John MacDonald
Enterprise Customers Want A Green Approach And Vendors Are Listening
According to a report published by the US Environmental Protection Agency, data centers alone consumed about 1.5% of the total energy consumption in the United States in 2006. That’s double what it was in 2001 and it’s expected to double again by 2011 costing about $7.4 billion annually.
Realizing that efficiency and sustainability yield profitability, IBM, which has recently been named the #1 green IT vendor by Computerworld, has launched several green initiatives. A year ago IBM announced Project Big Green committing $1 billion per year to develop products and services for IBM and clients to reduce data center energy consumption – to create the “green data center.” In April 2008, IBM announced a new brand of server for cloud computing called the iDataPlex that not only uses 40% less power than a traditional server, but also uses water-cooling technology reducing the need for air conditioning.
Named by Fortune as one of the 10 green giants, HP is another IT powerhouse making significant inroads toward the greening of IT. HP’s Dynamic Smart Cooling technology claims that enterprises can reduce their cooling costs in the data center by 25-40%. And last November, HP acquired EYP, a consultancy with expertise in energy-efficient data center operations, bolstering HP’s ability to deliver data center services to the enterprise with efficiency in mind. HP has also recently announced research initiatives for HP Labs that will focus exclusively on sustainability.
Sun Microsystems is another major infrastructure IT player taking initiative to offer green products and services. Sun invests about $2 billion a year in research and development toward eco-friendly solutions. Sun boasts that the latest in its line of energy-efficient, CoolThreads blade servers outperforms those of its competitors in both memory and I/O capacity. In addition to green products, Sun offers a range of data center consulting services to assess enterprise data center conditions and to outline a plan to optimize energy usage and cooling.
Green concerns are increasingly more important to enterprise customers. According to data from Forrester Research, 50% of users surveyed said that their company takes environmental criteria into consideration during their IT procurement process. This percentage will only grow as energy prices continue to climb, the federal government enacts more stringent federal regulations, and environmental consciousness becomes more mainstream.
