Study Recommends CAFE-like Standards for Green IT

Green IT. It just rings in the ears. It is tech, it is eco. It also sounds like a greenwashy way to make nice on the eco front while doing carbon-intensive business as usual. However, a new report by McKinsey & Company and the Uptime Institute says that data centers are big, expensive CO2 polluters that are poised to cause big headaches for IT Managers nationwide.

It may now be a common fact that the price to store or transfer a megabyte of data is quickly approaching zero, but in many ways the cost of IT is still going up. The installed server base is expected to reach 41-43 million by 2010 and energy consumption per server is growing by 9% per year. Spending on equipment, energy, and maintenance is growing so quickly that it has the potential to reduce profits among major companies.

For many industries, the greenhouse gas output of IT is shaping up to be a big problem, especially as companies start to look closer at their carbon footprints. The authors warn that even with immediate increases in efficiency, enterprises and their equipment providers can expect their tech-related GHG emissions to balloon, quadrupling by 2020. Some of the major culprits are insufficient IT planning across organizations, inefficient equipment, and wasted capacity.

To conteract these trends, the groups recommend a doubling of IT energy efficiency by 2012. How will this be accomplished? They say that companies must make IT energy management a priority by appointing internal "Energy Czars" and taking into account data center costs in business decisions. The authors also push for the establishment of voluntary automotive-style Corporate Average Data Efficiency (CADE) standards that would measure data center efficiency across an organization and set escalating target levels to aim for.

Quick fixes like maximizing data center space usage and shutting down underused or "dead" servers can save a ton of cash and carbon. Still, larger improvements like cooling servers with outside air, green facility design and internal auditing of IT-related business processes will be needed to make significant gains. In short, corporations need to treat their IT management with as much cost scrutiny as they do other parts of their business.

The world's data centers pump out 170 megatons of CO2/yr, more than the countries of Argentina and the Netherlands. As a percentage of total world carbon dioxide output, these digital warehouses may soon pass up the airline industry. With numbers like that, and greenhouse gas legislation marching its way through Washington, data centers may soon be expected to put the brakes on their kilowatts per gigabyte.