UK Worst in Europe for Green IT

  by Richard Muirhead | 09 Jul 2008 | Permalink |

A recent survey of 8,000 executive released by Brocade revealed 60 per cent of UK IT directors and board-level managers gave the thumbs down to their firm’s environmental credentials. But only 37 per cent of them said they were personally concerned about their company’s energy use and carbon footprint, and just 16 per cent said they sought out green technology. Even Brocade admits the results are disappointing. According to the report, “IT directors said they felt there were no green products out there to buy. The technology industry needs to offer more education as to what is available.” (UK Worst in Europe for Green IT)

The onus is on IT to get the basics right. Like many other disruptive technologies, green IT is a journey, not a destination. So how are UK IT directors to begin if they don’t think there are any green products out there to buy? To start with, they can look at themselves first, specifically their own data centres. In the average data centre we’ll find most power-hungry servers running at only 10-15% utilisation. The Uptime Institute estimates most enterprises have up to 30 percent obsolete, decommissioned servers in their data centres that are no longer in use – but are still using power!

Almost half the UK respondents from the Brocade study think a quarter of their company’s operating expenses are spent on energy. An efficient data centre – one with an accurate count of its servers and other hardware, software and additional resources – uses about 25% less electricity than a run-of-the-mill one. In a mid-size facility, that could amount to $4.5 million a year in savings.

So it stands to reason that if they can’t find any green products to buy, the data centre is one of the first places they should look, as there are significant and immediate cost – and green – savings to be had by removing these inefficiencies. They can start with an understanding of how each physical and virtual server is used, what software is running on it, which business applications it supports and what its value actually is to the business. Then they can weed out or refresh unused, unnecessary and inefficient assets and begin to green themselves by reducing their energy requirements and power use.