InfoWorld

CIOs lack the "green" to go green, survey says

<div class="rxbodyfield"><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">CIOs and senior IT executives lack the "<a href="http://www.networkworld.com/dimension/greenit/index.html?tnav=_l317_t72_s87">green</a>" to go green even though they overwhelmingly believe that a more energy efficient datacenter will become mission-critical, according to a recent survey.</p><p align="right"><a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /><img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"/></a></p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">Seventy-six percent of executives queried do not have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 percent believe that greening their datacenters will be crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009, according to the survey conducted by <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/072607-infiniband-vendor-voltaire-going-public.html">Voltaire</a>, a maker of server and storage switching and software products for <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2007/ndc1/021907-ndc-best-of-grid-tips.html">grid computing</a>.</p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody"><b>[ Keep up on green IT trends with InfoWorld's <a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/?source=fssr">Sustainable IT blog</a> and <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/newsletter/subscribe.html?source=fssr">Green Tech newsletter</a>. ]</b></p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">In addition, 57 percent said they believe going green will give their company a competitive advantage, the Voltaire study found.</p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">Voltaire queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Voltaire says a Fortune 500 company with five data centers worldwide and 3,000 servers per data center can save approximately $7.4 million per year.</p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">The study also found that 43 percent of respondents will implement a green data center in the next two years, and that reducing power and cooling costs/requirements was ranked by 52 percent of the respondents as the most important benefit gained by going green in the <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/data-center.html?tnav=_l320_t72_s">datacenter</a>.</p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">The next most important benefit was helping the environment (37 percent), followed by increased utilization (32 percent), reducing real estate/space requirements (28 percent), and reducing/consolidating equipment needed (27 percent). Among the respondents who said that going green gives their companies a competitive advantage, 72 percent said it provides a more efficient and cost-effective infrastructure so they can invest more in new technologies.</p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">In response to the survey findings, Voltaire says it developed a "50-50-300 Pledge," which states that IT executives, working with the company to deploy a Voltaire <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/2006/1113stor1.html">InfiniBand-based</a> unified fabric, can save 50 percent on power/cooling related to <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/servers.html?tnav=_l317_t72_s40">server</a> interconnections and 50 percent on hardware allocation/usage, while delivering up to a 300 percent increase in application performance. Voltaire has also developed an efficiency <a href="http://www.voltaire.com/calculator">calculator</a> to help IT executives estimate their network energy and cost savings and justify the investment.</p><p page="1" class="ArticleBody">Unified fabrics provide networking services between InfiniBand, Fibre Channel <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/sans.html?tnav=_l317_t72_s49">storage-area networks</a> and Ethernet <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/lan-wan.html?tnav=_l317_t71_s">LANs</a> over a single fabric with multiple virtual interfaces replacing actual physical adapters. By merging all three traffic types within a single switching chassis, IT executives can reduce power consumption by consolidating and virtualizing their data center interconnects, Voltaire says.</p></div>