Rating: +0
Ann,
One of the primary issues with “sustainable” green initiatives (on the Information Technology side), is that sustainable green requires a "thinning" of IT [across the board]. What happens over time is like a water balloon pinched in the middle, you drain one side and the other side gets fatter. So IT managers are constantly chasing their tails in the greening of their "overall" operations. Right now, green within the data center is a thinning down on power consumption, which means (as one example) more efficient servers chassis that can process more in less space with less power, and "less" has to be all the way around, it's no good to squeeze the box and make air and chip cooling, in a better laid out design, if you added more ports on the outside, which now require more cables, which connect to more patch panels, ports, etc. So, their has to be a constant awareness of "thinning" all the way around, and not just thinning in one area, while creating "fat" in another.
That said, the "green" efforts really need to also extend themselves to ISV's (software vendors) - right now they are not as cognizant as they should be of how software becomes "greener" and how the application stack participates in the greening of the data center. It's not just hardware, and power right? But, software is driven by hardware - and the fatter a piece of software, requiring more I/O increases the load on the hardware side. That’s an instance that is totally missed today. "Software needs to be Green" by design.
That means that software vendors needs to find ways to "thin" I/O ops for processing, so that the software can also operate on smaller foot-print hardware. Over the years, there has been no worry at all from software getting "fatter" and "fatter" and “fatter”. The "fatter" the enterprise software, the harder it is for data center managers to "sustain" green initiatives. Now SaaS models do help in this cause, since it’s a leveraged model, different topic I’m sure. However, corporations should ask "green" questions from all of their suppliers in order to advance themselves on the preferred procurement list of suppliers, and these questions should be specifically geared to “enterprise” software vendors as well as hardware suppliers. If I'm evaluating an enterprise business application and I can stand-up 2 servers to support 10,000 users with one, and to do the same with another I need to stand-up 4 servers, everything else being more or less equal - the greener choice from the software end is the 2 server application. That type of thinking needs to be pervasive across the entire eco-system that makes up an IT operation - otherwise, the dog will always be chasing its tail – one step forward two steps back, etc.
Good Luck,
Peter
March 2008