We asked government IT folks at this year’s FOSE show how important Green IT was to their agencies. The results:
- 73% said Green IT was important
- 16% said it wasn’t
- 9% admitted they didn’t know what the agency’s policy was
The follow up question (and the responses) was the kicker though:
- Only 13% had tools/solutions for Green IT in place
- An additional 13% had plans this year to implement
- 55% didn’t know or had no plans to implement
Call me a skeptic, but the environment, and what people do to “save it”, must be pretty high on the list of things people pay lip service to. 3 out of 4 people said Green IT is important – but most people seemed to be responding from a personal perspective. I mean, who’s gonna come out and say “I don’t care about the environment”? In our conversations at the show, there was a lot of talk about energy-saving solutions that people personally used, but very few institutional examples.
Not to say that companies aren’t doing it. I was just talking to a Gartner analyst who had a customer with 2500 servers and ended up virtualizing them 6:1 with a resulting annual power savings of $1.1 million. Very cool. And of course, Opus Interactive, whose data center is 100% wind-powered. But so far, these guys are the exception and not the rule.
I was reading recently about IBM’s Big Green initiative, launched last year. There are many different components to this plan, but their recent announcement on new power/energy monitoring capabilities was pretty interesting. IBM partnered with companies like APC, Eaton, Matrikon, OSIsoft and VMware, to come up with a way for Tivoli customers to collect data from partner products in the power and cooling space.
So what’s going to drive adoption of Green IT? The cost savings – especially as energy costs rise? A more institutional approach to doing what’s right for the environment? Will it be a side benefit of the push to virtualize? Another article on how “hot” Green IT is? More vendors baking energy/power management features into their products? (Which I think is a great thing, BTW)
What do you think?
