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Energy Efficiency Finds a Home in IT Departments; PUE Not So Much

<p>The third annual CDW Energy Efficient IT report finds that three-quarters of IT professionals have put efficiency on their to-do lists, although some tools and concept for green IT have not yet made their way into common usage.</p>

Energy efficient IT has always seemed like a no-brainer: Cut the energy used by your PCs, servers and data centers, and start saving money immediately. And despite a slower start than one might expect from a no-brainer, the third annual Energy Efficient IT report from CDW, released today, shows that the concept has finally sunk in.

Three-quarters of the 756 IT departments surveyed for the report said they are working to reduce energy use, and 41 percent of the businesses among the responses (and 56 percent of all respondents) have managed to cut their energy costs by 1 percent or more. A further 28 percent of companies have cut their energy use, but rising electricity prices mean costs continue to climb.

But despite this widespread commitment there is still a big gap in awareness of the tools and concepts to measure and manage IT energy use. Power usage effectiveness, a tool for measuring the efficiency of data centers, is used by just 15 percent of the IT departments in the survey, despite PUE being the cornerstone of the EPA's data center energy efficiency metrics.

Above all else, the third CDW report shows wide growth in green IT practices. When the first report was released two years ago, just 39 percent of all respondents had cut their energy costs, a growth of nearly 50 percent in just two years.

And today, two-thirds of IT executives say that knowledge of best practices in energy-efficient IT is critical to them performing their jobs.

"Energy efficiency is no longer an afterthought, but a key requirement in many organizations' IT purchasing plans," Norm Lillis, vice president of system solutions at CDW, said in a statement. "Not only is excess energy consumption a drain on budgets, it also limits the ability of IT managers to provide more and better IT services to employees and customers when aging data centers approach the limits of their power sources. Improving energy efficiency is often the only way to enable improved computing performance in a power-constrained environment."

Among the top practices that IT departments are deploying to reduce their energy use, two-thirds of respondents said they were using at least one of the following six best practices:

• Deploying more power-efficient core switches
• Replacing edge and workgroup switches with more power-efficient switches
• Using the network as a platform to manage and reduce energy use
• Adopting 10GB Ethernet, Infiniband technologies
• Reducing storage area network infrastructure by implementing Fibre-channel Over Ethernet (FcOE)
• Moving to top-of-rack models for access layer switching

The shift to network-based solutions is a significant change from last year's CDW survey, which found more entry-level IT solutions to energy efficiency, including data center lighting management and beginning a shift to virtualization.

But a follow-up study from CDW published in January found that even companies that said they'd fully deployed virtualization across their data centers had actually only done so on 37 percent of machines.

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