This is part two of a two-part series about virtualization. In the first post, we attempted to explain what virtualization is and why you should care about it. Here, we explain more about server virtualization and share our own positive experience with it.

Server Virtualization

If your organization has multiple server computers that supply your computer system with email, Internet, print services, databases, data back-ups, password authentications, a place to store documents, and more, then server virtualization is something that can save your organization money and energy. Virtualization software can cut server power consumption by up to 80%.

Server virtualization is software that allows you to optimize a single server computer so that it is able to do the work of multiple servers. Did you know that most servers are only utilized between 10 and 15%?

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If you haven't already, check out TechSoup's new Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit. In addition to our free book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, you'll also find webinars, articles, and links to other information around the Internet. We think that this toolkit can be a great resource for organizations in times of health as well as those facing disasters.

A point that we emphasize throughout the book is that disaster planning isn't just a matter of being ready for a natural disaster. It's about rethinking the way your organization works and adopting technologies and procedures that emphasize flexibility and adaptability throughout your organization. An organization that's ready for a disaster is also ready for a new opportunity to expand its impact when a need arises.

I can't think of a story that better illustrates this concept than that of the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, one of the winners of our Microsoft Show Your Impact contest.

Freestore Foodbank serves over 7000 individuals a month in the greater Cincinnati area, and those numbers double in November and December. Before undergoing a major overhaul of their tech infrastructure, the Foodbank’s multiple branches had a lot of trouble communicating and working together, both internally and externally. In making major infrastructural improvements and standardizing practices across all of their branches, the Foodbank was able to serve the community more swiftly; what's more, when one branch was struck by a natural disaster, the Foodbank was ready for it.

If you are a small to medium-sized nonprofit, why should you care about cloud computing? Because it can save you time, money and help spare the environment.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Here is how the CyberOptic Group describes it:

Essentially, cloud computing enables computer software and hardware resources to be accessed over the Internet without the need to have any detailed or specific knowledge of the infrastructure used to deliver the resources, much like a utility model. You really don't need to know what the phone company or electric company does on there end to enable calls and allow the lights to go on when you flip the switch; and, you really don't want to know as long as when you plug into it, it works.

I bet many of you are using a form of cloud computing without knowing it. Current examples are Gmail, Yahoo mail, Google Docs, Salesforce, and Microsoft Office Live Workspace. They are often called Software as a Service (SaaS). A company provides access to their software applications over the Internet and you access it through your web-browser. If you are using email hosted by a company, like one of those mentioned above, you and your staff don't have to manage an in-house email server like Exchange. You simply sign up for the accounts and all the back-end stuff is handled for you.

This post is by Steve Longenecker, who is a principal infrastructure consultant at Community IT Innovators in Washington, DC. Community IT Innovators, or CITI is an employee-owned, triple bottom-line company that provides computer tech support to nonprofits and socially responsible businesses. They're an important green IT practitioner in the U.S.

When one of CITI's clients needed to replace their two servers we set them up with a single server with virtualization software on it. The single server replaced an old domain controller that authenticated users and also hosted Microsoft Exchange for email and provided file and printer sharing. The other was their old terminal server that allowed users to access applications and documents on a shared network hard drive. These are very common functions for server computers.

Our clients primarily use Windows server for their server software.

Last month, TechSoup Talks hosted a free one-hour webinar on ways your nonprofit or library can use new affordable telecommunication tools like Voice over IP (VoIP), virtual PBX, and virtual private networking (VPN) to reduce your need to travel and better enable telecommuting and virtual meetings.

Some of you may be familiar with the ongoing Adobe-TechSoup Show Your Impact Contest from this year and the last. You may have submitted your entries and you may have even been one of the winners.

Well, now is your chance to tell us how Microsoft donations have helped your nonprofit or public library fulfill your mission and impact your communities. Microsoft has joined TechSoup for a similar partnership to highlight, promote, and award nonprofits and public libraries which have used Microsoft-donated products from TechSoup to work better. The full details can be found here, along with guidelines for submitting your story, and a gallery of submissions.

The key categories for submissions are:

1. Stable and Secure Technology
2. Optimize Mission Delivery
3. Transformations to Maximize Impact

You might have a your tale about how Microsoft-donated products through TechSoup helped your organization go from a tangled mess of tech inefficiencies to build a stable infrastructure so your staff could better focus on doing their jobs. Maybe your donated products helped your nonprofit upgrade to a new donor-database, create an interactive and engaging Web site, or develop effective outreach materials that helped reach new supporters and increase your impact.

