Green Information Technology: A Sustainable Approach

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.

About the Authors

Professor Dastbaz’s main research work over the recent years has been focused on the use and impact of emerging technologies in society, particularly learning, training and the development of “government”. Mohammad has led EU and UK based funded research projects and has been the Symposium Chair of Multimedia Systems in IEEE’s Information Visualisation (IV) conference since 2002. He has over 50 refereed publications, including numerous journal paper articles, conference papers, book chapters and Books on e-learning, eGovernment and design and development of Multimedia Systems. Professor Dastbaz is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and UK’s Higher Education Academy as well as the professional member of ACM and IEEE’s computer society.

Colin Pattinson has been an academic member of staff at Leeds Met since 1985, beginning as a junior lecturer, progressing to Professor in 2006 and Head of School from 2011. During that time, his research and teaching has reflected the massive changes in computer and communications technologies, beginning with very basic computer to computer connections, through the development of the Internet to current developments in smart phones and cloud computing. Colin continues to be an active researcher in these areas, with a particular interest in measuring and understanding the performance of IT systems.

Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics and Director of CENTRIC (Center of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organized Crime Research) at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and Fellow of the British Computer Society. He has more than 100 refereed publications in international journals and conferences on information systems with specific focus on knowledge management (KM). He is member of editorial boards of several international journals and has acted as Chair and Program Committee Member for numerous international conferences. He has extensive and hands-on experience in the development, management and execution of KM projects and large international security initiatives (e.g., the application of social media in crisis management, intelligence-based combating of terrorism and organized crime, gun crime, cyber-crime and cyber terrorism and cross cultural ideology polarization). In addition to this he is the technical lead of two EU Security projects: “Courage” on Cyber-Crime and Cyber-Terrorism and “Athena” onthe Application of Social Media and Mobile Devices in Crisis Management. He has co-edited several books on Intelligence Management.. His recent books are titled Strategic Intelligence Management (National Security Imperatives and Information and Communications Technologies), Knowledge Driven Frameworks for Combating Terrorism and Organised Crime and Emerging Trends in ICT Security. Prof Akhgar is member of the academic advisory board of SAS UK.