Greening IT

In this fiscal year, the Department of State's Bureau of Information Resource Management will replace an additional 2,212 PCs with thin clients, bringing the total number deployed to 8,187. The Department is expected to save 630,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 422.7 tons annually as a result. Plans are under way to begin adding thin client workstations to the unclassified network in fiscal 2011.

By using a PC’s power management capabilities such as sleep, hibernate and shutdown modes, the Department could increase energy savings by more than 35 percent annually, according to conservative estimates. In fact, a number of overseas posts have already implemented power management and gained impressive results. IRM’s ultimate goal is to enable computers that have been shut down to automatically “wake up” so that scheduled maintenance can occur without disrupting work activities. In the future, while you’re sleeping at home, your PC at work will also be sleeping— and saving energy.