Why should you care about Green IT?

There are some very pragmatic reasons why data center managers should be concerned about implementing green practices as the following talking points illustrate.

• IT runs on electricity - A survey conducted last year by the Uptime Institute, enterprise data center managers responded that 42% of them expected to run out of power capacity within 12-24 months and another 23% claimed that they would run out of power capacity in 24-60 months.


• The EPA Report to Congress detailed that data center sector consumed about 61 billion KWh in 2006 - approximately 1.5% total U.S. electricity consumption at a cost of ~$4.5 billion. These amounts are projected to increase to 100 billion kWh in 2011 or ~2.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption and ~$7.4 billion.


• IDC estimates for every $1.00 spent on new data center hardware, an additional $0.50 is spent on power and cooling, more than double the amount of five years ago.


• According to Gartner, 70 percent of CIO's are reporting that power and/or cooling issues are now their single largest problem in the data center. With 90% of companies running large data centers needing to build more power and cooling in the next 30 months.
• Gartner estimates 48 percent of the data center budget being spent on energy, up from 8 percent a few years ago.


• National average rate for electricity has jumped 44% since 2004 with only 5% of data center managers actually seeing the utility bill and few if any are held accountable for energy cost.
• Incremental US demand for data center energy between 2007 and 2010 is equivalent to 10 new power plants.


• Implementing sustainable manufacturing helps to manage disposal and recyclable fees. Electronic components contribute 2% to the solid waste in landfills but 40% of the lead.


• The regulators are coming - Carbon tax; Cap and Trade. If you are not involved with green policy implementation the chances are you will be, to some degree or another, very soon!