Over on the GreenBiz.com side of my job, we talk quite a lot about the nature of "green consumer" surveys -- how even over the course of 20 years, there's been very little change in the number of people who say they'd pay more for green products (always the vast majority says they will), while the actual market for green products is only growing ever so slightly.

That, however, doesn't seem to be the case for green IT: a study conducted by AFCOM at its recent Data Center World conference finds that the an ever-increasing number of data center and facility managers (71.3 percent, to be precise -- what we could easily call "the vast majority") have already adopted at least some green IT projects.

This comes despite -- or more likely because of -- the economic downturn: the biggest benefits report in the survey were a decrease in energy use (aka increased efficiency), and an increase in cooling efficiency.

I spoke with Jill Eckhaus, the CEO of AFCOM, to dig into the findings, and she explained why they conducted the survey now.

"Given that the economy has been where it is for a while, we figured it was a good time to talk about trends and see what's been impacted due to the economy as well as just what's going on in the data center," she said.

What she found most interesting is how quickly and thoroughly the concept of greening the data center has taken off. "Where maybe five or six years ago green IT was a concept that people were starting to look at, it is no longer just a concept: It's here and it's being taken seriously."

The big reason, of course, has to do with exactly those two top results from the survey: green IT saves money.

"[Green IT] extends a positive savings to the corporation, which is looking at data centers as big wasters of energy -- executives are asking what they're going to do about it," Eckhaus explained

Even so, one of the wrinkles in the study shows that despite C-suite concern about data center energy use, the biggest obstacle to implementing these projects is that there's not enough money to get these projects started: 39 percent said budgets were too tight to purchase more efficient servers or cooling systems.

Perhaps that's not surprising -- budgets are always an issue in IT, and never more so than during a downturn -- but what it points to is a disconnect or a lack of communication between IT and the executives responsible for funding it.

"There's still a disconnect between corporate management and data center managers, who need to learn how to sell what they need," Eckhaus said. "In a lot of cases, management is saying it's too expensive to invest in, but [IT managers] need to show how this is going to help the overall organization.

Another interesting finding in the survey is that, even though there may still be gap between the data center and the C-suite, it seems like the longstanding gap between the IT and Facilities departments is closing: of the 436 respondents to the survey, 59 percent were from the IT department and 31% from Facilities.

With this gap closing -- in essence, by making sure that IT managers are also the ones seeing the energy bill for their systems -- it suggests that energy efficiency will pick up all the more quickly.

As with all trend surveys, AFCOM plans to undertake another one during the next Data Center World, coming up in March in Nashville. But in the meantime, the first round of survey results suggests great progress toward green, efficient IT systems.