Noel, a principal analyst at Ptak, Noel and Associates.
Just as virtualization is no slam dunk, neither is green computing. Industry watchers say that working toward a greener computing environment isn’t going to be easy for most data center managers due to technical, political and other reasons outside the control of IT.
“Legislation is coming about putting corporate responsibility programs in place, but in a lot of cases IT doesn’t fall under the umbrella of corporate responsibility,” says Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of global enterprise research at the Yankee Group.“IT needs to start understanding more about data center facilities and find ways to design data centers to eat up less power.”
According to Steven Harris, director of data center planning and design at con-sultancy Forsythe Technology, the amount of power that data centers consume has doubled in the past five years and it is projected to double again in five years. Because the data center consumes a significant amount of the resources from facilities, many will be looking to IT to be more cost-effective and conserve energy.
“When people think about how they can save money and lower operating costs, unfortunately the big changes from the facilities side -- such as replacing an electrical or mechanical system -- are extremely expensive and introduce significantly more risk,” Harris says.“So companies will be looking to IT to make changes such as consolidation, virtualization and optimization to lower costs and do so without causing major outages.”
For IT, that means finding ways to reduce their power consumption -- but not necessarily because they care about the environment. Forrester’s Staten says in 2008 data center managers will be tasked with “energy auditing,” which involves understanding the entire power path from the utility to the CPU. While vendors will paint such efforts as green computing, companies
are more looking to cut costs.
“Being green is not the main driver for trying to conserve power. It’s a cost-driven measure for IT,” he says.
One way to start cutting costs is with products that shut off unused workstations or limit power consumed by servers. For instance, companies such as Partners Healthcare and many others tapping Energy Star initiatives have already reported millions in savings.
Still, the disconnect between the premise of green computing and the IT drivers could cause confusion among data center managers lacking clear direction from corporate management.
“There isn’t anything you will be doing when you won’t hear about green IT,” but without more knowledge of the subject and technologies relating to green IT,“the whole argument could blow up in IT’s face,” says Rich Ptak, founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel and Associates.
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