Green IT? Not yet

IBM has just released the findings of a study “examining the practices and attitudes of large Australian enterprises towards Green IT”. IBM deserves credit for helping drive this agenda.

The findings are that 36% of respondents (IT managers and directors in large Australian enterprises) believe that the reduction of carbon emissions from their IT infrastructure is a high priority for their business.

While it would be great if this were higher, I wonder if the results would be different if the audience was management in manufacturing, logistics or finance? In other words, carbon emission is becoming a factor for business, but is not yet a high priority.

In IT I suggest we can take a lead in 3 ways:

- Specify lower power consumption and lower heat output in all devices, and make this an important buying criterion. This will drive vendors to constantly improve design in this area, which I sense is happening.

- Introduce back-end technology that reduces power consumption and heat output. One of the most high-profile technologies, which makes sense on multiple levels, not just carbon emissions is Server Virtualisation. Fewer servers, each working at higher capacity drives down cost of acquisition and cost of ownership, which includes power consumption from operation and cooling.

- Introduce technology that increases effective collaboration without the need to travel. The reduction of travel only works if the meetings can still be effective and in my experience, with technologies such as Adobe Connect and WebEx they can. These are great tools which are available on demand, to virtually bring people together which saves the carbon emissions from travel – both ground and air.

While the reduction of carbon emissions from their IT infrastructure may not be a high priority in all businesses today, it will become more important and IT can take a lead now and be ahead of the curve.

The worst that will happen is that IT will help the business save money!

Green for Go

I noticed last week that Terradata announced a new server and the promoted feature appeared to be low power consumption - it uses much less power than the unit it replaced. This is the first such promotion I have seen.

In addition, a week ago in Sydney there was a Data Centre conference with the major themes around building more sustainable Data Centres, consuming less power and thereby emitting less carbon.

This is exciting news and what is surprising is how quickly these "green" issues have become prevalent in IT. Were we trying to reduce power consumption and heat emissions 3 years ago? An idea who's time has come?