Greening your data center, IT department, and PCs can seem an overwhelming task, requiring months of planning and corporate buy-in, as well as big-budget items that will pay off in the long run, but cause financial pain right now. But it needn't be that way. In fact, as I'll explain in this column, there are plenty of simple steps you can take today to green IT in your enterprise that take little effort, and little or no money. As I explain how to do it, I'll also show how other enterprises have done it as well, including several that recently were recognized by Computerworld as being green IT pioneers.

If you're looking for simple solutions, the best place to target when it comes to greening your data center and computer use throughout your organization is with power consumption. That's probably the lowest-hanging fruit.

Simply issuing an edict that people should turn off PCs when they go home for the night isn't always practical, and won't be particularly effective, either. A much better bet is to use the free Open Source tool EZ GPO, free software developed for the EPA Energy Star program. The tool uses Windows' Group Policy Objects to put PCs to sleep when they're not being used, and to control overall PC electricity consumption enterprise-wide.

The Snohomish Public Utility District uses this tool, among other techniques, for cutting IT-related energy consumption, and has been able to put 1,000 desktop PCs to sleep every night. For details about how they did it, and for more advice from the utility, check out this Computerworld article.

Another company cited by Computerworld for its greenness, Perkins+Will Inc., a Chicago-based architecture, engineering and construction company, uses a similar technique, although with slightly different technology. As Computerworld explains, the company has a rendering farm that architects use to tap into idle desktop cycles during off-hours in order to run computer-intensive architectural software. That required PCs to stay on overnight, so that their idle cycles could be used --- but because their idle cycles weren't always needed, plenty of energy was being wasted.

The company's answer? Turn the PCs off, and use Wake-on-LAN (WoL) technology that powers up the PCs when they're needed. WoL is built directly into most modern desktops, so its capabilities are most likely sitting unused in your enterprise's desktops. You'll need software to tap into them, and there's plenty of free and low-cost software, scripts and services to do it, such as RSHUT Pro shareware. A Google search will turn up plenty of others.

Replace your CRTs with LCDs

Here's another quick way to save on electricity -- replace your old CRTs with LCDs. You can save a substantial amount of electricity with this simple step. You'll have to calculate the exact savings yourself, but according to the Energy Star Web site, " In some cases, the energy-consumption of an average LCD display can be half to two-thirds of that for an average CRT."

Want to get a better sense of how much you can save by replacing an energy hog monitor with an Energy Start-compliant one? Then download this very useful calculator [.xls] -- a spreadsheet that will give you a good sense of how much electricity you can save.

Here's another low-cost way to save money -- institute telecommuting for your IT department. Some enterprises may be leery of telecommuting, but numerous studies have shown that telecommuters are at least as productive, and often more productive, than workers who don't telecommute.

The savings can be substantial, both for your company, and for the environment as a whole. Your company will be able to get by with less space, which offers clear financial benefits. In addition, overall it cuts down on the number of cars being driven, reducing pollution further. As another Computerworld article explains, Ryder Systems has seen substantial benefits by allowing 60 of its 380 IT workers to telecommute.

Other low-cost ways of saving

Being smarter about your use of storage can save electricity as well. Archiving less-important data onto drives with slower-speed spindles can save surprising amounts of energy. Marriott International did just that. Wendell Fox, senior vice president of Marriott's information resources shared-services group, estimates that a disk drive spinning at 7,200 rpm uses eight times more power than a disk that spins at 3,700 rpm, so the savings by doing this can be surprisingly large.

There are plenty of other surprising ways you can save electricity, as Jeff Lowenberg, VP of facilities at Web-hosting company The Planet, found out. As detailed in this InfoWorld article, he took some very simple, plain-sense steps. For example, to keep his data center cooler, and cut down on air conditioning costs, he rearranged floor tiles to manage cold airflow better, installed plates in server cabinets to more efficiently direct airflow, and installed seals and grommets in the walls, ceilings, and floors in order to reduce bypass airflow. Along with other steps, this has paid off in a big way --- the article notes "Even though critical server loads increased by 5 percent, the facility's overall cooling power needs dropped by 31 percent."

The bottom line in all this? There's no need to wait for big plans and big budgets if you want to start greening your data center and computing hardware. Take these simple steps, and you can get started right away.

Preston Gralla is the editor of GreenerComputing.