Economic Meltdown: Green IT's Best Friend

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Sometimes bad news can be good news: The economic meltdown may be the best thing that ever happened to Green IT. I recently interviewed Dr. Albert Esser, Vice President of Data Center Infrastructure at Dell, and Dell's resident green guru, and he explains why tough times can be good for greening the data center.

Dr. Esser says that when it comes to greening IT and the data center, the current conventional wisdom is often wrong. People measure the energy-efficiency of hardware, and believe that's the key to greening IT. In fact, though, he says that the real key is measuring data center productivity --- how much computing power a data center can deliver per unit of electricity.

He points out that server utilization is often extremely low in data centers, which means that most data centers have too much hardware, and are using too much electricity for the amount of computing power they're outputting. The problem, he says, is getting worse.

In the past, he says, server utilization was in the teens. But with newer generations of powerful, multi-core servers, utilization has dropped to the single digits.

"Servers are completely under-utilized, and we're only going backwards," he explains. "As platforms become more powerful, they have outstripped the ability of applications to take advantage of them. Every year, as raw computing power increases, server utilization drops."

The key to greener IT, he says, is improving the productivity of servers by increasing server utilization. That way, fewer servers will be required.

And that's where the economic meltdown comes in. Dr. Esser says that enterprises simply can't afford to build entirely new data centers in the current economic climate. That's problematic, because many data centers face critical power shortages, and simply cannot get access to new sources of electricity. It's true in the developing world, in China, in the U.K. and even in the U.S. As I point out in a previous blog, a survey shows that nearly two-thirds of data centers will run out of power capacity by 2011.

So what can enterprises do if they can't build a new data center, but are running out of power? They can make IT more productive, by taking steps such as virtualization, hardware refreshes, and so on. In doing that, they'll also make IT far more green, and help their bottom line.

Dr. Esser talks from experience. Several years ago, Dell was faced with building a massive new data center. It had all the plans in place, including the blueprints. Instead, though, it embarked on a plan to make its data center more productive, and as a result it didn't have to build a new data center, which led to big environmental savings.

"The greenest data center you have is the one you don't build," he says.

In addition to the cost-savings of not building a new data center, Dell has saved about $30 million a year in other costs related to greening the data center.

Dr. Esser believes that the current economic crisis will force other companies to make their data center more productive.

His conclusion is simple: "We believe that you cannot afford not to be green."