Concerned about energy costs, IT organizations have begun to make significant changes to how their data centers are powered and cooled. But many IT departments haven't yet looked at saving energy throughout the rest of their companies' IT infrastructures. That's shortsighted. Although data centers may use more power per square foot, as a percentage of total power consumption, office equipment is the big kahuna.

"Office equipment has become more highly featured and powerful than ever before, but there's an energy cost to that," says Katherine Kaplan, who manages the US Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star consumer electronics and IT initiatives.

"If you look at overall power consumption, you're seeing almost double for computers and monitors than for data centers," says Jon Weisblatt, senior product manager of the power and cooling initiative at Dell.

Verizon Wireless is one company that's saving plenty of green by going green. Earlier this year, the wireless carrier deployed 1E's NightWatchman power management software, which is designed to put desktop computers and monitors in offices, stores and call centers into power-saving mode after a period of inactivity, overriding any personal settings.

Another 1E product, SMSWakeUp, can 'wake up' those machines to deliver patches and updates after-hours and then shut them down again when the process is complete. "It saved us [money] just turning computers on and off on demand," says CIO Ajay Waghray. He also replaced 7,000 PCs in 10 Verizon call centers with power-sipping Sun Ray thin clients from Sun Microsystems and began a companywide migration to LCD monitors. The managed thin clients use 30 percent less energy than the non-managed PCs, says Waghray. He estimates that the power management and thin client initiatives combined have decreased the cost of front-office power needs by Rs 3.6 crore annually.

To Waghray, going green is good business. The projects were good for customer service -- off-hours patching and the more reliable thin clients improved uptime and reduced trouble-ticket volumes by 50 percent. "To make things more efficient, simple and customer-focused, green becomes a very important factor," he says.

Here are five tips on increasing the efficiency of front-office equipment.

Do an Energy Audit

It's hard to know where you stand if you don't first measure the efficiency of the equipment you have. Fortunately, a simple, inexpensive meter that fits between the target device plug and the outlet can measure current loads and total power consumption.

Meters include basic models such as P3 International's Kill A Watt or Sea Sonic Electronics's Power Angel, and more-advanced units like the Watts Up Pro from Electronic Educational Devices. Watts Up Pro stores data and includes software for graphing that data over time.

At Geiger Brothers, an audit revealed that computer equipment was consuming nearly as much power after-hours as it was during the day. It became "a driving force behind initiatives to get power consumption down," says Joe Marshall, a business systems analyst and software specialist at Geiger Brothers.

Adopt and Enforce Power Management

"The biggest impact you're going to make in your overall computing environment is to get systems to go to sleep," says Weisblatt. For example, a laptop that uses 14 to 90 watts in full operation uses less than 1 watt in standby mode. Desktops consume even more, and a single CRT monitor may use upward of 90 watts in operation mode.

Some corporations are doing something about it. Network administrator Keith Brown deployed LANDesk Software's LANDesk to manage -- and lock down -- power settings on all laptops, desktops and attached monitors at Gwinnett Hospital System.

Like SMSWakeUp, LANDesk and similar tools can remotely awaken or turn on PCs, upload updates and turn them off again, Brown says. Lenovo recommends configuring employee laptop disk drives to spin down after five minutes of inactivity, setting monitors to go blank at 10 minutes and configuring the machines to go into standby mode after 20.

Dump Those CRTs

Replacing older computers and peripherals with Energy Star-rated equipment can save energy and space, and the decreased power