EGHAM, United Kingdom — Green IT may be on the rise, but most IT professionals are not yet looking at the best ways of reducing computing's impact: According to Gartner's survey of IT managers, only 52 percent are actively measuring their data centers' energy use.

The findings come despite relatively widespread recognition of the importance of energy efficient computing; the survey of 130 tech professionals found that 68 percent consider data center management to be their top green IT issue. Even so, their attention focuses primarily on issues already at hand, rather than expanding the scope of their IT management.

Just 7 percent of respondents said they'd considered working with vendors to develop and incorporate more energy efficient tools and products into their data centers, even though 63 percent said they're expecting to run into data center capacity constraints in the next 18 months, and 15 percent have already hit capacity.

"This finding is further affirmed in client conversations which reveal that, although the green IT and data center energy issue has been on the agenda for some time now, many managers feel that they have to deal with more-immediate concerns before focusing attention on their suppliers' products," said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner. "In other words, even if more energy efficient servers or energy management tools were available, data center and IT managers are far more interested in internal projects like consolidation, rationalisation and virtualization."

Although those strategies are increasingly common ways for IT pros to trim energy use, without thorough measuring and management projects are less likely to be successful.

Gartner recommends that data center managers implement the following four strategies to immediately earn reductions in energy used:

1. Raise the temperature at the server inlet point up to 24 degrees Celsius (71 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit), but use sensors to monitor potential hotspots;
2. Develop a dashboard of data center energy-efficient metrics that provides appropriate data to different levels of IT and financial management;
3. Use the SPECpower benchmark to evaluate the relative energy efficiencies of the servers; and
4. Improve the use of the existing infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization before building out or buying new/additional data center floor space.

For more details on the survey's findings, see the Gartner research report "Data Centers Focus on Green, but Many Neglect Metrics."