World’s Top Companies Struggling to Make Data Centres Green
World’s Top Companies Struggling to Make Data Centres Green
November 21, 2007: While its hip to be green these days, according to Symantec claims that the top 2000 companies around the globe are struggling to make the switch to greener datacentre pastures.
In its worldwide Green Data Centre report, Symantec says that almost three quarters of the global 2000 says they are interested in adopting a strategic green data centre, however, only one in seven have actually successfully made the switch.
Symantec defines a green data centre as having increased efficiencies in energy usage, power consumption, space utilisation and reduced use of polluting energy sources.
To this end, Symantec found that while energy efficiency is a priority, it does not trump business needs and has added yet another layer of complexity when it comes to managing data centres.
One way of attacking the issue is software, and this is one area where Symantec found increasing amounts of data centre professionals focussing on, particularly when it comes to managing server consolidation and virtualised environments.
The firm found that 51 and 47 percent of those surveyed indicated plans to consolidate and virtualise their servers respectively, with 68 percent of respondents claiming that reduced energy requirements played a part in their decision to implement virtualisation and server consolidation.
In addition to software solutions, energy efficient CPUs were cited as the second most popular technology for power savings, with 28 percent of respondents naming CPUs as one of the two technologies they think will reduce power consumption.
Beyond this, 44 percent claimed the replacing of old equipment with more energy-efficient equipment was a way they were being green, 39 percent nominated the recycling of obsolete hardware components and 37 percent cited reducing the space used by servers.
As for geography, more than a third of companies based in the United States said they have corporate green policies, while almost 60 percent of companies from Asia-Pacific and Japan and 55 percent of European companies have them.
Furthermore, the research found that companies from Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico and South Korea are more likely to have green data centre policies than not.
“Data centre managers are running out of space and energy costs are skyrocketing, so they are motivated to ‘green’ the data centre for cost reduction and efficiency purposes,” says Mark Bregman, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Symantec. “The report findings indicate that cost savings and constant business pressure to maintain performance and meet increasingly aggressive service level agreements are the main reasons for implementing many green strategies.
“For them it is beyond environmental concerns – it is about meeting business goals and reducing costs,” says Bregman.
The report is a spin off of the firms State of the Data Centre report conducted in September 2007 by Ziff Davis Enterprise, and is comprised of an online survey fielded in 14 countries, in-person focus groups in Hong Kong, London, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo, one-on-one telephone interviews in Mumbai and Singapore, and a teleconference focus group in Canada. A total of 77 data centre managers participated in focus groups and telephone interviews, while 800 data centre managers completed the online survey.
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