Companies who are failing to improve resource management and process efficiency are causing a drag on their green data center initiatives.

So says a report released at DatacenterDynamics London conference from the Aperture Research Institute.

The report entitled: "Organizations Overlooking Significant Opportunities to Improve Efficiency and Reduce Expenses, Despite Adoption of Green Initiatives," concludes that most organizations are missing opportunities to optimize data center performance by neglecting to manage people and resources as part of their initiatives.

Steve Yellen, principal of the Aperture Research Institute:. "Nearly all of the respondents in the survey - 96 percent - believe they could better manage their resources to extract additional capacity, some by 30 percent or more. Opportunities to better manage resource utilization are not only plentiful, but financially beneficial, since they can delay capital investments by improving utilization and extending the life of available resources."

The report also identified opportunities to better manage resources at the data center IT infrastructure layer through the reduction of unproductive, or "ghost" servers. Ninety percent of respondents reported the presence of at least some ghost servers in their facilities, with 18 percent indicating that 11 percent or more of their servers are ghosts.

"The practice of data center performance optimization maintains that an optimized data center actually achieves not just energy efficiency, but resource and process efficiency as well," Yellen said. "By focusing largely on energy efficiency, many organizations are not only missing opportunities to reduce costs, but preventing the initiatives they do have in place from achieving their full potential."

The survey found that 87 percent of participants have energy efficiency initiatives in place, up from 35 percent last year. Thirty-two percent of respondents intend to focus on fully utilizing existing capacities to cope with reduced or stagnant budgets, and 19 percent plan to cut back on capital investments.
Aperture questioned more than 100 data center professionals.

The report was unveiled at Datacenterdynamics London conference where Chief Technology Officer of Kn