Green IT: A Red Hat Perspective

While green IT is pursued for a number of reasons (eco-responsibility, CAPEX/OPEX, facility constraints, etc.), a green IT strategy often has unforeseen benefits (increased manageability, security, business continuity, etc.).

This presentation will explore how Red Hat has and continues to contribute to the green IT movement. While there are many ways of going green, Chris Runge, a director of solutions architects at Red Hat, will discuss four of them:

• UNIX-to-Linux migration: UNIX-to-Linux migrations facilitated green computing before the term "going green" was popular. As customers migrated from RISC systems to industry-standard systems running Linux, they were able to achieve higher performance with less hardware and lower power consumption.
• Power management technologies: Runge will discuss Red Hat's involvement with power management technology, including LessWatts.org. Emerging improvements, which include: RHEL 5.3 and Nehalem, the tickless kernel, improved drivers, and improved coding techniques, will also be discussed.
• Virtualization: Virtualization provides many benefits to a green IT strategy, from server consolidation to the increased benefits of Red Hat Enterprise virtualization's system scheduler and power-saver technologies. In addition to these benefits, Runge will discuss the benefits of emerging approaches, which include KVM's architectural approach (relative to power savings), cloud computing, and VDI.
• The mainframe: Runge will highlight a migration to the mainframe as a path to green IT with a discussion of the Bank of New Zealand migration.