Talk is cheap -- which may be why managers at a majority of the world's largest companies say they're considering green data centres, but few are actually going green.
A worldwide survey from Symantec of data centre managers at large companies and public-sector institutions found that while 71% of respondents expressed an interest in adopting green IT practices, only 12% are implementing green data centres. A minuscule 2% reported they have completed green IT data centres, while 29% haven't even considered implementing green data centres.
Moreover, among the organisations that are or have considered implementing green data centres, the main motive is not protecting the environment, the survey found: It's strictly business.
For example, when data centre managers were asked what role energy efficiency played in their decision to implement server consolidation and server virtualisation -- the two most popular green technologies -- only 10% cited it as the most important reason. The vast majority, 68%, cited it as one of many reasons, and 10% said energy efficiency did not factor into the decision at all. This, despite the fact that 57% of data centre managers consider themselves "advocates of greener data centres," according to the survey.
"Cost savings and constant business pressure to maintain performance and meet increasingly aggressive service-level agreements are the main reasons for implementing many green strategies," said Matt Fairbanks, senior director of product marketing for Symantec's data centre management group.
"For them it is beyond environmental concerns -- it is about meeting business goals and reducing costs," he said.
The survey, commissioned by Symantec and conducted by Ziff Davis Enterprise, is based on responses from 800 data centre managers of Global 2,000 companies and other large organisations. The average annual IT budget of the U.S. respondents was US$71 million; non-U.S. companies spent an average US$54 million annually on IT. The study defines green data centre as "having increased efficiencies in energy usage, power consumption, space utilisation and reduction of polluting energy sources."
A will, but few incentives
The disjunction between words and actions when it comes to green IT shows up in other studies. A recent survey by Forrester Research, for example, found that while 85% of IT procurement and operations professionals in U.S. companies believe environmental concerns are important in planning their IT operations, almost as many -- 78% -- said green IT has not been written into their evaluation and selection criteria for IT systems and devices.
"That's not an unusual type of behavioural model to see," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "Frankly, I think we're in sort of the early days of this."
Simon Mingay, who covers green IT at consultancy Gartner, agreed. "The harsh reality is that the media is way ahead of this compared to business," he said. And boardroom policy is ahead of practice. CEOs at large corporations in the public eye increasingly understand the political, if not the environmental expediency of going green, Mingay said, injecting promises to reduce their carbon footprint into corporate social responsibility policies.
"They can see that there is more risk in doing nothing than doing something. That is a big change from where we were 12 months ago," he said. "But what does that mean for the guys in the middle, who are stuck with figuring this out without any additional resources or spending any more money?"
Even within IT, there is a disconnect between the executive ranks and the people on the front lines of the energy crisis, King said. In general, IT decisions are based on computing demands, he said, while data facilities management makes decisions based on the cost and availability of energy. CIOs know green technology is important, but they may not see it as urgent, because IT typically doesn't deal with the rising electricity bills at the facility. In fact, green technology often doesn't become an imperative until power and cooling issues prevent CIOs from putting more servers in a data centre.
But the light bulb will go off, so to speak, sooner rather than later, according to Gartner. The consultancy is predicting that by 2009, one-third of IT organisations will include environmental sustainability in their top-six buying criteria for their hardware and services vendors.
And there is no question that the groundswell for green IT in the data centre is growing. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sounded the alarm in a report this summer: If left unchecked, energy consumption by U.S. data centres and servers will nearly double by 2011, accounting for 2.5 % of U.S. electricity consumption.
The Green Grid, a nonprofit consortium of IT companies formed in 2007, unveiled in August its roadmap for developing and promoting energy efficiency in the data centre. Dell CEO Michael Dell got spontaneous applause at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in October when he told a room of 6,000 technocrats that IT can lead the charge in reducing carbon emissions at their companies.
The rich get greener
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Symantec survey found a correlation between wealth and green IT. Organisations with larger data centre budgets implement green data centre strategies more frequently than those with smaller budgets. They are more likely to implement server virtualisation, server consolidation, data deduplication and storage virtualisation, and to use disk for backup than their less-green counterparts.
Server consolidation and virtualisation implementations are more prevalent in U.S.-based companies in general, and surpass implementations in other parts of the world. (Even among U.S. data centres defined as "not green," 38% have consolidated servers and 36% adopted server virtualisation, the survey found.)
However, while fewer Asia-Pacific and Japanese organisations are implementing consolidation and virtualisation in their data centres, the majority of IT managers from this region who do (88%) cite energy consumption and energy reduction as the primary reason.
Slightly more than a third of companies based in the U.S. said they have green policies, while almost 60% of companies from Asia-Pacific countries and Japan, and 55% of European companies, have them. According to the research, companies from China, Germany, Mexico, Canada, India and South Korea are more likely to have green data centre policies than not.