By Tim Ferguson, 19 March 2008 15:46
NEWS
There needs to be greater incentives for tech departments to become greener by reducing their overall energy consumption and carbon footprint.
That's according to Dennis Szubert, principle analyst at Quocirca, who feels data centre managers would take more responsibility if they were given more information about what their hardware consumes.
Green IT from A to Z
Click on the links below to find out more...
A is for Abroad
B is for Blades
C is for Carbon footprint
D is for Data centres
E is for Energy sources
F is for Freecycle
G is for Government
H is for Homeworking
I is for Ice caps
J is for Jobs (Steve)
K is for Kilowatts
L is for Landfill
M is for Mercury
N is for Nanogeneration
O is for Offsetting
P is for Paperless office
Q is for Queen
R is for Recycling
S is for SmartPlanet.com
T is for Travel
U is for Upgrade
V is for Virtualisation
W is for WEEE
X is for Xmas
Y is for You
Z is for Zero emissions
Speaking to silicon.com, Szubert said: "There's a lack of information, [IT managers] don't know how much power they're using and there's a lack of incentive for them to save power."
He added: "The carbon footprint of IT is the same as the airline industry. And yet the way IT is managed doesn't really help in cutting the power consumption."
Szubert argued data centre managers would be more inclined to improve efficiency if they are the ones who have to pay the bills.
But Quocirca research found less than one in five IT decision makers have responsibility for the electricity bill, with 54 per cent never made aware of it.
Szubert said: "If they had responsibility for the power bill then they would recoup that through chargeback to the business."
He added, electricity costs are often calculated according to floor space rather than actual demands of different departments.
He said: "If you think about it, it doesn't make sense because IT must be one of your biggest power consumers. If you do it that way then obviously the data centre manager is paying way less than he's consuming."
Of the Quocirca research - which was commissioned by software house GDCM and covered 300 businesses in Europe, the UK and the US - Szubert said: "The results that came back were really rather startling and they really paint a picture of companies struggling with complexity in the data centre."
Only 43 per cent of respondents said they have a formal carbon footprint reduction policy, while just 35 per cent of those said they pass them onto IT departments as a formal objective.
The other major barrier to data centres becoming more environmentally friendly is poor management according to Szubert.
He said: "If data centres don't manage their physical infrastructure very well then they can't do all the good things that could be done to save power."
"If you want to make changes in the data centre, you need to put in incentives. The technologies are there, the techniques are there to save power but there's not the will, there's not the incentive to do so," he concluded.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
The problem is that 'techies' are sufficiently educated to realise that all this "carbon footprint" "global warming" talk is just politicians who, having lost control of the populous via religion, have decided to start their own new religion of 'green sustainability'.
Its a good way of screwing more money out of the plebs and is so tenuous that you need faith to believe.
I'm clearly going to be excommunicated as an heretic.
2. Karen Challinor
if the climatologists are right we have about ten years before we can't breathe the air any more
and our politicians measured and considered response to this possible global extinction event was to create a market allowing people who produce lots of CO2 to offset this and "sell" some of these emissions to people who don't produce quite so much, raising lots of tax revenue in the process
a bit like the captain of a sinking ship who instead of doing something that might stop the ship sinking sets up a system whereby the people who don't have so much water in their cabins can sell the empty volume to those that do, while giving the captain a kickback on every transaction, the ship is still going to sink and everyone is still going to drown but the captain will be rich
I think if the situation were so serious that "green carrots" are actually "needed" for anyone, then even our politicians with their rather loose grip on reality, might have done something a little more productive to save the planet than introduce a carbon tax
or maybe they've collectively slipped over the edge and are determined to enact the old joke about taxing the air you breathe for one last final giggle at our expense
3. MusicFan
Karen,
It does make you ask the question "Is the ship really sinking?"
Diesel running cars can just as easily run on vegetable oil. If there was any danger of causing our own extinction im sure our sientists could make them run on water if needed along with all the factories that produce them!
Yet all the governments concentrate on is new ways to tax us on using the only fuels we are given, all in the cause of being "green". We still have to drive the same amount of miles to work each day if we pay 0.1p or £1.00 taxing us more doesnt change anything apart from the bulge in their pockets!
Whats happening with the ozone layer these days? Were we not all doomed some years back if we didnt fix that?