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2013
Conference Paper
Titel
Comparative inventory model of conventional end-user devices and thin clients
Abstract
ßIn the German technology program IT2Green, heterogeneous approaches for the improvement of the energy efficiency of ICT systems are developed. IT2Green shows the considerable environmental improvement potential in the field of high efficient data centres and telecommunication infrastructure (load-adaptive operation and utilization of renewable energy). At the same time, storage 'in the cloud' and 'Software as a Service' applications become more widely used in the business and private sector. Such applications reduce the necessary hardware at the user side, but increase the data traffic for the telecommunication networks and the computing load in data centres. Against that background, the paper investigates the improvement potential of a thin client-based ICT system. We will present a respective inventory model for a comparative long-term assessment of a conventional and a thin client-based ICT structure. A case study for PCs, notebooks and thin clients in a home and an office environment is investigated. Results for energy consumption in the use phase show that thin clients perform a lot better than PCs. However, notebooks are even more energy efficient than thin clients which results from the use additional display and servers when working with a thin client. When looking at the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, thin clients and notebooks are in the same range, both causing significantly less GHG emissions than PCs.