Green IT

The Government Printing Office (GPO) was recently named as a finalist by Computer World magazine for Green IT initiatives. This is an impressive honor granted to a 147 year old agency that is slogging through several massive information system transformation initiatives.

GPO’s IT systems are similar to any other organizations; relying upon networks, hardware, trained personnel and the most important, satisfaction of the end user. In the past several months, the department has eliminated redundancy throughout the agency by consolidating servers, reused or recycled all retired hardware, enhanced end user capabilities and reduced energy consumption in areas by more than 50%.

Additionally, the IT organization is specifying all new systems with low energy components, and equipping areas, as appropriate, with low energy Citrix solutions.

Sustainable computing is a priority for GPO and every effort is being taken maximize green computing techniques. As a federal agency, GPO takes pride in our mission to Keep America Informed and believes environmental stewardship is not only good business but good government.

One of the fundamental transformations at GPO is to develop and launch a world-class information management system for Federal publications. This is known as FDsys, GPO’s Federal Digital System (www.gpo.gov/fdsys). This and other system initiatives are being developed in line with GPO’s sustainability initiatives. These digital system initiatives will allow GPO to maintain their mission to Keep America Informed, by offering access to Federal publications electronically, and improving our print operations to efficiently utilize raw materials and energy. All new digital systems are being installed with energy saving components.

We plan to implement virtualization technology for servers once this technology proves to be reliable for our applications. Virtualization offers us the ability to share single physical servers to support multiple applications operating systems. This will further reduce our Information Technology energy consumption.