Datamonitor reportedly announced the availability of its latest market research effort titled, ‘Can Green IT Bloom in an Economic Downturn? (Market Focus),’ and said its main finding is that significant advances have been made and are being made to reduce the overall IT infrastructural carbon foot print.

Research analysts at the Datamonitor claim that the reasons are reduced, abandoned and shelved IT budgets because companies would rather hold on to precious cash reserves than spend as they used to in the pre-recession timeframe, and this has forced vendors and technologists to innovate in such a way that equipment delivers more, costs less, and, most importantly, consumes the least possible electricity.

A recent report titled, “Power, Proximity Peak Performances Propel Profits” on a survey of the financial market segment revealed that firms were still spending at the rate of $1.8 billion per year on servers, power and cooling solutions. Even though super quick two way communication is a vital parameter, 82 percent of respondents surveyed claimed that even the smallest additional expenditure on power was the cause for maximum concern and seen as the number one reason for reducing profit margins.

Some of the innovations include software and hardware combined packages that inform the power source controller within equipment to selectively shut off power supply to and from unused ports and devices. One set of resources that helps IT departments of any type of organization keep a tight scrutiny on power consumption for each port and each device are Advanced Monitored enclosure based Power Distribution Units.

Many companies are exploring the possibility to switch to Direct Current (DC) rather than the high cost and carbon generating Alternating Current (AC). At least one known company houses DC power plants and offers the option of DC power that is considered an attractive option for companies who need high-equipment densities to house rich digital content.

Datamonitor said that alternatives include IT leasing, managed services, virtualization software, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)), which for example, may be a viable option to reduce the carbon foot print since SaaS adds another dimension that significantly cuts down on IT and infrastructural costs. It gives customers the freedom to use and pay for only select components of their choice from software suites, and the flexibility to add other requisites as and when the need arises.

Prior to this innovative customer driven request for ‘a use and pay when required only’ approach, entire solutions had to be bought and installed at a significantly higher one-time cost. IT support resources such as staff, network equipment, installation fees and annual maintenance contracts are kept to a minimum, if not eliminated. With lesser pre-installed information to wade through, systems become more agile and corrective measures require lesser bandwidth, are more focussed and can be done remotely.

"The global economic recession has spurred a paradigm shift in the way organizations evaluate, budget for and deploy green IT," said Rhonda Ascierto, Author of Report and Senior Analyst at Datamonitor. "The downturn has also resulted in green IT trends for Datacenters, client devices and asset lifecycle management, as well as re-shaped return on investment (ROI) models."

Another related survey revealed that 47 percent of the respondents declared it is their companies’ top priority to reduce the electrical consumption of their devices and network equipment. The most significant factor to emerge was that 61 percent of respondents were forced to cut budgets and significantly reduce IT spend because the economy is so bad, and interlinked with this statistic is the fact that 35 percent of respondents revealed that their companies were forced to go slow, put on the back burner, or even stop expansion pipeline projects.

Some companies are taking the down economy with a positive attitude and are using the forced breathing space to review energy efficiency and heat density plans. As soon as the economy gets back to a semblance of stable equilibrium, 52 percent of respondents claim that they will implement their improved blue print plans to create future facilities to support densities of between 10 kilo Watt (kW) and 20 kW per rack – significantly higher than the 7.4 kW average supported by current facilities.

Reasons that were cited to migrate to higher density Datacenters were to leverage significantly improved technological advancements by using blade servers, save volume required per rack, and reducing energy costs.

Cooling solutions to help with data complexity, affirmed 55 percent of the respondents, was another area they were seriously looking into. Of these respondents, says the survey, 74 percent evaluated cooling reliability, 54 percent energy consumption and 51 percent expansion plans.

In September 2007, a survey conducted by the Datacenter Users Group (DCUG) showed just how serious companies are about getting carbon emissions under control. The study indicated that 75 percent of companies polled now have their Datacenter arranged in a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration to increase cooling system efficiency, while 65 percent are using blanking panels to minimize recirculation of hot air and 56 percent have sealed the floor to prevent cooling losses.

Datamonitor added that current green IT investments are driven by compliance with environmental legislation and cost savings, and said that green IT that eliminates the need for capital expenditure (capex), such as Datacenter virtualization, Datacenter design and layout, and asset lifecycle management, has become increasingly important as IT budgets remain constrained.

The research firm concluded its report by predicting that the greatest demand for Datacenter green IT will be for virtualization because this technology is becoming more holistic, whereby various assets, including servers, storage, communications infrastructure, and business applications, are being virtualized across a pool of Datacenter hardware, and says that business applications are the next frontier of Datacenter virtualization.

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