Environmental Leader

InfoWorld has put together a list of predictions from some IT experts who’ve been immersed in sustainable tech this past year and have a keen eye on the future.

Here are just a few of the points we found interesting:

Tom Clark, chair, SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) Green Storage Initiative and principal engineer, Brocade:
The consciousness-raising around green datac enters has been accompanied by some cynicism in the trade press (”Vendors are just trying to sell more stuff”), but the subjective motivations of any particular vendor are really irrelevant. This is not a solution seeking a problem; this is, in fact, a very real problem that will continue to worsen in 2008 and every year beyond. I think we’ll see some very dramatic and perhaps unfortunate initial case studies of large datacenters that failed to react quickly enough to what is actually a pending crisis of global proportions.

Dave Douglas, VP of eco responsibility, Sun Microsystems:
Every day we’re more and more reliant on a growing web of Internet-based social and business services. Datacenters that support these services are growing at high rates, but the power grid isn’t keeping up. The probability is rising that 2008 will bring a high-impact power outage that will affect consumers in new and totally unexpected ways.

Paul Marcoux, vice president of engineering, Cisco development operations, and “green guru,” Cisco:
If you can’t measure it; you can’t manage it. In 2008, we’ll see a slew of technologies developed to offer real-time monitoring intelligence to measure energy consumption for products. By 2009, there will be few products available that cannot be monitored for energy consumption.

Read all the predictions here.