Green IT Must Look Beyond Cost Cutting

“Something like only 17 per cent of UK organisations are planning on implementing carbon management programmes in the next 18 months. Now, why is that? There is a clear need for them to do it; there’s a legal obligation for them to do it under the UK government’s carbon reduction commitment and yet they are leaving it to the last minute to do it, which is going to cost them money.”

But does that necessarily mean that green projects will be put on hold? Mingay replied: “Where there are programmes and initiatives that don’t have that short-term ROI [return on investment] – those will be the projects which are basically being put on what I described as a ‘gap year’. Virtualisation, consolidating servers and storage, improving cooling, switching off PCs at night, and so on, is all very good. But in reality the real decision behind those efforts is not carbon reduction, but reducing the electricity bill and extending the life of the data centre. A lot of data centres have power capacity issues and so, driving efficiencies in the data centre allows you to squeeze more kit in there

IT power reduction does not go far enough

“But doing all of this stuff isn’t going to be enough,” stressed Mingay. “[Organisations] absolutely need to be able to demonstrate that the energy consumption has reduced potentially. And they need to prove that and show it. Now, that’s messy and difficult. And it’s much easier to get on and do some of these things without actually measuring if they are having an effect, so they can also demonstrate to the wider organisation as whole that IT is making some kind of contribution to sustainability strategies.”

Given the progress made in areas like the data centre, he advised IT professionals to take the lead on wider sustainability programmes. “Gathering the data isn’t rocket science, but it’s also by no means a trivial task. It will take a fair bit of time to implement, where information systems will have a key role to play. But organisations are going to be compelled to this next year anyway, where leaving it to the last minute is probably the most costly thing to do,” he said.

“So it’s our view that IT organisations should be looking to demonstrate they can make 20 to 30 percent improvements in their energy consumption. But in the long term, IT is going to consume more power, not less. So it should also position itself to become an enabler of sustainable business operations and change,” concluded Mingay.