Green IT ignorance adds risk
By Miya Knights,
Businesses who ignore green IT issue and their potential impact on future power shortages do so at their peril, a new survey has warned.
The survey of one hundred IT managers and directors in corporate UK firms with revenue exceeding £50 million found over 70 of them were concerned about future power shortages, but few are taking any action to minimise the risk.
The concern may be well justified, given that EON only recently published a report predicting partial power losses interruptions or ‘brown-outs’ by 2012, with the potential to dramatically affect power many businesses' critical IT systems.
Simon Williams, director at survey sponsor DMW Group told IT PRO that IT directors should prioritise power management, so that only business-critical systems remain protected by backup power sources in the event of a brown-out.
But despite concern among IT managers the survey - conducted by researcher Vanson Bourne - suggested only seven per cent were able to estimate how much energy their technology estate consumed with any reasonable accuracy.
When asked specifically about power use in the data centre, 68 per cent of respondents claimed not to understand the energy efficiency of this major source of power consumption.
Furthermore, more than two-thirds of respondents had not set any targets to reduce their IT energy consumption. Reasons cited were either that it was simply not viewed as their responsibility, or it was unnecessary because IT accounts for only a small amount of total power usage.
But the survey found the average cost of powering an IT estate was already £12 million a year – a figure that Williams pointed out was only set to rise further with increased consumption and energy price inflation.
He said: “Not measuring your current IT power consumption means that many IT managers are unlikely to have a sound plan for reducing their power requirements and completely underestimating the size and impact of the problem.”
Williams advised IT heads to establish a regime of measuring their energy usage and to constantly look at ways to reduce it, adding: “They are more interested in reducing their total cost of server or PC ownership because often, they are not made responsible for their power bills.”
The research also highlighted that 79 per cent of respondents reported that they are either using server virtualisation or consolidation or planning to do so. But less than half turned off power to servers when not in use and less than half (47 per cent) had thought about reducing average server power consumption.
Less than a third (29 per cent) had considered using fresh air cooling in their data centres, while 18 per cent had considered recycling heat generated from data centre or using renewable energy.
Sponsored Links
advertisement
Latest Strategy Analysis & Insight
Q&A: Daniel Reed, Reader's Digest
We spoke to the man in charge of the technology strategy for Reader’s Digest in Europe and Asia Pacific.
- Welcome to the stay-at-home Olympics
- What should RIM do to recapture the attention of businesses?
- Q&A: Colin Bannister, UK CTO, CA Technologies
- Will someone rid me of these troublesome Macs?
- What can Intel bring to the smartphone market?
- Q&A: Cisco on servers, storage and strategy
- Q&A: Raj Samani, CTO McAfee
- Erase and rewind: the EU and privacy
- Does 2012 spell doom and gloom for the tech sector?
Latest Strategy Reviews
ThinPrint Printer Dashboard review: First Look
- Office 365 review: First look
- Novell ZENworks Configuration Management 11 Standard Edition review
- Mindjet MindManager 9 review
- Tableau Desktop Professional Edition review
- Spiceworks review
- Head to Head: Parallels Desktop 6 vs VMware Fusion 3
- Swiftlight review
- FaceTime Communications USG-1030 review
- Top 10 iPad apps for business review
advertisement
Most popular
- Ubuntu vs. Windows 7 on the business desktop
- York researchers heat storage to speed up data
- BlackBerry Bold 9790 review
- OneNote hits Google?s Android
- O2 trials Olympic-scale remote working
- Will someone rid me of these troublesome Macs?
- Lenovo beats expectations again
- Who to trust after the VeriSign hack?
- Google to promise fairness after Motorola buy
- Report: Google cloud storage coming soon
Latest News Videos in Strategy
Q&A: David Elton, PA Consulting Group
CIOs are increasingly influential, but have to juggle "dual roles", study finds.
Register for IT PRO
You'll get exclusive member benefits including free whitepapers, downloads, Webinars and weekly newsletters full of the latest IT PRO news, reviews, insight and expertise.



RE:
Energy prices are on the up and they never go down - unless people move to more energy efficient machines/devices they will find themselves in a right pickle. And/Or alternatively they should invest in Renewable sources for their energy and implement schemes that will help them in the future.
By nicomo on Thursday Sep 11