IT Executives See Greening of Data Center as Mission-Critical, But Lack "Green" To Go Green

A recent survey by Voltaire Ltd. found that, although CIOs and senior IT executives overwhelmingly believe that a green data center will become mission-critical, many lack the necessary funds needed to have their data centers go green. Nearly 90 percent of executives surveyed said they believe that greening their data centers will be crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009, and 57 percent said they believe going green gives them a competitive advantage. Yet, 76 percent do not have a committed budget for a greening policy.

In response to these findings, Voltaire developed a "50-50-300 Pledge," which states that IT executives, working with the company to deploy a Voltaire unified fabric, can save 50 percent on power/cooling related to server interconnections and 50 percent on hardware allocation/usage, while delivering up to a 300 percent increase in application performance. Voltaire has also developed an Efficiency Calculator to help IT executives estimate their network energy and cost savings and justify the investment.

"It appears from these findings that senior IT management is still in the planning phases, and they will need to prioritize funding for these important greening initiatives," said Patrick Guay, executive vice president global sales and general manager of Voltaire, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Voltaire Ltd. "We help them with the analysis and data collection in order to validate the savings they will achieve. Our numbers show that for enterprises, the return on a green data center fabric infrastructure using currently available technology is in the millions of dollars. For example, a Fortune 500 company with five data centers worldwide, and 3,000 servers per data center, can save approximately $7,400,000 per year," he added.