Green IT – The Cart and the Horse

May 23rd, 2008 by Julia Lim

We asked government IT folks at this year’s FOSE show how important Green IT was to their agencies. The results:

• 73% said Green IT was important
• 16% said it wasn’t
• 9% admitted they didn’t know what the agency’s policy was

The follow up question (and the responses) was the kicker though:

• Only 13% had tools/solutions for Green IT in place
• An additional 13% had plans this year to implement
• 55% didn’t know or had no plans to implement

Call me a skeptic, but the environment, and what people do to “save it”, must be pretty high on the list of things people pay lip service to. 3 out of 4 people said Green IT is important – but most people seemed to be responding from a personal perspective. I mean, who’s gonna come out and say “I don’t care about the environment”? In our conversations at the show, there was a lot of talk about energy-saving solutions that people personally used, but very few institutional examples.

Not to say that companies aren’t doing it. I was just talking to a Gartner analyst who had a customer with 2500 servers and ended up virtualizing them 6:1 with a resulting annual power savings of $1.1 million. Very cool. And of course, Opus Interactive, whose data center is 100% wind-powered. But so far, these guys are the exception and not the rule.

I was reading recently about IBM’s Big Green initiative, launched last year. There are many different components to this plan, but their recent announcement on new power/energy monitoring capabilities was pretty interesting. IBM partnered with companies like APC, Eaton, Matrikon, OSIsoft and VMware, to come up with a way for Tivoli customers to collect data from partner products in the power and cooling space.

So what’s going to drive adoption of Green IT? The cost savings – especially as energy costs rise? A more institutional approach to doing what’s right for the environment? Will it be a side benefit of the push to virtualize? Another article on how “hot” Green IT is? More vendors baking energy/power management features into their products? (Which I think is a great thing, BTW)

What do you think?

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May 23rd, 2008