These are challenging times for IT organizations everywhere. After all, never before has IT had so many mission-critical applications to support, such stringent service level agreements (SLAs) to meet, or more complex infrastructures to manage. Given these circumstances, it would be understandable if IT organizations opted to put green IT projects and initiatives on the backburner.
But they’re not. In fact, as Symantec’s 2009 Green IT report shows, rather than viewing themselves as casual participants in green efforts, IT organizations are actually leading the charge to a greener future. According to the survey of more than 1,000 large enterprises in 15 countries, nine out of 10 IT organizations see their role in minimizing their company’s environmental footprint as very or extremely significant. Furthermore, 83 percent of respondents are now responsible or cross-charged for the electricity consumed in the data center—bringing visibility and accountability to bear on the ultimate consumer of these resources.
As these and a growing number of IT organizations are discovering, there are several ways in which companies can lower energy costs and fulfill green mandates. Better yet, a number of these approaches can be implemented within an existing infrastructure. As a result, IT organizations can not only begin now to address their green IT initiatives but also reduce energy costs today and tomorrow.
Keen on Green
At any given moment, the world consumes 15 trillion watts of energy. Business IT is a big energy user, drawing four percent of that amount, with analysts projecting new usage to double in the next five years. With energy prices soaring, regulations demanding lower consumption, supply dwindling, and environmental concerns mounting, IT’s interest in going green makes economic sense.
Indeed, green IT has reached critical mass. A staggering 97 percent of IT organizations are actively pursuing a green IT plan. And companies are no longer seeking green IT merely to cut costs, although 81 percent of IT organizations are either responsible for electricity in the data center or are cross-charged for it. While 92 percent look to green IT as a way to reduce energy consumption and 91 percent see it as a way to reduce cooling costs, 87 percent are considering green IT because it will reduce pollution and 86 percent because it is now considered a corporate objective.
Companies are also willing to pay for green IT, with one-third willing to pay 20 percent extra and two-thirds willing to pay 10 percent extra for more energy-efficient resources. At the same time, companies are also increasing their green IT budgets. With the average data center currently spending more than $20 million just on electricity, it is no surprise that three out of four IT organizations also say that funding will very likely increase for initiatives that promise to lower power bills.
Going Green
Environmental and energy-cost considerations call for IT to conserve energy using any of a variety of approaches. Organizations that can afford the related expense and downtime may opt to redesign their data centers. Others may choose to invest in an upgrade to hardware that may be initially be very costly but is also more energy-efficient.
Perhaps the most economical yet compelling approach is to simply do more with existing IT resources. Organizations can take the guesswork out of this approach by first leveraging one of the free energy ROI tools that are now available. Using a combination of technologies and services, these tools can help organizations quantify energy consumption and expenditure reductions as well as carbon footprint reductions.
These tools may also provide a means for modeling and comparing different approaches for deployment, integration, and operations to determine the most effective option for an organization—revealing, for example, the benefits of replacing aging equipment or of tiering storage. Once organizations have quantifiable data from which to base their green decisions, they can then determine which activities are most appropriate for their environment.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
There are several ways in which IT organizations can meet their green objectives through better utilization of existing resources. Among the most effective and cost-efficient are to use software to change the way energy-consuming IT assets are used.
For example, with an estimated 40 percent of IT equipment energy consumption due to desktops and laptops, organizations that can automate energy conservation on these systems will see measurable benefits in lower energy use. Software as a Service (SaaS) may also help reduce energy demands by enabling the use of thin clients or netbooks, which require less power.
Software can also be used to optimize servers, which also consume a disproportionate share of energy in the typical IT infrastructure. For example, configuration management software can help administrators adapt configurations to standards for energy efficiency by discovering these systems and their dependencies and tracking their changes. Virtualization can also aid in energy efficiency by enabling IT to use fewer physical servers while requiring less supporting infrastructure and providing more room to future expansion. It is important to note, however, that in order to maximize the benefits of virtualization, organizations must be able to manage virtual systems with the same tools they use for their physical servers.
High-availability clustering software is another effective tool for reducing energy consumption. By obviating the need for dedicated spare servers, clustering tools that instead take a “roaming spare” approach to high availability and disaster recovery eliminate the incremental energy costs of powering and cooling idle high-performance systems.
With storage volumes growing, energy-conscious organizations must also find ways to accommodate increasing amounts of data without adding more storage hardware. Organizations can address these seemingly conflicting needs by identifying and reclaiming unused storage, eliminating the storage of duplicate data, and tiering storage. Because these software practices enable better utilization of existing storage assets, they also produce sustained energy savings.
As organizations continue to pursue green IT initiatives, they can take advantage of a growing number of tools that enable them to reduce energy use and costs by improving how their existing assets are used. With a software-based approach that provides quick time-to-value, organizations can reap measurable returns on their green investments now and into the future.
By Jose Iglesias, Vice President of Global Solutions, Symantec Corporations.
