What Green Really Means

Despite all the recent hype about eco-friendly IT, anyone who thinks that technology is green, or ever will be, is living in cloud cuckoo land.

At least, this is the message from analyst firm Forrester, which recently issued a wake-up call to users looking to build eco-friendly data centers.

"Technology is not green, and never will be," explains Forrester analyst Doug Washburn in the report "Is Green IT Your Emperor With No Clothes?," arguing that users, not vendors, will drive the green agenda forward.

Anyone who relies too heavily on technology could get caught with their pants down, according to Washburn, who provides a perfect foil to months of green storage hype from vendors.

"Before investing a single dollar into green IT, we recommend that firms set expectations by measuring their green IT baseline - an annual estimate of the energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and financial costs of operating IT."The analyst explains that only 11 percent of IT shops, for example, include energy costs in their budget, adding that better upfront measurement is needed to build eco-friendly networks.

"Avoid guessing about what to green’ first by referencing concrete statistics on energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and operating costs for IT," he says.

Forrester is not the only organization urging users to rethink their green storage strategies, however, and the corporate world could even take a leaf from the world of cone-head research labs and shadowy government supercomputers.

"Most of the [technology] developments, whether they are in the interconnect [fabric], the processor technology, or the storage technology, start off on these large grids and clusters that are created," says Patrick Guay, executive vice president of high-performance computing specialist Voltaire. "Over time, they migrate to the enterprise."

The exec explains that the most cutting edge research sites in the U.S. are pushing their green strategies forward, serving as a model for other sites across the country.“They are pushing the server vendors for more efficient server technologies and they are pushing the chip vendors for more efficient chip technology,” says Guay, adding that blade servers, for example, emerged from this effort.

So, next time a storage vendor is hammering on your door with the latest all-singing, all-dancing, "green machine" you may need to take a long hard look at your current IT infrastructure. Only with a clear idea of what you have, and what you want to achieve, will you really "go green."

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