We are living in the era of "Big Data" and the computing power required to deal with "Big Data" both in terms of its energy consumption and technical complexity is one of the key areas of research and development. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that centralized computing infrastructures (data centres) currently use 7 giga watts of electricity during peak loads. This translates into about 61 billion kilowatt hours of electricity used. By the EPA’s estimates, power-hungry data centres consume the annual output of 15 average-sized power plants. One of the top constraints to increasing computing power, besides the ability to cool, is simply delivering enough power to a given physical space.

Green Information Technology: A Sustainable Approach offers in a single volume a broad collection of practical techniques and methodologies for designing, building and implementing a green technology strategy in any large enterprise environment, which up until now has been scattered in difficult-to-find scholarly resources. Included here is the latest information on emerging technologies and their environmental impact, how to effectively measure sustainability, discussions on sustainable hardware and software design, as well as how to use big data and cloud computing to drive efficiencies and establish a framework for sustainability in the information technology infrastructure.

Written by recognized experts in both academia and industry, Green Information Technology: A Sustainable Approach is a must-have guide for researchers, computer architects, computer engineers and IT professionals with an interest in greater efficiency with less environmental impact.

• Introduces the concept of using green procurement and supply chain programs in the IT infrastructure.
• Discusses how to use big data to drive efficiencies and establish a framework for sustainability in the information technology infrastructure.
• Explains how cloud computing can be used to consolidate corporate IT environments using large-scale shared infrastructure reducing the overall environmental impact and unlocking new efficiencies.
• Provides specific use cases for Green IT such as data center energy efficiency and cloud computing sustainability and risk.