“I was excited for the opportunity to speak about Ecoinfrastructure to members of Boulder’s Linux community, noted McClain. “Going ‘green’ has become as much a smart business strategy as it is a sign of global stewardship, and IT departments have significant opportunities for improving an organization’s bottom line by reducing capital and operating costs while also benefiting the environment.”

McClain’s presentation, titled “Greening Your Linux Infrastructure,” provided an overview on ways that organizations can reduce their data center footprint, including rightsizing tools and systems to maximize efficiency, consolidating network and storage infrastructure, implementing virtualization tools to reduce the number of servers needed, measuring changes to track improvements made over time, and recycling old computers and other IT equipment whenever possible.

McClain also discussed specific ways to make Linux systems more “green,” such as running kernel version 2.6.21 to avoid processor-intensive kernel timer interrupts, implementing SMP power savings, and using virtualization tools such as Amazon EC2.

As a way to illustrate some of the points in his discussion, McClain concluded the presentation by citing some of the ways in which Applied Trust has been going green, including replacing incandescent lighting with LED lighting, implementing electronic faxing, using server virtualization, and implementing monitoring tools to measure our progress in reducing the company’s ecological impact.

“It would, especially in Boulder, have been easy to make it a management-level, Political Correctness talk; instead, Ned had lots of useful, pragmatic, non-trivial tips,” noted Jeff Haemer, who attended the meeting, in his blog.

About Applied Trust Engineering
Applied Trust Engineering provides IT security and network/systems infrastructure consulting services. The company serves clients in a variety of industries, including healthcare, financial services, recreation and government. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Applied Trust's proven process and industry-recognized experts deliver increased security, performance and availability, while reducing ecological impact. For more information, visit www.atrust.com.