I received a call from a colleague today who manages a large data center in North Carolina. About a year ago we toured this facility and while impressive and modern it was far from what someone would call "GREEN". Over the past year they have undergone a major change in thinking and have undertaken a program to make all of their IT operations and functions GREEN aware. From easy items like solar panels to more difficult items like monitoring cooling and air flow the change has been palpable, not just in technology approach but also the the bottom line.
Of course there is the savings against utilities and general facilities costs but there is also government subsidies that can make the whole pill a little easier to swallow. In most states their are programs that can help take advantage of tax breaks or incentives for for embarking on a GREEN effort. In this case the correlation from the incentives to the return was immediate and for most enterprise data centers this has to be at least a fundamental consideration at this point even with energy costs leveling off.
Whilst this was a great example of industry (and government) making a change for the good, advising clients to GREEN outside the data center space is often a more challenging situation. Government subsidies are targeted at energy and not hardware per-say. Client based GREEN efforts have come of age, and they've done so without similar government subsidies. As most know client computing has been dramatically effected by the move to the Virtualization and Mobile platforms. While clients often see an immediate impact on budgets by a reduced cost for hardware the GREEN impact of not having to run additional hardware is often lost in the fray. Making hardware refresh decisions today often is an opportunity to explore the impact of GREEN on IT as well as the efficiencies of new technology.
No matter what size organization, there are options to let GREEN find it's way into your organizational thinking for IT. Virtualization, Alternative Energy, Mobilization, and even Cooperative Cloud Computing are just a few examples and efficiencies in this space are growing every day.
Robert Zullo
Vice President, Technology Consulting
ZuCom
www.zucom.com
rzullo@zucom.com
518-496-2592
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