5 Tips to Reduce IT Electricity Consumption

  

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Computer World reported that AOL cut its energy bill by $5 million last year after unplugging half its servers--nearly 10,000 of them. Those figures might be difficult to relate to on a personal level, or even with your small firm, but they must raise some questions. How much did I spend on electricity last month? What?! How much less could it have been?

Our friends at Tips & Tricks HQ monitored the energy consumption of a desktop PC over the course of an average week and computed its contribution to the annual energy bill. It racked up $96.64 per year. That’s just one computer!

I know it’s absurd, but don’t panic. There are things that can be done. Here are 5 tips to reduce IT electricity consumption.

1. Go computer shopping. If your computer is older than your car, it is probably time to upgrade. New computers are smaller and incorporate more efficient hardware, which both conserve energy.
2. Save your screen with standby. Screensavers with colorful zigzag lines might have been appealing in 1995, but green is the only color that people care about these days. Setting your computer to standby after 20 minutes looks much better. Standby deactivates the monitor, hard drive and peripheral devices, but powers the memory so no work is lost.
3. Not bright enough for you? Turning down monitor brightness saves energy and extends battery life in laptops.
4. It’s OK to disconnect. Wi-fi and Bluetooth devices can be turned off when not in use. Do you really need wireless when flying coach or a cord can accomplish the same task?
5. Take it to the cloud. Like AOL, it might be time to unplug those servers and take your network to the cloud, or at least reduce dependency on large, inefficient servers. Virtualization is one available option.

We can’t guarantee a $5 million reduction in your energy bill this year, but each of these tips will save green by being green. If you have any questions about reducing IT electricity consumption, feel free to contact us.

Sankaran Ganapathi

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

What is GovCloud?

  

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Terminal technicians take questions about GovCloud and its impact on cloud computing.

What is GovCloud?

GovCloud is an initiative by the US Government to move the IT networks of governmental agencies to the cloud. According to GovCloud.com, it strives to:

help federal organizations learn about, try and securely adopt cloud computing technologies. Cloud computing provides new capabilities, efficiencies and substantial cost savings... Our mission is to facilitate implementations that adhere to rapidly evolving cloud computing standards, with a heavy focus on interoperability, portability and security.

We have been eagerly following GovCloud since former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced the Cloud First initiative, requiring all federal agencies to examine cloud computing options before making any new IT investments. Essentially, there are three motives behind this campaign.

1. It’s all about the money. From the US Government’s perspective, the biggest advantage of cloud computing is cost reduction. The cloud reduces excess by leveraging shared IT resources, ensuring agencies only pay for the IT resources that they need and use.
2. Cloud resources are easily scalable. Agencies can add or remove IT resources on-demand to quickly meet unplanned growth or budget restrictions.
3. Built for speed and comfort. GovCloud provides immense processing power with relative ease, utilizing IT resources which are currently too expensive for governmental organizations to implement on-site.

In short, that means GovCloud promises to increase both IT efficiency and agility for governmental organizations while saving taxpayers money in the process.

Why is GovCloud important to the cloud movement?

GovCloud is a turning point in the evolution of cloud computing. If the US government fully embraces cloud-based IT networks, it's likely that state and local governments will follow. Additionally, various GovCloud developers, including industry leaders like Amazon, are already entertaining the opportunity of adding foreign clients. The government sector on a global scale represents an enormous market (and motive) that would solidify cloud computing as an IT mainstay for the foreseeable future.

Security is currently the largest drawback of GovCloud and cloud computing in general. By allowing sensitive governmental data to be centralized on shared IT resources, there is a higher risk of data being compromised. GovCloud providers are aggressively addressing this issue, and will test cloud computing in ways that may not have been intended.

It's an exciting time for cloud computing. GovCloud demands a new degree of security, which is bound to raise the bar for acceptable standards. Corporate and personal users want the very best available, and we think that they will get it. Cloud computing was discovered by most people in 2011, but 2012 will be the year that they will remember. Lots of big things are about to happen.

Sankaran Ganapathi

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

5 Business Lessons That We Have Learned From Google About IT Support

  

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At some point over the last several decades college dorm rooms expanded their image from havens for late nights and procrastination to include technological innovation and entrepreneurship. Like Gates, Jobs and Zuckerman, Larry Page and Sergey Brin changed the way that people communicate, learn and dress for work, and they started it all with standard issue desks and twin-sized beds.

Google founders Page and Brin created principles to guide the company in its effort to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Here are five points from the list and the business lessons that we have learned from them in our quest to provide the best IT support possible.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. Some companies strive to take over the world by constantly expanding to new markets and customers. That’s not us. We offer IT support to clients in Boston that promotes growth and efficiency in firms of any size.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well. Every time we expand service packages or certify technicians on new brands, we ask ourselves how it contributes to Terminal’s mission. Does this decision allow us to provide better IT support? We only move forward with it if the answer is "Yes."
3. There’s always more information out there. It is impossible to learn everything about everything--there are only so many hours in a day--but that should not discourage employees and managers from continuously learning. There is always something to be learned.
4. Great just isn’t good enough. Exceeding expectations should be every company’s goal regardless of business or industry. We try to do that every day with every client.
5. You can be serious without wearing a suit. We have nothing against suits--we just don’t own any--but positive, comfortable work environments are essential for sustainability. As IT support specialists, we have visited many companies and can say that the most successful have employees that are excited to come to work each morning.

The other business lessons that Google teaches are less applicable for most companies, like how many zeros are in $100 billion. If only we had invested our evenings in the dorm room crunching numbers for search algorithms instead of movie marathons and Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

To learn more support packages, please visit the IT support section of our website or contact us.

Sankaran Ganapathi

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!