Last Friday, HP announced the entrance of its new desktop, the rp5700, into the market. With an average life expectancy of five years, it outlives HP’s previous Energy Star 4.0 certified models by more than three years.

Longer lifecycle desktops mean lower TOC. That's increasingly important, especially because power and cooling costs in the data center have reached a critical point: It now generally costs more to maintain your infrastructure than it does to purchase the equipment to build it. This was one of the many topics discussed during CIO's Green IT Roundtable, which is now online. Six CIOs, researchers and vendors got together for a discussion surrounding the IT industry's impact on power consumption and the important role that IT leaders have when it comes to promoting energy efficiency at their organizations. The discussion focuses on why IT needs to become more energy efficient, the steps CIOs can take to get there and how they can use things like measurement and verification to establish ROI on different programs. So please check it out: It's a lively (and extremely important) exchange of ideas to say the least.

In addition to its longer life, the rp5700 has a gold rating from EPEAT; the previous dc7700 had a silver rating. (EPEAT ratings are given based on environmental features, such as energy efficiency, recycling capability, and lower levels of hazardous materials). Another big difference between the new and the old has to do with the availability of environmental features. While Energy Star 4.0 certification was previously available on certain models only, it’s standard on the rp5700, as is an 80 percent efficient power supply and low power CPUs. In addition to that, 95 percent of the components can be recycled, 10 percent of the plastics in the PC are made of recycled materials and 25 percent of the packaging material comes from recycled material.

Lower energy costs and the ability to standardize on one configuration are two of the big incentives for organizations to adopt the new model, says Lesley Fagg of HP. During a recent phone interview, she told me that customers who have expensive certification processes should go with a long lifecycle desktop. In an environment where operations are repetitive or task orientated, such as distribution, Fagg says there is no need to constantly change models. “Environments like that crave stability over the latest and

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