Five years ago at a green building event where I first presented the concepts of GreenIT, one of the other speakers was an architect who had helped design the first LEED-NC certified building in his state. In his talk he gave the best and shortest summary of a green design philosophy that I’ve heard: Use Less Stuff.

What most people hear when you say “Use Less Stuff” is “Live Less Well”. This column is not the place to start in on whether or not most of us would be better off if we had less stuff, but the three-word mantra is absolutely applicable to sustainable solutions for IT.

Every piece of IT stuff we buy costs money up front, and even more money over time to support it and keep it running. Using less stuff generally also means using less money. But, in the real world of IT design and management, uptime (or fear of downtime) and performance usually win out over efficient use of stuff. Perhaps the biggest enemy of efficient, sustainable solutions for IT is time: the time to consider why we do what we do and develop new ways of doing things.

The real estate developer also spoke at the same event. It was has very first green building project after a long, successful career in developing office buildings. His message was also very simple: "Designing a building for LEED certification required us to re-think everything we normally do, and it took a lot more time than just doing it the old way."

Fortunately, there are technologies and processes that can reduce both the amount of stuff we need to IT build systems and the amount of time needed to keep them running. Virtualization of computing resources is the best current example of how we can re-think the relationship between physical equipment and the services we want to deliver to achieve both cost and eco-footprint reductions.

Many organizations have already begun the process of virtualizing servers, achieving equipment, space, and energy use reductions of 30-80%. With server-based computing, as many as 20 users can have virtual PC’s on a single server. Data storage and even networking devices can be virtualized as well.

In most cases there is not just a significant reduction in the hardware needed, but also in management resources required to support the equipment itself. Ultimately there’s "cloud computing" where "less stuff" becomes "very little stuff”" because most of our premise-based equipment (where computing service equipment is moved onsite) often is somebody else’s management and environmental problem.

Recently two of my Associates were deep into a conversation about the old days, the days when they had to scrimp for every milliwatt of power savings in designing PBX circuit boards and trim every bit of code to make use of available processor power for applications software. Both of them were of the definite opinion that we could definitely Use Less Stuff and reduce the costs and eco-footprint of IT while continuing to deliver high-quality, reliable IT services to users.

We can, we just have to take the time to figure out how to do it. And, like the burned out light bulb, we have to want to change.

Richard Hodges is the Founder and CEO of GreenIT, the first consultancy to incorporate the impact on the environment into a systemic and strategic approach to sustainability for Information and Communications Technology.