Software Pivotal in the Greening of Datacentres

By Greg McNevin

December 17, 2008: With one recent report finding that businesses are still focussed on sustainability despite the economic downturn, IDC has followed up with another study of the ‘greening’ of data centres, and has found that power management, automation and virtualisation software are all playing critical roles in improving efficiency.

The firm says that its latest research, "Green IT Software – Nutritious Supplements for Your Datacenter", shows that software can enable significant economical benefits as well as environmental sustainability by promoting efficient management of existing hardware or services within datacenters.

The research firm says that with rising energy costs concerning IT managers across Asia/Pacific, applications that can help to better manage power and cooling and improve management, automation, load and capacity administration of these servers, will be in demand.

“As businesses in APEJ continue to grow, power consumption in energy hungry datacentres also increases. Green IT technologies has become even more appealing as businesses look towards energy efficient solutions to reduce power consumption and to alleviate the costs,” says Adren Lim, Market Analyst of IDC’s Asia/Pacific Software Research.

IDC’s Asia/Pacific Green Poll has found green IT technology gaining strong momentum and mindshare across the region, driven largely by benefits from cost savings, followed by corporate social responsibility (CSR) and compliance.

IDC says that 75 percent of those surveyed agreed that cost savings were the main reason for them to invest in green IT technology, and that while mainstream green IT in the datacentre is largely a combined effort of more energy-efficient hardware, best practices, and consultation services, software is playing an increasingly important role in facilitating the whole "green engine" to achieve business and environmental sustainability.

The research firm adds that green IT software helps in virtualising, monitoring, measuring, and automating tasks, etc., that would otherwise require manual involvement and incur higher costs.

“A large portion of Green IT practices and supporting software revolve around virtualisation products, but equally important, is the management of these consolidated virtual and physical assets that will bring value through lower power, hardware, and manpower costs,” says Adren.

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