InfoWorld Names Dell to Its Green 15

In today's economic climate, investing in products and services with ecological-minded features may seem impractical. However, the InfoWorld Green 15 Awards, which honored Dell as a winner in 2010, shows that innovation can still exist.

Every year since 2008, InfoWorld, a leading source of information on emerging enterprise technologies, has been recognizing the 15 most innovative IT initiatives that promote a healthier planet through its Green 15 Awards. To determine the winners, InfoWorld's editors and analysts look for projects and products that aim to trim waste, reduce or eliminate the use of harmful substances and boost energy efficiency.

Dell did the latter by thinking outside of the box — the box being the data center. You've no doubt heard of data centers (perhaps you even manage one): huge, anonymous rooms full of humming computer servers. Every person and business that uses computers in today's global economy depends on these facilities. They make the internet possible and keep data secure. But in doing those tasks, data centers also consume a lot of power from the energy grid.

That's why the greenest data center is the one you never build. It turns out that you can challenge conventional assumptions about the number and types of applications that need to be running at any given time in a data center, and free up a lot of capacity. For us, that innovation — plus virtualizing, using the most high-efficiency servers possible, and revamping the way we do power and cooling — meant that we actually removed 4,000 data center servers over the course of a year, doubled our server utilization levels to 40 percent and saved some $50 million in energy costs.