Datacentre managers still show poor energy awareness

Many datacentres are running at full capacity

As Microsoft hails the opening of a "mega datacentre" in Dublin today, new Gartner research has found that IT managers are still not prioritising the measurement, modelling and monitoring of energy costs in their datacentres.

The Gartner poll found that for two-thirds of IT and datacentre managers, datacentre energy management is their top green IT priority for the next 18 months. However, just seven per cent said they consider green procurement and forcing vendors to create more energy-efficient solutions as a top priority.

According to Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, the study shows that there are still more pressing matters for IT managers to deal with.

“In other words, even if more energy-efficient servers or energy management tools were available, datacentre and IT managers are far more interested in internal projects like consolidation, rationalisation and virtualisation,” he added.

Around two-thirds of respondents said they will face datacentre capacity constraints in the next 18 months, while 15 per cent said that their datacentres are already at capacity, and that they will be forced to build new sites or refurbish existing ones within the next year.

Tim Turquand, a consultant at IT services and technology company Morse, argued that by better understanding IT assets from an energy use perspective, IT managers can not only improve their green IT efforts, but optimise existing systems so that they can become more sustainable and help to reduce total operational costs.

"We need to see more education so that IT departments start to understand that energy use and green IT shouldn't be a project in its own right, but instead measured and monitored in much the same way as IT performance," he added.

"The metrics gained should then be used and considered as a factor in many of the projects and decisions that IT departments make every day."

However, despite many managers' failure to roll out energy monitoring tools IT departments are expected to come under increased legislative pressure to report on their energy use and related carbon emissions over the next two years.

Next April will see the launch of the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment, which wiill force an estimated 5,000 organisations to publish detailed information on their energy use and carbon emissions. Meanwhile, US authorities announced this week that up to 10,000 industrial sites in the US will similarly be required to publicly report their carbon emissions for 2010.