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Going Green: The Writing Is On The Wall For IT

Green computing isn't just the right thing to do, it's fast becoming a business necessity. IT needs to start implementing energy-efficient means of running the data center. Sure, energy prices have gone down in the past month, but to treat the uncertainty surrounding the continued availability of energy as a temporary blip shows not only social irresponsibility, but bad business sense. We've run a number of articles that dramatize the urgency of this issue in the past months. Just last week, Gartner issued a stern warning that CIOs must take immediate action to reduce IT's spiraling consumption of energy.

There are two equally urgent reasons to do this. First, the increasing power demands of energy-ravenous data centers are causing electricity-producing plants to release more emissions that contribute to global warming, says Gartner. Second, the need for additional power, coupled with rising energy prices, mean energy costs could soon escalate to more than 50% of IT budgets. And this isn't some vague future prophecy; this could come about in the next few years, Gartner says. Added to this, IBM recently predicted that as early as 2007, businesses will spend more money on electricity to power and cool their data centers than they spend on the computer systems themselves.

There are some hopeful signs that the tech world is waking up, however. At last week's Intel Developer Forum, for example, the chipmaker's major theme was "energy-efficient performance." To its credit, Intel said cutting power consumption was one of its major goals going forward, and that it was building its chip design strategy around that goal.

Google is one of the companies at the forefront of green data centers. At the Intel forum, Google engineer Luiz Barroso was invited onstage to explain how Google is saving energy in its many massive data centers.

In a fascinating white paper that provides insight into Google's often-mysterious inner IT workings, Google says it has been working for years to develop more efficient power supplies to eliminate waste. As a result, its server power supplies now run at 90% efficiency, cutting down on energy losses by a power of four.

Another promising development is that VC investments in power management technologies are increasing exponentially. Investors are pouring dollars into energy-efficient technologies--including those that allow businesses to track energy use--thus far in 2006 at a rate three times that of 2005. In total, energy efficiency investments topped $60 billion by August this year, compared to just $15 million in all of 2005.

Also, back in April, Sun and a consortium of electronics companies including AMD and Lawrence Berkeley Labs joined with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to hammer out a standard to define a metric that would measure energy efficiency in server technology. This would be similar to the gas efficiency rating currently used to evaluate the energy efficiency of a new car and should help IT enormously when deciding which servers to purchase.

All this is good, but for the sake of economics as well as environmental health, technology vendors and CIOs need to immediately step up their efforts even further. The negative repercussions of not doing this--and again, this is for financial as well as socially urgent reasons--are alarmingly imminent. You don't have a decade. You probably don't even have five years. The time to act is now.

What do you think? Has your IT department begun thinking about energy issues? Do you have any plans in place to address them? Let me know by replying below.

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