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With IT responsible for as much carbon emissions as the aviation industry, according to Gartner, more energy efficient or ‘green’ IT has risen up the corporate agenda.

In a survey conducted in September of last year, 72 per cent of IT managers said they had plans to implement green technology initiatives to reduce carbon emissions over the next few years.

And, of the 100 UK IT managers polled, the majority said they were planning hardware-based projects in the near future that focused on virtualisation to consolidate servers and so, save energy in data centres.

Too narrow a green focus?

But Tom Weston, executive chairman at Sunrise Software, the IT service management vendor that carried out the survey, said IT organisations were missing a trick.

“It seems strong messages about green strategies are not getting through, at least with regards to the office environment,” he said.

The research found that, of those firms that had already implemented green initiatives, 83 per cent recycled IT equipment and 69 per cent turned off printers and computers at night, while 36 per cent also used virtualisation in the office.

An interesting article, and with ever increasing requirements to declare your corporate carbon footprint, and on operating costs or competitiveness, realizing the potential of your IT, and providing it in an energy efficient way becomes not only something for the corporate social responsibility teams, but a real concern of the board. We’re increasingly reading about and talking to those organizations who’ve had to acquire another data center for that project, that application, and at the same time, seen as a result of the activities in the financial sectors seen idle data centers up for ’sale’, how you provision and manage your IT becomes an operational and financial priority.

Switching to a green IT infrastructure might simply mean consolidating and refreshing the hardware, utilizing newer energy efficient power supplies, the lower voltage processors and technologies like virtualization.

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