How green is your business?

Do more with less
Other things to consider when trying to save energy centre around doing more with less.

For example, you can save on both power and cooling bills by consolidating multiple servers onto one, more powerful device.

The latest multi-core servers offer levels of performance far above that available even a couple of years ago and are much more power efficient.

Add server virtualisation tools for extra flexibility and you can do a great deal more with less hardware and save money, too.

You may also want to look at thin-client computing, where desktop PCs are replaced by simpler terminals and applications are run on remote shared servers. Mainly sold as a way of enhancing security and providing greater control over the computing environment, thin terminals require a lot less power than a standard PC and can also help with your efforts to go green.

Don’t forget printing
And then there’s printing. Even the smallest of companies will still get through reams of paper a day, not to mention all those expensive and environmentally unfriendly ink and toner cartridges, developer, optical drums and the like. Simply looking carefully at printing can have a big impact on your bottom line and help you do your bit for the environment.

First, establish what printers you have and what they’re being used for. In a small firm this could just be a matter of a physical audit, but for larger organisations this could be time-consuming. In this case specialist print-auditing tools will do the job. Some printer vendors offer their own, but independent products are also available, such as Print Audit 5, for example, or Pcounter.

By using tools such as these it’s possible to collect data about who’s printing what and to which printer. From this information you can establish just how much it is costing and where savings can be made. The same tools can also be used to continue monitoring and, in some cases, reduce costs by redirecting users to the most efficient devices and by billing customers for work done.

Don’t buy cheap
As far as the printers themselves are concerned, it’s a good idea to avoid cheap personal desktop products and deploy more capable network devices. They may be expensive to buy but in the long run will work out more economical because the cost per page is dramatically lower, on both black and white and colour documents.

Network printers also last longer, reducing maintenance overheads, and they tend to be quicker. If you buy or lease photocopiers, extra savings are gained by opting for multifunction printer/copiers, many of which now also include network scanning, email and faxing as standard.

Finally, when looking at printing it’s important to take into consideration the running costs over the whole life of a printer, not just how much the hardware costs to buy. Laser printers from Kyocera, for example, potentially have very low running costs compared with most others because the only consumable that needs to be changed on a regular basis is toner.

In comparison, for HP, Lexmark and other makes of printer, the toner cartridges also contain the optical drum and other components making the consumables much more expensive – not to mention the fact that every time you change the toner you could be throwing away the optical components before they actually need to be replaced.