Efforts to introduce
energy efficient policies in datacentres could fail because
they are at odds with the
key performance indicators traditionally used to measure IT
efficiency, according to Forrester Research.
The analyst firm said that in many companies the
IT department neither sees nor pays the electric bill, and
therefore lacks the incentive to save energy.
Christopher Mines, senior vice-president at Forrester Research,
said, "An IT organisation's goals, which are related to uptime,
throughput and reliability of technology-enabled business
processes, might be at odds with, or at least threatened by, goals
related to being energy-efficient."
He said companies might be hesitant to pursue a
green IT policy due to concerns over return on investment on
energy-efficient equipment.
Forrester found that users were concerned that the payback on
investments in
greener IT involving changes to datacentre infrastructure and
client devices was unclear.
To implement green IT successfully, businesses need to change
the way they work and have return on investment methods to measure
energy benefits, said Mines.
"For example, IT could put in conferencing capabilities to cut
down on employee travel and enable home working, or it could put in
monitoring devices and networks to track corporate energy use. The
metric here would be something like an improvement in the corporate
CO2 output/revenues ratio," he said.
Rising power needs and a shortage of expansion space for
datacentres mean that lifetime energy costs could exceed the
acquisition cost of datacentre equipment, said Mines. Under these
conditions, Forrester predicted that electricity prices would rise,
so IT departments should recognise the importance of going
green.
"IT buyers were simply unaware of the problems. Twenty nine per
cent of respondents to our survey identified datacentre power
issues as important, but 71% did not," Mines said.
Forrester's research found that green responsibilities, if they
were identified within a company, were typically spread around an
organisation in marketing, procurement, facilities, human resources
and management.
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