With the UN’s approval of a one-time ivory sale late last year, and a growing demand for ivory in China, its hard not to point fingers at the Chinese for an upsurge in the murdering of elephants. Chinese workers in Kenya are buying ivory tusks that have been hacked from the carcasses of illegally hunted elephants in a banned trade that could run down the herds in one of Kenya’s most famous wildlife reserves.

Recent raids at the main airports of Kenya and Nairobi had two shipments of bloodstained tusks headed for Thailand seized. While the final destination is still not known, these shipments may be part of the growing link between China and elephant poaching.

To top it off, most ivory smugglers arrested at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport were found to be Chinese nationals.

Also noted is that poaching is on the increase due to the increased demand for ivory in Asia, no matter what the cost.

Wildlife experts in Kenya are reporting a disturbing increase in elephant killings that coincides with the arrival of Chinese workers for massive road projects. Most of the elephants killed have been in proximity to where the Chinese are working.

The Chinese government has denied any connections to the increase in the poaching of the wildlife for the ivory.

It cannot be denied that the Chinese have a hand in the increase in the poaching, all fingers continuously point towards Chinese nationals living/visiting Kenya. Chinese nationals working in Kenya purchase the ivory at local prices, and make a lot when they smuggle the ivory back to China.

How will the Kenyan government react to curb the increased poaching? How will the Kenya Wildlife Services in charge of the parks where the elephants are being killed going to handle the situation? How will they take action against these illegal poachers?

The Solution – Virtualization.

Virtual machines allow the sharing of the physical machines resources between different virtual machines, each running its own operating system. The software layer or host providing the virtualization is called a hypervisor. A hypervisor can run on bare hardware or on top of an operating system.  Simply put, server virtualization software allows you to run multiple guest computers on a single host computer with the guest computers believing they are running on their own hardware. By doing this, you gain all the benefits of any type of virtualization: portability of guest virtual machines, reduced operating costs, reduced administrative overhead, server consolidation, testing & training, disaster recovery benefits.

Examples of server virtualization products are:

• VMware Server, Workstation, Player, and ESX Server
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Virtualbox

Virtualization could save you money, time and your data in case of disaster. It also helps reduce the costs of power and cooling, improve the use of servers, do more with less hardware.

I just want to do my part to contributing to making the world a greener place. I believe I can make a difference simply because there are others like me out there who believe the same and that adds on. One of those being my friend Kahenya is doing his part by starting a tree planting initiative start from 1st November to 30th November. I highly recommend you visit his site to have a look at his initiative which I feel is indeed very different and to which I am definitely going to contribute.

A few other ways of going green take place in your everyday lives, these little efforts make a huge if not massive difference.

• Wash your car once in two weeks. I tweeted about this a couple of days ago, why waste upto 30 liters of water washing your car every single day? It still gets dusty at the end of the day. Leave it that way. If just a 1000 people would wash their cars once in two weeks you would save 390,000 liters of water. Now that’s a start.
• Recycle paper - So what if the office buys the paper, use the reverse side of the paper. If you were to do this, you would use half your paper supply in an entire year. Do not buy new novels/reading material, try and borrow/exchange.. Or get a Kindle. Try and save as much paper as you can.
• Use Energy Saving Bulbs -  Go out there and get yourselves low energy bulbs, you will be amazed at how bright a 10watt bulb could actually get. And it really beings down the monthly bills, especially now that KPLC are charging 8shs per unit as fuel surcharge. Do you really wanna fork out that extra 500-2000shs a month when you can use it to do something better?
• Virtualised Computing – This is my favorite, not only does it save me administrative costs, but I use less physical machines/servers therefore saving on power and the need for extra air conditioning. Your bosses will be happy too that you aren’t asking for more hardware (they’d probably find it in their hearts to give us IT guys a raised now ).
• Switch Off your car in traffic – Daily we have about 300,000 cars stuck in traffic, if 10,000 cars were to be switched off while stuck in traffic we would greatly reduce carbon emission, and you fuel your car a little less.
• Avoid Plastics – When going for shopping, try and avoid plastics, especially paper bags. Try to get more items packed into one packet or try and get them packed into a cardboard box that can be reused next time round.

Which ever way you look at it, Going Green not only helps our environment and our future, but its also a lot better on the pockets. You tend to save in different ways, and before you know it you have saved a decent lump sum that can be used for something better

Edit:- Once again, I request you to contribute to the post especially mentioning how else we could make a difference in our daily lives