Desire, But No Budget To Go Green

By Greg McNevin

September 5, 2008: Green data centres may be a must for responsible enterprises, however, a new survey from Voltaire shows that while IT execs see them becoming mission-critical, many lack the budget to go green.

The survey, which canvassed CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, found that almost 90 percent believe that greening their data centres will be crucial to meeting their companies’ business objectives in 2009, and 57 percent said they believe going green gives them a competitive advantage.

That said, 76 percent do not have a committed budget for a greening policy.

“It appears from these findings that senior IT management is still in the planning phases, and they will need to prioritise funding for these important greening initiatives,” says Patrick Guay, Executive Vice President Global Sales and General Manager of Voltaire, Inc.

Voltaire claims that IT executives that deploy a Voltaire unified fabric, can save 50 percent on power/cooling related to server interconnections and 50 percent on hardware allocation/usage, and do it while delivering up to a 300 percent increase in application performance.

“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 centre fabric infrastructure using currently available technology is in the millions of dollars,” says Guay. “For example, a Fortune 500 company with five data centres worldwide, and 3,000 servers per data centre, can save approximately US$7.4 (AU$8.44) million per year.”

Voltaire has developed an Efficiency Calculator to help IT executives estimate their network energy and cost savings.

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