Tony Sceales - October 2007
We've heard so much about green IT initiatives recently you'd be forgiven for thinking that everybody had this under control. You might be surprised to learn that storage vendor ONStor found that 58% of the companies they surveyed were either still talking about what they were going to do, or still have no plans as yet to do anything.
Green IT hasn't had the headline profiles of recycling carrier bags, or not using your car, but the fact is that IT is a major contributor to CO2 emissions. The UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) estimated last October that the UK's PCs and servers were already consuming 14% more power than the entire power consumption of Luxembourg, and of course the figure is still rising. All this power is also costing businesses dearly. IDC's John Humphreys, for example, estimates that power, cooling and other operational costs account for 70% of a server's lifetime cost. Yet all too frequently this has not been taken into account when servers were bought.
The penny is dropping though. A study by Sun Microsystems showed that since the first quarter of 2006 more than three-quarters of executives involved in buying decisions for data-centre equipment in enterprises have prioritised energy efficiency; although 63% admitted they didn't know what their energy costs or carbon emission rates were. Sun is one of the companies walking the walk, announcing in August that it had just completed a consolidation of one of its data centres which had seen 5,000 old servers, network switches and storage devices being switched off. ONStor's Bob Miller says: "Whilst the vendors appear to be taking this issue seriously the overall end user community is some way behind."
So what encourages end users to do something about this? Well according to OnStor's survey 48% of organisations felt that a drying up of energy supply would drive a reduction in power consumption at their data centres; while higher power bills were driving business decisions in 66% of companies. "Ultimately, if energy costs continue to rise, more businesses will be forced to look at this by their shareholders. Longer term we can also expect regulators and governments to use big sticks to drive better efficiency in the name of environmental protection," notes Simon Sherrington, founder of Innovation Observatory, a company that specializes in tracking opportunities in green technology markets.
A central plank of green IT is server consolidation. According to OnStor's statistics, fifty-five per cent of respondents stated that storage consolidation would be a central element of their green policy. While an even more upbeat Gartner survey found that 92% of respondents had a data centre consolidation planned for, in progress or completed.
