Outsourcing addresses 'green' IT issues

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A new study has found too few organisations are looking to managed data centre services as a way of reducing rising costs associated with growing environmental pressures.

"Creating Cost and Efficiency through Outsourcing Hosted Solutions," by analyst firm IDC said the fact only around half of companies host their websites and e-business infrastructure in-house suggests many are missing out on potential benefits.

James Eibisch, research director at IDC's European telecoms and networking group told IT PRO that the remainder have a perception that managed hosting is either more expensive and less secure or offers less control and security, so introducing more risk into the IT infrastructure.

"In my opinion, some of these benefits are illusory," he said. "The costs or designing, building and maintaining data centres in-house are rising and perceived barriers to outsourcing these problems can be overcome by choosing a decent provider."

The increasing pressures felt by IT departments in the areas of rising energy costs and consumption should encourage companies of all sizes to overcome the perceived barriers to managed service adoption, he added.

"By outsourcing they can offload much of the uncertainty of future environmental legislation and regulation to a third party, resulting in a reduction in long-term risk to the company," he said.

"Although today the European Union would like the IT industry to regulate itself, this won't be the case forever. Today, legislation is concentrated on areas such as materials (covered by the "restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment" directive or RoHS) and recycling (the "waste electrical and electronic equipment directive or WEEE), but discussions are going on to extend environmental regulation to IT and communications, and companies must consider the future implications of this for their business."

The paper urges organisations to look to hosting providers to exploit economies of scale by sharing data centre infrastructure across customers and reducing overall power consumption and environmental impact.

Fabio Torlini, marketing manager for Rackspace Managed Hosting, which commissioned the white paper, said too much of the 'green IT' debate has been focused on the cost effectiveness of data centre operations.

"It's more to do with looking at the infrastructure management costs, where managing complex data centres can be as expensive as running them in-house," said Torlini.

In April 2007 Rackspace announced its move to a new data centre that will run on environmentally friendly energy to help reduce the company's dependency on fossil fuel, as well as provide a more efficient way to manage its customers' needs. Torlini said Rackspace now also utilises HP ProLiant DL385 servers featuring dual-core AMD Opteron 200 Series processors, which consume less electricity than prior server models.

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