VMWare makes me carbon neutral - well nearly anyway…

http://www.idm.net.au/story.asp?id=8498

June 5, 2007: In line with World Environment Day, VMware has talked up their role in not only saving dollars, but also reducing the C02 emissions of IT organisations, reiterating to IDM their virtualised server consolidation rate of 12 to 1.

As pressures are mounting on CIOs and IT managers to get a hold of their escalating power bills and sprawling data centres, virtualisation technologies are providing a well-needed respite from growing budgets and public condemnation over exceeding energy usage.

Paul Harapin, managing director of VMware in Australia points out it’s virtualisation technologies providing the perfect opportunity for organisations to take hold of their growing carbon emissions, yet still maintain the power and force of their IT infrastructures.

“More CEOs are coming out and giving statements about having their organisations go ‘carbon neutral.’ It was only a couple of weeks ago that Rupert Murdoch made the commitment to achieve this by 2010,” says Harapin. “Given that it’s IT that’s driving 60 percent or more of a company’s power utilisation, where do you think they’re going to look first?”

The more VMWare highlight the benefits of their product from an environmental and energy standpoint, the more it aids the virtualization movement which has to be a good thing. Not only does reducing the size of your server estate using VMWare or the other virutalization platforms save you money through direct energy costs, you can also use it as a vehicle to reduce your annual hardware support costs, at the same time evaluate how much air conditioning you need, keeping in mind that cooling remains an expensive part of the data center operation costs. Very cool article, check it out.