Green carrots needed for IT chiefs

There needs to be greater incentives for tech departments to become greener by reducing their overall energy consumption and carbon footprint.

That's according to Dennis Szubert, principle analyst at Quocirca, who feels data centre managers would take more responsibility if they were given more information about what their hardware consumes.

Green IT from A to Z

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A is for Abroad
B is for Blades
C is for Carbon footprint
D is for Data centres
E is for Energy sources
F is for Freecycle
G is for Government
H is for Homeworking
I is for Ice caps
J is for Jobs (Steve)
K is for Kilowatts
L is for Landfill
M is for Mercury
N is for Nanogeneration
O is for Offsetting
P is for Paperless office
Q is for Queen
R is for Recycling
S is for SmartPlanet.com
T is for Travel
U is for Upgrade
V is for Virtualisation
W is for WEEE
X is for Xmas
Y is for You
Z is for Zero emissions

Speaking to silicon.com, Szubert said: "There's a lack of information, [IT managers] don't know how much power they're using and there's a lack of incentive for them to save power."

He added: "The carbon footprint of IT is the same as the airline industry. And yet the way IT is managed doesn't really help in cutting the power consumption."

Szubert argued data centre managers would be more inclined to improve efficiency if they are the ones who have to pay the bills.

But Quocirca research found less than one in five IT decision makers have responsibility for the electricity bill, with 54 per cent never made aware of it.

Szubert said: "If they had responsibility for the power bill then they would recoup that through chargeback to the business."

He added, electricity costs are often calculated according to floor space rather than actual demands of different departments.

He said: "If you think about it, it doesn't make sense because IT must be one of your biggest power consumers. If you do it that way then obviously the data centre manager is paying way less than he's consuming."

Of the Quocirca research - which was commissioned by software house GDCM and covered 300 businesses in Europe, the UK and the US - Szubert said: "The results that came back were really rather startling and they really paint a picture of companies struggling with complexity in the data centre."

Only 43 per cent of respondents said they have a formal carbon footprint reduction policy, while just 35 per cent of those said they pass them onto IT departments as a formal objective.

The other major barrier to data centres becoming more environmentally friendly is poor management according to Szubert.

He said: "If data centres don't manage their physical infrastructure very well then they can't do all the good things that could be done to save power."

"If you want to make changes in the data centre, you need to put in incentives. The technologies are there, the techniques are there to save power but there's not the will, there's not the incentive to do so," he concluded.