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Green is also the color of money
Saving money, not corporate social responsibility, is the primary driver in the green IT movement.
By Denise DiRamio, Associate Editor, Communications News
Communications News’ GreenTech column focuses on a variety of issues concerning the Green IT movement. You can contact Associate Editor Denise DiRamio at ddiramio@comnews.com.
As awareness and support for environmentalism increases, technology organizations are implementing green initiatives at a rapid pace. Moves toward greater energy efficiency, however, and the resulting environmental benefits, are motivated primarily by the desire for cost savings, not the much-touted environmental consciousness of big business.
Economic rather than altruistic reasons have been the impetus for green IT initiatives, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 148 technology company executives. The desire to decrease expenditures by reducing energy consumption is the main driver of the sustainability movement in the technology industry, the survey concludes.
A key reason for the growing interest in more energy-efficient products is the rising cost of energy. Companies now spend as much as 10 percent of their technology budgets on energy, says Rakesh Kumar of research firm Gartner. Much of this is spent on cooling, but around half of the budget is used to run servers and computers.
Data center managers are especially concerned with the rapid increase in power and cooling requirements, and the rising cost of electricity. The Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook 2008 indicates that the price for electricity increased by an average of 9.3 percent in 2006, the largest one-year jump since 1981. Data centers in the United States spent approximately $4.5 billion in power costs in 2006, and are expected to see that cost increase by 40 percent by 2010, according to a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.
Energy costs have become a huge area of concern, however, as computing and storage needs escalate and the demand for data centers continues to rise. Between 1996 and 2006, the number of servers in use increased from six million to 28 million, and the average power consumption of each server grew from 150 watts to 400 watts, says Jed Scaramella of IDC, a market-research firm. But things are now starting to change as the computer industry has been overcome with enthusiasm for green computing, he adds.
Most vendors have introduced new systems or options with energy efficiency as a key feature. Microsoft has reduced power consumption in Windows Server 2008 by 40 percent. Dell has developed energy-efficient servers and desktops that consume less power than regular models, delivering up to 25 percent greater performance per watt, while reducing power consumption by up to 24 percent. HP has several solutions that cut cooling costs in the data center by 15 percent to 40 percent. Compellent Technologies has developed a storage solution that utilizes automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and advanced virtualization to cut power consumption.
VMware has brought virtualization to the forefront, offering resource and memory management features that can eliminate server sprawl and reduce power consumption by converting physical machines into virtual machines. Virtualization can dramatically reduce the number of servers needed, which provides significant savings on power and cooling costs.
“Green IT is now being driven as much by an element of business strategy as by a sense of corporate social responsibility,” says Vamshi Mokshagundam, technology analyst at Datamonitor. “Green IT practices such as energy-efficient hardware, hosted infrastructure and data center virtualization have all been around for a while now, it is only recently that companies have begun incorporating green IT in their core business strategy.”
While saving the planet by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, recycling and reducing waste are fine objectives in a green initiative, it is an aversion to rising energy costs that is driving change. Energy-saving strategies and solutions deliver the tangible benefit of a smaller electricity bill–and that is green, no matter how you look at it.
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