Tell your story and possibly win a $5000 cash grant plus more than $25000 in donated Microsoft products. Only organizations in the United States and Canada are eligible to participate and the donated Microsoft products must be been received through TechSoup. Learn more about who can enter. Submissions are now OPEN so share your experience from now through the May 29 deadline. Once submissions have closed, we'll invite you back to vote for your favorites. Stay tuned for more!

If you haven't heard of Facebook, I'm sorry to break it to you, but you are living under a rock. However, if you haven't seen a use for Facebook for your organization, then you are not alone, and we are here to help. Many people view online social networking tools, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace as time-draining distractions. But a benefit of Facebook that may not have occurred to you is that Facebook will allow you to aggregate content from around the Web, and easily pull it into one central page, which will help you spread the word about your organization. Facebook also has the benefit of having your installed audience, your network of friends at your fingertips, so you can easily announce new activities, campaigns, and events to your self-selected constituency of like-minded individuals and groups, without having to email a large group of people and risking the effects of a spam filter's black hole.

Telecommuting or telework allows employees and volunteers to work from home or in a remote location and still be in touch with their office. The most basic tools of telecommuting have been phone and email, but new information and communication technologies (ICT) are available that make telecommuting much more effective.

Telework has been greatly enhanced by solutions such as virtual private networks (VPN), videoconferencing, and Voice over IP (VoIP). Be sure and check out our new GreenTech Initiative Telecommuting page for additional resources on telecommuting outside of this post.

Employee travel to and from the office accounts for roughly one-fourth of carbon emissions from all office operations. Statistics compiled by the Telework Coalition show that more than 44 million Americans are commuting less by working at home at least one day per week, and it is the same in most countries with a growing number of "knowledge workers."

The environmental impact in this area is profound. US workers alone commute an average of 10,000 miles per year each and consume 67 billion gallons of gasoline. For every day that a person's vehicle remains at home, 20% of that work-week's gas consumption and environmentally harmful emissions are eliminated. Telecommuters saved 840 million gallons of gasoline last year and reduced carbon emissions by almost 14 million tons.

Telecommuting is of course not suitable for everyone. For instance, some meetings need to be face-to-face or somebody needs to be on hand for customers or clients. However, it is an option for more and more people working in the information economy who have broadband Internet and mostly work on computers, telephones, or smart phones.

If employees must have direct access to their office phones, there are affordable new Voice over IP solutions that are emerging like virtual PBX, that allows you to set your office phone to ring at home or anywhere. Google is planning to launch a free service called Google Voice that will provide similar functions at no cost. One green company that installs virtual PBX systems is BetterWorld Telecom. They also do free telecommunications audit for US nonprofits and libraries.

For more info on Voice over IP and other ICT options check out:

Last year at RSA — the annual industry-wide information security conference held here in San Francisco — we noted that Web 2.0 was one of the question marks in terms of security and how to support users and data.

This year cloud computing is on the hot topic track and in one session, "Are Clouds Secure? Security and Privacy implications of Cloud Computing," the presenters from RSA and Sun Microsystems argued that due to a variety of factors, large enterprises are ill-advised to, or at least shouldn't be, using public clouds for their infrastructure or applications. At the same time, they believe that although software-as-a-service (SaaS) is likely to be a step down in terms of security for large enterprises, it may be a step up for small and medium businesses.

I think that the same can be said for nonprofits as well. The pay-as-you-go pricing makes it more like an operating expenditure rather than a capital expenditure, which fits our sector well in many cases.

Various media outlets such as the New York Times, Forbes, and Ars Technica are reporting that McKinsey; along with The Uptime Institute, a data center consulting group; released a report this week on the value (and hype) of cloud usage, cloud computing, and cloud services. Although the report is geared towards large enterprises and their potential ROI and TCO, I think there are some takeaways for the nonprofit sector as well, especially small and medium organizations:

• Although nonprofits have been keen to adopt cloud services such as Google Apps and Salesforce, it may be awhile before cloud computing such as Amazon Web Services are right for us. At the same time, there may be "down-to-earth" technologies such as virtualization that are easier to implement and offer a faster ROI.
• Unlike larger organizations and enterprises, our main technology capital expenditures are not the multitude of server farms and datacenters, but rather the individual PCs and hardware we use to get on the cloud. Those prices have already fallen precipitously in the past 3 years. The key should be making sure that their uptime is maintained.
• A main feature of cloud services is that they are location-agnostic. Adopters of these services need to determine how high of a priority this is amongst all other benefits. If it is not crucial that you access services from anywhere, then you need to understand what you might be giving up for that freedom, such as data oversight and security.

Photo: Karen Ka Ying Wong, CC License