We've heard so much about green IT initiatives recently you'd be forgiven for thinking that everybody had this under control. You might be surprised to learn that storage vendor ONStor found that 58% of the companies they surveyed were either still talking about what they were going to do, or have no plans as yet to do anything.

Green IT hasn't had the headline profiles of recycling plastic bottles or driving a hybrid car, but the fact is that IT is a major contributor to CO₂ emissions. The UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) estimated last October that the UK's PCs and servers were already consuming 14% more power than the entire power consumption of Luxembourg, and of course the figure is still rising. All this power is also costing businesses dearly. IDC's John Humphreys estimates that power, cooling and other operational costs account for 70% of a server's lifetime cost. Yet all too frequently this was not taken into account when servers were bought.

That was then. A Sun Microsystems study found that since the first quarter of 2006 more than 75% of executives involved in buying decisions for data center equipment prioritized energy efficiency -- although 63% admitted they didn't know what their energy costs or carbon emission rates were. For its part, Sun announced in August that it had just completed a consolidation of one of its data centers that resulted in 5,000 old servers, network switches and storage devices being switched off.

One key component to green IT is server consolidation, and here enterprises are making some progress. According to ONStor's statistics, 55% of respondents stated that storage consolidation would be a central element of their green policy. While an even more upbeat Gartner survey found that 92% of respondents had a data center consolidation planned for, underway, or completed.

Along with server consolidation, another essential way to reduce energy consumption is to streamline applications and data. Duplicated data and applications is a major problem in many organizations and causes a range of operational inefficiencies, including demand for more storage space. Most companies know that at the data and applications levels they are far from efficient, but the risk, cost and time to consolidate applications has put them off. Celona recently conducted a survey of telecoms executives and 59% said they'd been so discouraged by an application migration that they decided not to go ahead with it. The new generation of migration technology overcomes these problems, making the long-awaited benefits of application consolidation a reality.

The "end user community is some way behind," when it comes to reducing energy consumption says ONStor's Bob Miller. What will it take to get end users to change their ways? Well, according to ONStor's survey, 48% of organizations felt that a drying up of energy supply would drive a reduction in power consumption at their data centers, while higher power bills were driving business decisions in 66% of companies. "Ultimately, if energy costs continue to rise, more businesses will be forced to look at this by their shareholders. Longer term we can also expect regulators and governments to use big sticks to drive better efficiency in the name of environmental protection," notes Simon Sherrington, founder of Innovation Observatory, a company that specializes in tracking opportunities in green technology markets.

"Environmental sentiment is all well and good, and it helps that environmental issues currently enjoy a high media profile, but few companies have the financial freedom to go green overnight" says Simon Sherrington. "They simply can't justify decommissioning equipment unless there is a clear cost benefit in terms of saved opex, or unless the kit is becoming obsolete anyway. That is why companies with comparatively high energy costs, and companies in markets with high rates of technology obsolescence, have been swifter out of the blocks than peers in other industry sectors."

BT is just such a company, being a major energy consumer and operating in a highly competitive market. It has already cut its carbon emissions by 60% since 1996, saving more than one million tons of CO₂ annually. This drive extends from data centers to applications-level consolidation. BT's One IT consolidation project, and similar projects in other large operators, is all about delivering business benefits. There are huge opportunities within large Telco's to consolidate IT infrastructure and thereby enhance efficiency, which should deliver the ability to bring new services to market more quickly, but also savings in terms of both cash and carbon.

This point is underlined by BT's Steve O'Donnell who comments that to date One IT has enabled BT to decommission and consolidate over 1000 racks of servers, resulting in a net saving of 22GW hours per year. "We calculate this translates to a cost saving of just under £1.8 million per annum or around 3,110 metric tonnes of carbon per year," says O'Donnell.

BT is using its supply chain to drive change by incorporating environmental and efficiency goals into its procurement process. It expects suppliers to work to reduce the energy consumption and impact of each new generation of products or services, and this will become a mandatory criterion in all tender adjudication. Donna Young, BT's head of Climate Change, notes that the extended supply chain is a powerful force for positive change. "About three years ago our large business customers started coming to us and asking about our carbon status. They understand the need to drive efficiency down their own supply chains. The power of the supply chain, and of competition, to drive this sort of change should not be underestimated."

Notes:

* Celona's survey was conducted in May 2007 amongst 212 telecoms IT professionals (see www.celona.com).

* ONStor's survey was conducted across 440 companies between July and August 2007 (see www.onstor.com).