Where to find green components
Current green certification processes and proclamations -- whether they are independent or self-proclaimed by the vendor in question -- tend to focus on the entire package. That is, when you hear about a new piece of technology from Dell or Hewlett-Packard or IBM or some other leading tier vendor, the statement covers the entire product, from chassis to packaging.
So, what if you want to make sure you're buying the greenest components to upgrade or trick out your desktop or server?
Right now, there are very few resources with this goal in mind, but I have just heard about two that are trying to get things kickstarted when it comes to knowing more about green credentials of the memory, cards, drives and other components that go into building a computer.
The first is the Green IT Resource Guide from NASBA, the Association of Channel Resellers. Lots of the members of NASBA are what you might call a white box builder, companies that assemble custom PCs, workstations and servers. You'll find many of the things you'd expect here, such as lists of systems that have been vetted by EPEAT (the Electronics Products Environmental Assessment Tool) and those that comply with the Energy Star program standards. The association also has compiled a list of non-governmental organizations and industry resources that offer information about green technologies.
But in my opinion, the most interesting tab is the one that includes the list of green-friendly components, including chassis, CPUs, hard drives, I/O controllers, monitors, motherboards, power supplies, optical disks and memory. The group makes an effort to update this list regularly.
I heard about the second component-focused resource yesterday in the form of a new site featuring green memory products from Samsung Electronics. Mind you, this is obviously a vendor-driven site, with the mission of touting green technologies from Samsung itself. For example, the company last week was at VMworld (who wasn't?) demonstrating a new 16-gigabyte low profile memory modules that works in IBM blade servers. According to Samsung, the new module will use 20 percent less power than a 1.5V DDR3 and more than 80 percent less than a 1.8V DDR2.
The site includes the requisite power savings calculators, so you can get a notion of what you'd save in power if you used a Samsung memory module.