When it comes to going green, IT pros care very little about green procurement issues and getting vendors to create more energy-efficient hardware. That is one of the surprising conclusions in a recent report by Gartner.
Gartner did a Web-based survey of more than 130 infrastructure and operations managers and found that only seven percent of them say that green procurement and getting vendors to sell more energy-efficient hardware is a priority. This is quite a surprise, considering that they also say that data center energy management is a very high priority. The report found:
...although green IT issues remain at the top of the agenda, respondents consider vendor and green procurement a low priority activity for the next 18 months. Although 68 per cent of respondents thought data centre energy management is their most important green IT issue for the next 18 months, only 7 per cent consider green procurement and pushing vendors to create more energy efficient and greener solutions as their top priority.
This sounds as if it is some kind of disconnect. After all, how can 68 percent say managing energy in the data center is important, but only seven percent think it's important to procure green equipment to run in the data center?
In fact, though, there's no disconnect at all. IT pros know exactly what they're doing. The low-hanging fruit in reducing energy use in the data center is consolidation and virtualization --- reducing the the number of servers and other hardware. In the short run, there's a much bigger and faster payoff in that than merely in replacing energy-inefficient hardware with energy-efficient hardware.
The report bears that out --- that's exactly what IT pros are doing. Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner says that:
"...although the green IT and data centre 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. In other words, even if more energy efficient servers or energy management tools were available, data centre and IT managers are far more interested in internal projects like consolidation, rationalisation and virtualisation."
There are plenty of other useful findings in the report, such as that only 52 percent of data center managers are actively measuring the electricity usage in their data centers. For more details, see IT Pros Must Measure More to Increase Efficiencies, Research Finds.