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How will green IT and virtualization change the landscape?
In many of my recent conversations with CIOs and IT infrastructure and ops professionals, I’m noticing an increasing interest in understanding how green IT will evolve.
Why do IT leaders want this vision? In the short-term, IT leaders want to ensure they’re not missing out any easy opportunities for savings they haven’t thought of yet. And over the long-term, IT leaders developing their green IT strategies want to strive for a broad scope of projects that reduce the environmental impacts — and of course costs — within and outside of IT.
I wonder how it will evolve in terms of cross charging, of IT in the enterprise, and crucially who is responsible when it comes to the ever important part, that of carbon footprint. Is the carbon footprint of the data center an IT cost or a facilities cost? What will this mean to the value of an application or service? From an operating cost am I prepared to pay £1 million a year for email in internal support costs, and absorb the associated carbon footprint and energy costs? Does the customer or the service provider declare the carbon footprint of the data center?
How do we manage the need to be green, with the need to balance the return on investment, it’s one thing to say virtualize the desktop, but when you’ve got a working strategy, a working contract, fixed cost per employee, moving to a more fluid type business model and cross charge model, can it seem that step too far? Do I want my desktop hosted in a data center on a server, or on a low power pc, which is in all intensive purposes a fixed disposable asset running on renewable energy supplied and supported by a service provider?
Do we start pricing an application based on revenue and cost? That olden days application used by one business line that is only validated on VAX equipment, is that suddenly not only an IT risk but a business one too?
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2 Comments
While many of us constantly strive to be as green as possible, as business managers we have a responsibility to our businesses to maximize the profitability of our organizations. These may appear to be in conflict, but there are reasonable and appropriate improvements we can implement today. From choosing servers with high efficiency power supplies to retiring hardware in favor of utilizing virtual servers, we can satisfy both goals. For example, simply improving PUE may not result in the best overall efficiency (which is maximum output for a given input), but the previous suggestions do. Many of these decisions simultaneously provide an ROI and support green initiatives. Just as consumers have demanded greener, more efficient vehicles and the industry has begun to respond, so it has begun with data centers.
From the conversations we have been having, it’s evident that chief information officers are definitely looking to make sure they're not missing out any easy opportunities for savings they haven't thought of yet.
Cutting energy waste, reducing carbon emissions and improving resource efficiency is firmly on the CIO agenda and the returns are persuasive. In today’s economy, it is the role of the CIO to integrate and rationalize business information to facilitate sound business decisions and create and deploy an agile enterprise information infrastructure that supports business strategy and leverages existing assets. Cross charging can be seen as a viable consideration as the IT department and business leaders take on more of an appreciation of the synergies between each other’s roles.
So to answer your question ‘how will Green IT and virtualisation change the landscape? The answer is simple. Green IT and virtualisation are natural evolutions. Perhaps it’s more a case of ‘enhance’ rather than ‘change’; either way, it’s an evolution that must be taken charge of and cannot be ignored.