Green IT numbers don't lie
Stark statistics shed light on the needs driving green computing If a picture's worth a thousand words, how many are statistics worth, I wonder? I have some numbers this week that speak volumes as to why so many companies have green IT on the brain -- or why they should. These figures come from management consultancy McKinsey and Company, part of a report titled "Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency," issued a
Follow @tsamson_IWStark statistics shed light on the needs driving green computing
If a picture's worth a thousand words, how many are statistics worth, I wonder? I have some numbers this week that speak volumes as to why so many companies have green IT on the brain -- or why they should.
These figures come from management consultancy McKinsey and Company, part of a report titled "Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency," issued at the recent Uptime Institute's Green Computing Symposium. If someone at your company is pooh-poohing the notion of even investigating sustainable IT opportunities, some of these numbers might give them pause to reconsider.
$11.5 billion - The total estimated energy bill for datacenters come 2010, up from $8.6 billion in 2007. Driving that figure: The installed server base is expected to grow by 16 percent to as many as 43 million machines worldwide; energy consumption per server is increasing by 9 percent; and energy prices have risen by an average of 4 percent, according to McKinsey. That, of course, means that if you're feeling some pain now from high energy prices or insufficient power, it's going to get worse if you don't make some changes.
25 percent - The amount of the IT budget at a typical company that goes toward datacenter costs. Indeed, the datacenter is expensive to operate, with 17 percent of the costs going to hardware and storage and another 8 percent going toward the facilities that support those machines. Of course, the report notes that not all the facilities costs associated with maintaining your IT infrastructure appear in the IT budget, so it's conceivable no one at your company is really aware of how much it costs to run, say, a midtier server each year.
$1,870 - The annual operating expense for powering and cooling a single midtier ($2,500) server in a tier III datacenter. The number is $1,320 for a tier II datacenter, and it reaches $2,020 in a tier IV datacenter. According to the report, "servers are often housed in a higher tier datacenter than necessary, further driving facility costs." The point, of course, is that "cheap" servers really aren't cheap at all, so the "throwing hardware at the problem" approach isn't particularly sustainable.
30 months - The amount of time until 90 percent of companies with large datacenters will need to add more power and cooling. That's two and a half years. Not a lot of time, is it? And if you're already out of floor space or drawing all the power you can from your local utility, you're in trouble. There also may be opportunities to unplug systems that are grossly underutilized.
