Company chief executives and chief information officers are at the forefront of the drive to green' the data center, according to new research from ONStor Inc., the leading provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise.
According to the survey conducted by ONStor, it is the CEO and the CIO who are driving the trend toward green computing, championed by 48% of the sample. However, the message would appear to be slow in being implemented with only 36% of organisations citing that they have a green initiative in place for the data center, with over 58% with either no plans at all or not even being discussed.
The key findings of the ONStor research indicated that:
48% of European companies are predicting that they will outgrow their existing data center.
58% stated that they had already run out of space, power and cooling capacity in the last few months with little of no warning.
Only 36% of organisations questioned had a green initiative in place right now despite the current trends and concerns debated in the market, while 29% said they were talking about it and a further 29% cited that there had been no discussions to date.
Bob Miller, CEO, ONStor, stated: "Green initiatives are sweeping the IT industry with pressure groups such as the Green Grid now taking center stage in an industry renown for its power consumption. Whilst the vendors appear to be taking this issue seriously the overall end user community is some way behind.
"We have already announced our Go Green initiative to drastically reduce power consumption in the IT environment by deploying ONStor storage solutions, which have built-in advanced power management and file server consolidation technology. We have responded to the recent Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which calls for computer makers and their customers to adopt technologies that significantly reduce energy consumption. But it would appear from these findings that it will be market and technology drivers that affect change, he added.
One of the key facts that came out of the research was that higher energy and cooling costs would affect change. Higher power bills would encourage over 66% of respondents to deal with reducing data infrastructure power consumption. In addition 76% of those surveyed felt that higher cooling costs would also be a serious issue that needed to be addressed.
Other key findings included:
48% of organisations questioned felt that a drying up of energy supply would drive a reduction in power consumption at their data centers.
84% saw corporate responsibility mandates as the key business driver for reducing overall power consumption.
High power bills are also driving business decisions in 66% of companies.
When asked what percentage of cost savings would be enough of an incentive to go green 12% cited less than 5%, 24% stated between 5-10% and 33% stated between 10-20%.
73% of the sample stated that buying more efficient hardware and software would be integral to any corporate green data center policy.
A further 55% stated that storage consolidation would be a central element of their green policy and 70% stated virtualisation technology
By 2010, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative seeks to reduce global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year, equivalent to the annual output of 11 million cars or 10-20 coal-fired power plants. The initiative's projected result is a 50% reduction in power consumption by computers by 2010; committed participants could collectively save $5.5 billion in energy costs.
The survey was conducted across 440 companies between July and August 2007.