For businesses looking to cut their costs, it can be tempting to invest in the cheapest machinery available.

But Synergy energy solutions manager Allen Gerber says these calculations rarely factor in the much greater running costs, which can quickly add up over the lifetime of a piece of machinery like a computer.

Faced with these long-term costs, companies are embracing a new strategy for their technology — green computing.

The development of low-power technology has meant new computers use much less energy than previous models.

In fact, energy use in computers has been falling by about half every 18 months as new technology gets greater functionality out of less power.

This means even a computer which is a few years old will already be consuming a lot more power than a more modern alternative. Upgrading ageing or second-hand equipment to a recently released model can therefore lead to big savings.

“Also think about your servers and the heating and cooling they require to operate efficiently, ” Mr Gerber said.

“This is especially challenging for smaller businesses that may not have the sophisticated energy-minimising cooling systems of larger data centres.

“Adjust your server allocation — you may actually have more functionality than you need.

“It might even be worth taking applications off your office server and storing them in a cloud-based data centre.”

 

© The West Australian

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