Professionally Speaking » HP Labs: Innovating for the Environment

It’s appropriate that in the same week Al Gore gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, HP Labs – the research arm of Hewlett-Packard – has published an elegant summary of a range of innovations which help deliver on the promise of a greener information technology landscape.

Al Gore challenged the world’s scientists to focus their research on confronting a planetary emergency:

The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

So it’s significant that research institutions like HP Labs, with a network of seven R&D centers spread around the world, focus attention on environmental sustainability.

Innovative solutions from HP Labs which provide a way to minimize the environmental impact of data center computing include Dynamic Smart Cooling and Data Center Thermal Assessment Services – as well as looking beyond the data center to energy-adaptive displays, better ways to keep chips cool and video conferencing that has the feel of a face-to-face meeting. From the glass house to the executive jet there are now a range of environmentally sensible solutions that you can implement today, if you choose to do so.

These solutions from HP Labs allow customers the choice of an environmentally conscious alternative to the more profligate computing technology they may currently use.

So if you work in corporate computing, ask your CIO two things.

Firstly, ask them to evaluate the environmental impact of the entire IT life-cycle in your organization. Are there ways to implement technology that is good for business and good for the planet?

Secondly, ask them to consider their response to the question Al Gore posed yesterday in Oslo:

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: “What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?�?

Or they will ask instead: “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?�?

It’s your choice.

HP Labs: Innovating for the Environment

Categories

Archives

Search

Blogroll

Miscellany

Pages