Experts: Don't Believe Green IT Hype

ORLANDO, Fla. -- IT managers need to claw through the hype surrounding Green IT if they want to get their power costs under control, according to users here today.

Talking green is easy, but being green is difficult,” warned Dave Vellante, senior storage analyst at the Wikibon research and user group, during a presentation this morning. “Smart companies can cut through the hype.”

Even technologies such as de-dupe, thin provisioning, and virtual storage, which are increasingly touted as a way to slash power and storage space costs, are no silver bullet, according to Vellante. “They are all tactics to improve utilization, but they do not solve the underlying problem. I would say that about 3 percent of the people that we speak to have visibility into what energy costs are in their data centers. Until that changes, it will be difficult to change the problem.”

A slew of vendors, including IBM, Xyratex, and 3PAR, are pushing technologies that aim to reduce data center power consumption, but Vellante urged users to get back to data center basics.

The analyst belives that users shouldn’t get lulled into a false sense of Green success with technologies like de-dupe, thin provisioning, and virtualization. These are ‘band-aids’ that will buy you some time, he explained, but won’t solve the root problem, which is poor data management.For example, users need to get unused data off spinning disk and classify, migrate, archive, and eventually shred less frequently used information in order to lower the energy bill.

CIOs should also focus their attention on legacy kit, cooling, air movement, and even lighting, according to Vellante.

”Get rid of old stuff, turn things off [and] do simple power management. Clear out the data centers, use hot and cold aisles, use outside air [and] use water.”

These sentiments were echoed by Vellante’s co-presenter William Souder, the chief information security office at Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga. “It’s really simple, you walk the data center, you look behind your racks, you look for cable management [and] you look for your hot spots. Understand that it’s the simple things that get you there.”

Even the term "green computing" is misleading, according to Souder: “I don’t really call it green. You have to be a good steward about your spending anyway, and look to save money.”This is not the first time that users have been urged to use common sense before spending big bucks on the latest, greatest, piece of "green technology," although it seems that relatively few IT managers even have an environmental policy in place for their data center.

In a show of hands, only a handful of the 80 or so people attending this morning’s presentation said that they had a green IT policy in place, and only one confirmed that environmental criteria are built into his firm’s storage RFPs.

”It’s not quite happening yet, but it’s happening in Europe,” said Vellante, adding that Wikibon’s research suggest that less than one fifth of U.S. firms have a green IT policy in place.

One exception to this rule is Berry College, which has taken what Souder describes as a "multi-phase" approach to its green IT strategy.

After his initial evaluation of the college’s data center, Souder set out to virtualize the organization’s 62 servers. “We have virtualized 49 of those,” he said, explaining that this project will be completed by the end of this year, when the college will have consolidated onto just five servers.The exec has also placed his faith in at least one of the emerging ‘green’ storage technologies. “We de-dupe. It has revolutionized the way we look at data.”

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