ARMONK, N.Y. — Cost savings are king in this economy, and when it comes to reasons for adopting green IT projects, that is truer than ever before.
In a recent survey of 1,000 medium-sized companies (employing between 100 and 1,000 people),
IBM and
Info-Tech tracked the adoption rates of nearly a dozen different green IT strategies, and found that by and large, practices that save money quickly are at the top of the list.
Of the top five practices, four of them are driven largely by cost savings: Printer consolidation had already been adopted by 57 percent of respondents, followed by PC power management at 53 percent, and storage consolidation and remote conferencing scored 52 percent each. The second most-adopted practice, at 56 percent, was IT equipment recycling.
"Out of all initiatives in this study, the success of IT equipment recycling relies not on a business case with cost savings," the report notes, "but on a combination of environmental responsibility and regulatory pressures."
The e-waste finding underscores a key element of the report: green IT is seen not just as a means to save money, but as a two-fer: saving money while reducing environmental impact. The report quotes one vice president as saying, "Cost cutting is important to every organization, let's be real, but [our] philosophy as an organization is that we live in this world and we want to be good neighbors. With our new investments, we are doing both."
Virtualization also scored high rates on the list of projects companies plan to adopt: 39 percent said they were planning to virtualize their servers, and another 36 percent said virtualization would come soon to their PCs. Most importantly, companies that have completed virtualization projects overwhelmingly report them as successful -- in terms of decreasing investment needed for servers and storage, as well as space needed and energy use in server and storage racks.
Virtualization ties in with another element of the survey: server room upgrades and new construction. Although building new server rooms was the least-adopted of the 11 practices, 38 percent of companies said they were planning to do so in the coming months. The benefits of this type of project were to overcome excessive heat in existing server rooms and to get in front of upcoming lack of computing capacity for existing facilities.
Whether building new or upgrading the server rooms in place already, more than two-thirds of projects met the goals of reducing costs associated with maintaining and managing servers, real estate costs, cooling costs, and at the same time increased reliability and computing capacity of the servers.
You can download the full report from
GreenerComputing.com.
