With the growing concern over global warming, and sustainable energy usage, organisations and corporates the world over need to find ways to reduce their power consumption and their contributions to CO2, and other greenhouse gas emissions. Governments everywhere are considering introducing penalties for failure to reduce carbon emissions and other harmful waste, while energy utilities are looking to raise tariffs at higher than inflation rates as demand for energy grows with the resultant need to build new plants, as well as their need to reduce their own CO2 emissions. In some countries, like South Africa, penalties may be introduced if energy users do not reduce their consumption by as much as 10% and in 2008 the effects of growing energy usage where seen with widespread, rolling blackouts, across Johannesburg, South Africa's economic heartland.

Information Technology to be One of the Biggest Contributors to Greenhouse Gas Emissions

An October 2008 report by Mckinsey & Company predicts that by 2020 Information Technology and related industries, such as telecommunications will be one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.  This is partly due to the rapid growth in Asia and the resultant increasing use of technology. Despite this however, information technology is perhaps the easiest place for corporates and orgnanisations to reduce their carbon footprint without an significant increase in cost or reduction in available resources. The mega-trend in IT, currently, is server and desktop consolidation and the power and costs saving available, today, are significant.

Desktop Virtualisation - the next  Hot Technology

The server virtualisation space has received the lion's share of attention by the media and the hardware vendors. I covered the benefits of server consolidation and virtualisation in a previous post here. An area where not much attention has been paid, is on the desktop virtualisation side. The fact is, that most desktop machines use only about  10% of their power with the rest of the time spent idle.

The Canadian company Useful, realised there was an opportunity to make better use of this idle time and developed their Userful Multiplier technology that allows up to 10 users to make use of 1 desktop PC at the same time, each with their own mouse, keyboard and monitor. The technology leverages the robust and secure Linux operating system and provides its users with unrivaled cost and power savings, not to mention a plethora of open source applications for every need.

Userful recently got much attention for its roll-out of 357 000 desktops to schools in Brazil. One of the largest Linux desktop deployments in the world to date. Savings of 60% in up-front costs, 80% in annual power savings and additional savings in ongoing administration and support costs as compared to a traditional PC-per-workstation solution all contributed to making the decision to use Userful Multiplier on 356,800 new workstations for Brazil's school an obvious one. Replacing 10 computer with 1 PC also reduces computer hardware waste (“e-waste”) by up to 80%, further decreasing ITs environmental footprint.

But thats not all, as they say on the infomercials, according Sean Rousseau, Marketing Manager at Userful, "This deployment alone saves more than 170,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, the same as taking 28,000 cars off the road, or planting 41,000 acres of trees” .  The table below summarises the promised saving in  energy and co2 emissions by using the Userful multiplier to replace 10 PCs with 1 PC serving 10 workstations. 

Desktop Virtualisation with Userful Multiplier

So with the growing need to reduce power usage, it is highly likely that desktop virtualisation will start to receive much more coverage in the coming years and Userful Multiplier will play an important roll in this market.  With costs as low as USD69 per workstation for government and educational institutions and USD89 for corporates, Userful Multiplier is an extremely cost-effective solutions  If your company or organisation is looking to save costs and reduce energy usage, contact Jumping Bean for a quote and demonstration of the software via email or via phone on 27-11-781 8014. You have to see it to believe it.