IT puts service before green savings

Maintaining good levels of datacentre availability is more important than saving energy through efficiency drives, said IT managers at last week's Data Centre Dynamics conference.

A survey of 244 IT managers found that although 44.8% said reducing power consumption was a growing concern for senior management, keeping datacentres secure and running costs low were higher priorities.

For most IT managers, promoting the savings that could be made by reducing power costs was a more powerful force for driving datacentre efficiency than concerns over environmental issues.

Despite 82.4% ranking their datacentres as either "fair" or "poor" when it came to energy efficiency, almost 50% said they did not have the tools to collect information about how energy efficient they were.

Neil Rasmussen, CTO at power and cooling supplier APC-MGE, said the pressures of rising costs and legislation had changed user reactions to talk of becoming more energy efficient, but measuring efficiency remained a problem.

"You cannot control what you cannot measure," he said in a presentation. "Users do not have efficiency data, and even if they did, they would not know hot to act on it. Solving these problems requires a standard language for describing and measuring datacentre efficiency."

A separate study of 40 UK datacentre managers by Aperture Technologies, which provides software to monitor datacentres, found that 40% do not have a green IT policy.