Setting Up Your Onsite Server into an Eco-Friendly Powerhouse

Hosting a server room onsite and maintaining your information technology needs in-house can have a number of benefits for your business, ranging from complete control over your technological capabilities to an improved ability to keep your company's data safe from prying eyes. However, as many businesses have found out, setting up a few server rack enclosures and choosing the right operating system is only half the battle in running an effective, cost-efficient IT solution.


Some of the biggest issues many businesses run into are energy costs and a complete lack of eco-friendliness. Especially if you're planning to build a large data center, an IT setup that can use as much energy as a small city and produce a significant amount of air pollution, you'll need to take steps to reduce your consumption and better protect the environment. To a certain extent, the amount of pollution produced and energy consumed by your servers depends on your climate. That being said, there are steps you can take to improve your IT reliability, while drastically lowering your ecological imprint.


Three Tips for Turning Your in-House IT Green

1.Power Down Your Peripherals After Work Hours

North Carolina State University experts say that one of the simplest things you can do to reduce your environmental impact is turn off your peripheral devices after work hours. If you run an eCommerce business, you're not going to want to power down your server rack shelves, as that will mean blocking customer access to your product pages. However, by turning off printers, monitors, and any other unnecessary hardware when you leave the office for the night, you can easily reduce your energy consumption.

2.Be Smart when Choosing Your Technology

Whether you're talking about server rack cases or computer monitors, a revolution in green technology has given customers easier ways to go green. Many producers of server rack cabinets have even begun offering Energy Star compliant or otherwise eco-friendly options, as SmallBusinessComputing.com points out. If you have an especially discerning eye, you can even find hardware that will earn you hefty tax credits.

3.Virtualize Your Server Network

For every server rack case you run, you increase the amount of energy your business consumes -- that's a no-brainer. However, did you consider that more hardware also means more heat? Maintaining the proper humidity and temperature in your server room is crucial to the stability of your IT. As Tech Republic writes, you can kill two birds with one stone by virtualizing multiple servers. By consolidating multiple servers into one virtual solution, you reduce your need for multiple server rack cases, reducing purchasing costs and lowering the amount of heat your air-conditioning system needs to handle to keep your IT solutions running properly.

Have you chosen special server rack cases or virtualized your network to reduce your energy costs? What other tips do you have for businesses looking to go green? Share your tips in the comments below.