Cliff Saran’s FUD blog

Last year I met with Charles Phillips, president of Oracle and asked him about whether the company's flagship database was green. As I recall, his response was that green IT was something the hardware guys had to deal with.

This was not the answer I expected since efficient software design goes hand in hand with green hardware. A few days ago attended a meeting where investment bank Lehman Brothers described its approach to sustainability.

Rather than charge business departments for data centre resources based on rack space, Lehman Brothers has a charge-back model for IT services based on the power consumed by data centre applications used by business departments.

Assuming users do not incur a surcharge on legacy applications and Lehman Brothers has a fair and balanced approach to measuring net power consumption of applications, then, this model, I think this is a very clever appraoch as it encourages businesses to find more efficient ways to run applications, faster and tighter code.

Well I'm meeting Phillips again next week. I wonder if he has changed his approach to green software?