Green IT is quickly becoming one of the highest priority issues among CIOs and IT managers throughout enterprises and large-scale Internet data centers. It is a global issue that is having a dramatic impact on cost and operational efficiency as well as the social responsibility relative to carbon footprint containment.
The rapid growth of the Internet and internal corporate networks has brought with it a significantly increased demand for the energy needed to power growing data centers. As carbon neutrality and corporate sustainability are now C-level initiatives, one of the first areas to target for improvement is the enterprise data center.
Green IT is a label for a movement that is afoot in the IT industry to solve these problems through hardware and software advancements, efficient data center design and best practices. To date, Green IT has been nebulously defined and is still relatively nascent in terms of deployment.
The primary goal behind a solid Green IT strategy is to maintain and/or reduce energy usage and associated electricity costs while at the same time managing the continuously increasing requirements for additional compute/storage performance and capacity. Compute performance per kilowatt has become an increasingly important metric to understanding IT energy usage.
Green IT encompasses more than power, cooling, virtualization, and advanced hardware and software infrastructure. There are many tangential market segments that are also defined as part of the larger Green IT picture, including Intelligent Utility Networking (IUN), Enterprise Sustainability Management (ESM) software, alternative energy sources for powering data centers and the potential benefits from Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). Greentech Media has created the first detailed Green IT Taxonomy, provided in the figure below, to help better define the various components under the Green IT umbrella.
In reality, Green IT is a timely marketing label. Even so, it addresses real problems that have plagued the IT industry for years. IT managers and CIOs are waking up to the need to solve these problems with real products and services that are just now becoming commercially available in the market.
Greentech Media has worked in collaboration with Internet Evolution to create an interactive Green IT video tutorial. The tutorial can be viewed at the following link: http://www.internetevolution.com/tutorial_greenit.asp
Stay tuned, as Greentech Media will soon publish a free report going into more detail on each segment identified in the Green IT Taxonomy.