Green IT Saves Cash
Insurance Networking News, April 9, 2009
There’s science behind green IT. Recent case studies of emerging green technologies and practices have demonstrated quantifiable results. It’s clear that green initiatives save cash.
Organizations can realize major savings just by virtualizing servers and using power-management tools and variable-speed disk drives in data centers, for example. These approaches can extend a data center’s life span at a fraction of the cost of building a new one, upwards of $1,000 a square foot.
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When CIO’s shrink the carbon footprint of their data centers, improve energy efficiency, and promote recycling and telework, they directly boost the bottom line. In any economy, that’s good news for business.
The Cost of Not Going Green
Getting the business behind green IT is easier when considering the cost of not going green. As organizations ratchet up scrutiny of all IT projects, CIOs are wise to point out the consequences of inaction – both the tangible and intangible costs. A tangible cost would be a loss of revenue. An intangible cost would be the erosion of a company’s reputation by its unwillingness to invest in sustainability like competitors are doing. Fallout from such erosion includes credibility problems with key clients and difficulty in attracting and retaining the best employees.
The case for green IT rests on cost savings and operational impacts – and that includes the consequences of falling behind the times.
For the two most popular green related projects, virtualization and desktop management cost savings, reduced energy consumption is the primary driver. As companies increase their awareness and put action behind words, leading better-informed and more environmentally aware businesses, they will want to select IT providers that support environmentally sound products and services.
If IT departments lead with projects that clearly save money through reduced energy consumption, the cost of not going green becomes glaringly apparent. By Accenture’s estimates, at least two-thirds of the green initiatives IT departments can launch today would have an economic payoff. These favorable numbers help IT gain business support.
Who’s Hogging the Energy?
Some IT departments make the mistake of initiating their exploration of green IT by checking out their own vendors’ latest energy-efficient offerings. That’s a mistake, because it’s too easy to be led down a path of narrow “hardware refresh” focus. Better to take a hard look at IT’s overall power consumption and environmental footprint. That sounds like a daunting task, but new tools are hitting the market to help organizations with the process. Capabilities are now available from service integrators and niche players to identify which projects will produce the greatest impact most quickly.
The next step is to tackle the area with the most imminent promise: the data center. It’s no accident that the Environmental Protection Agency is ready to issue a stamp of approval for the most energy-efficient servers: Data centers are prime targets for the green IT agenda.
Most people don’t realize how dependent our economy has become on data centers. These hubs of computing, networking and storage equipment, and power and cooling systems deliver critical support to our economic institutions. Banking and financial services, media, manufacturing, transportation, education, health care and government all conduct billions of transactions a day through data centers.
Policymakers now recognize data centers as a branch of our national infrastructure, along with the power grid that juices them 24\7. We can make a good dent in greenhouse gas emissions just by making data centers more efficient in their power consumption and reuse of waste heat.
In 2006, data centers accounted for a whopping 1.5 percent of U.S. energy consumption, according to the EPA in its 2007 Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency. The EPA forecasted that figure to jump to three percent in the next five years, at which point we’ll be dropping $7.4 billion a year to run U.S. data centers. We can cut server energy consumption by 25 percent using existing technologies and strategies, said the EPA. And further reductions would be possible using advanced technologies.
But how do the EPA’s data center energy estimates play out in the real world? To find out, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s corporate members conducted 17 case studies. The group selected Accenture to analyze the results, which were published this year in the Data Center Energy Resources Report.
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