High tariffs fuel smarter thinking

Eskom's 35% tariff increase will force companies to rethink how they utilise their infrastructure to do more with less.

“The decision an IT department makes now will lock in the organisation in the amount of power it will use for the next five years. Making the most efficient decision now, is saving the business money for the future.”

This is the view of Rory Green, business unit manager of industry standard servers at HP Technology Solutions group. Green says IT's method of managing infrastructure needs to change.

“The whole industry has realised that, in the past, technology vendors were trying to make bigger, better and faster servers, and this wasn't sustainable. The amount of electricity costs being generated from one generation of servers to the next was going up.”

Green adds that when an organisation runs out of power capacity in its data centre, it would traditionally resort to ploughing additional capital to build another one. He points to the “do more with less” analogy, adding that organisations should rather opt to use their technology more efficiently within their existing infrastructure.

Currently, there are no South African laws which deal specifically with energy efficiency, however, Green points out that it will become too expensive for companies to continue neglecting power consumption.

“At the moment, the regulation we've been seeing is more around the reduction of hazardous substances in computer parts,” says Green. “Legislation aiming to drill down to the IT department, or certain aspects within a company, will be difficult to measure and enforce. This is because it's difficult from a legislative perspective to penalise companies on how much energy they consume.”

However, Green notes there are standards such as Energy Star which provide incentives for vendors that create energy-efficient systems. In countries such as the US and UK, there are carbon credit and carbon tax incentives, which in turn motivate organisations to become energy-conscious in the way they build their IT infrastructure.

According to Green, companies cannot continue working as they did in the past few years; they need to change. He says green IT will carry the weight of where a company's image as not being responsible will have an impact on its sales revenue.

“We are long way off before we have a government-enforced standard around green certification that they have to comply with; just because of the complexity involved in the process,” he notes.

“When you look at more mature markets such as the UK, we are not quite there yet, but we are getting there.”