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Legislative Hammer Poised Over 'Environmentally Unfriendly' IT Industry?

The electronics industry may be transforming into the 21st century equivalent of the smog-spewing steel industry of the '60s and '70s as the whipping boy for environmentalists. It's clear there are ongoing challenges surrounding increasingly high-powered data centers that are causing new headaches for data center managers and other IT executives. InformationWeek has been reporting on the data center "energy crisis" throughout this past year, most recently on Monday in our story about new cooling technologies to fight heat.

According to Gartner, businesses are under mounting pressure to develop "greener" approaches to their IT practices, and IT and business leaders need to do a better job of recognizing the issues of spiraling energy consumption and environmental legislation. The research firm says two factors are particularly visible to policymakers: electronic waste and the potential impact of data center energy consumption on global warming.

"IT's age of innocence is nearing an end," said Steve Prentice, an analyst with Gartner, in a statement. "Technology's clean and friendly weightless economy image is being challenged by its growing environmental footprint."

Another Gartner analyst, Rakesh Kumar, estimates that energy costs in the next few years may grow from a current average of about 10% of IT budgets to more than 50%. He believes legislation that will penalize businesses that don't put in place measures to improve management of energy is imminent in both the United States and Europe.

The simmering potential power crisis isn't going unnoticed in the IT industry, despite the "wake up and smell the coffee" tone of Gartner's most recent message. Data center equipment makers like Emerson's Liebert and American Power Conversion have been adding new equipment that brings cooling technologies closer to the source of the heat, and the leading culprit is the microprocessor.

Server makers including Hewlett-Packard and IBM have added cooling modules to their own portfolios, and microprocessor makers Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, and Sun Microsystems have been making more power efficient chips in an attempt to at least hold the line on the energy requirements to power and cool systems based on their devices.

AMD has used the issue of power efficiency to significantly increase its market share over the past two years. AMD is also leading the effort to create an industry consortium to address data center energy issues called The Green Grid. Other members include Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun.

After using the escalating megahertz, and then gigahertz, race in microprocessors to make itself the most successful semiconductor company in history, Intel has also belatedly joined the energy crusade. The theme for the Intel Developer Forum this week in San Francisco has been "energy-efficient performance."

There are also efforts ongoing to improve the energy efficiency of other components in the data center, including DRAMs and power supplies.

The question now becomes whether the race to improve data center efficiency can stay ahead of potential anti-IT legislation.

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