Cisco Is Losing Business Through UCS, Says Blade CEO
UCS was supposed to launch Cisco into the server market, but instead it has undermined the company's data centre…
3
Green IT Spending Bucks the Downturn
- June 22, 2009
Spending on environmental projects is holding up, despite the most savage cuts to IT budgets since the end of the dot-com boom, says HP's Ian Brooks
Initiatives to “green” the data centre are going ahead, despite the pressures on companies’ IT budget cuts, driven by legislation, better technologies and a desire to “do the right thing,” argues Ian Brooks, head of sustainable computing and innovation, for Hewlett-Packard EMEA.
CIOs across Europe are ring fencing funds to improve energy and reduce IT’s carbon footprint, according to Ian Brooks, head of sustainability in EMEA for HP.
In an interview with eWeek UK, Brooks said that emerging legislation, as well as high energy costs, have caused companies to maintain their funding for green initiatives. Businesses are also keen to be seen to be “doing the right thing”, despite pressures to cut costs elsewhere.
For larger enterprises, spending on sustainable IT has been bolstered by the need to comply with impending legislation, suggests Brooks. In the UK, for example, carbon reduction targets that come into force in April 2010 will compel the 10,000 companies with the largest energy use to start to manage their carbon footprints “and to submit a plan to reduce [them]”, he said.
Other measures, such as the European data centre code of practice, have also given companies some practical guidance that has helped them to focus their investments in greener IT. And persistently high energy costs, Brooks said, provide a direct financial incentive to look again at IT power consumption, especially in the data centre.
“Energy costs remain a huge factor in corporations’ bills,” said Brooks. “So there will be a focus on anything that helps to improve energy efficiency.” He added that oil prices might be some way off their recent peaks, but lower oil prices have not led to equivalent price falls for the electricity bought to power data centres. “CIOs are still being hit by high power costs, and it is likely that the oil price will track back up,” he said.
Taking steps to improve the data centre
Cutting power consumption -- and also reducing the heat put out by IT systems, which in turn demands expensive and power-hungry cooling – can bring an immediate improvement to a company’s IT costs. But CIOs have to set this against the need to fund new systems that can meet the lower power requirements. With capital scarce in many companies, this might be a challenge even when the medium-term benefits are clearly calculable.
Brooks, though, maintains that it is wrong to assume all green IT projects need significant capital investment, or indeed the wholescale replacement of servers and other IT hardware.
