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| Is the IT Industry Talking a Lot of Hot Air about Green Issues? A new survey just released by storage vendor ONStor shows that while CEOs and CIOs may be championing green IT, the reality is that most have made no active progress. The key message from ONStor's analysis is that IT must embrace more power-efficient technologies to become greener. Whilst Celona Technologies whole-heartedly supports ONStor's promotion of efficient storage, and servers, we believe that the greatest green gains will come from massive server and storage retirement delivered through application consolidation. Storage vendor ONStor found that 58% of the companies they surveyed were either still talking about creating a green IT environment, or still have no plans to do anything, even though IT infrastructure is a major contributor to CO2 emissions. Seventy-three percent of the sample stated that buying more efficient hardware and software would be integral to any corporate green data centre policy. The UK's Department of Trade and Industry estimated last October that the UK's PCs and servers were already consuming 14% more power than the entire power consumption of Luxembourg with this figure still rising. All this power is also costing businesses dearly. IDC's John Humphreys, for example, estimates that power, cooling and other operational expenses account for 70% of a server's lifetime cost. Yet all too frequently this has not been taken into account when servers were bought. "Power-efficient storage is obviously really important", comments application migration specialist Celona Technology's CMO Paul Hollingsworth, "but more important is ensuring that you have streamlined your applications and data. Duplicated data and applications are a major problem in many organizations and these cause a range of operational inefficiencies." Hollingsworth goes on to say that most companies know that at the data and applications' levels they are far from efficient, but the problem has been that the risk, cost and time to consolidate applications has put them off. "Celona recently conducted a survey amongst telecoms executives and 59% said they'd been so discouraged by an application migration that they decided not to go ahead with it. Our message to them is that the new-generation of migration technology overcomes these problems, making the long-awaited benefits of application consolidation a reality and is therefore a step towards becoming greener." BT is a company that is actually making some pretty impressive steps towards reducing their carbon footprint. It has already cut its carbon emissions by 60% since 1996, saving more than one million tonnes of CO2 per annum. This drive extends from data centres to applications-level consolidation. "BT's One IT application consolidation project, and similar projects in other large operators, is all about delivering business benefits", comments Celona Technologies' CEO Tony Sceales. "There are huge opportunities within large telcos to consolidate IT infrastructure and thereby enhance efficiency. And efficiency should deliver the ability to bring new services to market more quickly, but also hard savings in terms of both cash and carbon." This point is underlined by BT's Steve O'Donnell who comments that to date One IT has enabled BT to decommission and consolidate over 1000 racks of servers, resulting in a net saving of 22GW hours per year. "We calculate this translates to a (power) cost saving of just under ?1.8 million per annum or around 3,110 metric tonnes of carbon per year", says O'Donnell. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Computing News :: home page |