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By Knight Kiplinger

The Kiplinger Washington Editors

May 16, 2008

Overall prices will rise 4% this year -- on a par with last year -- but inflation clearly feels much worse for businesses and households struggling to pay bills. This week's Kiplinger Letter analyzes the various pressures impacting prices and forecasts when inflation will ease.

ALSO INSIDE THIS ISSUE: The Dollar vs. Euro, Investing in Brazil, Mexican Drug Violence, Retail Trends, Fingerprinting Foreigners, Hotel Rates, Steel Pennies, Climate Change and Election 2008.

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Slash Energy Costs on Servers

Learn how to tame the real energy hogs in your IT departments from the first monthly "GreenTips" column.

Worth Reading: The Quick Take from Kiplinger

August 2007

Andrew Binstock

Greener World Media Inc.

This month's author, Andrew Binstock, is principal analyst at Pacific Data Works LLC, where he performs market analysis and writes white papers for private clients. He is also the technology editor of GreenerComputing.

"GreenTips" is a monthly Kiplinger Recommends feature by Greener World Media Inc., which publishes environmental news and advice for business, including GreenBiz.com, GreenerBuildings, ClimateBiz and GreenerComputing .

How many computer servers does your firm have dedicated to one crucial database management system or other legacy application that needs its own operating system? And how much energy do those gluttons suck down a year -- not just in consumption, but in the power it takes to keep them cool and compensate for the extra heat they throw off?

Most companies have several, if not many such servers. And they and computer usage overall should be the first targets of any concerted effort to cut energy consumption for both financial and environmental reasons. Andrew Binstock, the technology editor of GreenerComputing, explains how reliable "virtualization" technology has finally evolved to a level of sophistication, reliability and speed that it will allow one server to act as several. "By moving these applications onto a single platform, IT sites save almost the entire energy consumption of the original server, the cooling costs of that server, and also gain greater manageability by having applications running on fewer physical machines," Binstock writes.

This is the first of a regular monthly "GreenTips" column aimed at helping businesses cope with all kinds of environmental issues -- for bottom-line, regulatory and customer relations reasons. It is being written by Greener World Media, publisher of GreenerComputing and other Web sites that offer businesses advice on going green.

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