IT biggest culprit for energy wastage

By Alex Kayle for HP

Johannesburg, 20 Mar 2009

Companies are increasingly looking to cut costs as the economic recession bites deeper into their pockets. This is according to Ian Brooks, UK Head of Innovation and Sustainable Computing for Hewlett Packard.

Brooks notes that European governments are driving legislation targeted at cutting greenhouse gases by one-fifth by 2020. He says that IT equipment is responsible for a sizable percentage of a country's energy bill (up to 10% in some markets).

Aaccording to a recent survey by HP,only 10% of companies have a fully implemented policy for green technology and one-quarter have no plans to implement such a strategy at all.

“But being green and cutting cost should not be seen as mutually exclusive,” says Brooks, “Having working policies in place around green technology creates businesses that are more efficient, more productive and control costs more effectively.

“It is the CIO who should take the reins and with that focus on cutting the energy bills of their IT infrastructure. Any organisation looking to become more energy efficient and make a significant reduction in its costs and carbon footprint should first look at ways to improve data centre efficiency as an initial step in a green technology strategy.”

According to Brooks, soaring demand for IT, increasingly powerful microprocessors, and the growing popularity of compact blade servers means that data centres are more densely packed than ever.

According to HP research, up to 63% of data centre energy consumption is used for cooling. It will soon cost more to power and cool a server over its lifetime than it does to buy the server itself. Brooks believes that server consolidation is a good way of reducing greenhouse gas emission, and at the same time reducing materials use, cost, and energy consumption.

He says: “Figures from HP's own data centre transformation process showed that, in one application alone, virtualisation and consolidation reduced server power consumption from 5 million kWh to 1.8 million kWh. Optimising the efficiency with which the available space is utilised in storage area networks through thin provisioning or adopting intelligent cooling systems within the data centre allows companies to slash their energy bills and cut their overheads.“