Execs Lack Budgets To Green Data Centers

Although CIOs and senior IT executives overwhelmingly believe that a green data center will become mission-critical, many lack the “green” to go green, according to a recent survey by Voltaire Ltd.Nearly 90 percent of executives surveyed said they believe that greening their data centers will be crucial to meeting their companies’ business objectives in 2009, and 57 percent said they believe going green gives them a competitive advantage. Yet, 76 percent do not have a committed budget for a greening policy. The survey queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

“Our numbers show that for enterprises, the return on a green data center fabric infrastructure using currently available technology is in the millions of dollars,” said Patrick Guay, Executive Vice President Global Sales and General Manager of Voltaire, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Voltaire Ltd. “For example, a Fortune 500 company with five data centers worldwide, and 3,000 servers per data center, can save approximately $7,400,000 per year.”

Additional findings from the Voltaire survey include:

• Forty-three percent of respondents will implement a green data center in the next two years.
• Reducing power and cooling costs/requirements was ranked by 52 percent of the respondents as the most important benefit gained by going green in the data center. The next most important benefit was helping the environment (37 percent), followed by increased utilization (32 percent), reducing real estate/space requirements (28 percent), and reducing/consolidating equipment needed (27 percent).
• Among the respondents who said that going green gives their companies a competitive advantage, 72 percent clarified that it provides a more efficient and cost-effective infrastructure so they can invest more in new technologies.