Some enterprises have found ways to ensure their technology investments provide
both environmental benefit and a quick return on investment.

"Because energy efficiency was never a significant factor in the architecting,
designing and development of most IT infrastructure in the past, there is plenty
of low-hanging fruit that businesses can go after," says Simon
Mingay, an analyst at Gartner. "There is so much 'fat' inside most
data centers, that it's not that difficult to make a business case where you
can make operations greener and save money at the same time."

According to Gartner, the "green wave" has only begun to rise. The
research company predicts that by next year, more than a third of all IT organizations
will place environmental concerns within their top six buying criteria. By 2010,
Gartner says, three-quarters of companies will use carbon-footprint considerations
with their hardware-buying strategy and by 2011 large enterprises will develop
policies requiring their suppliers to prove their "green credentials"
through an auditing process.

Most companies are talking a good game but not really going green where it
counts. According to a survey of 124 IT operations by Forrester Research in
May 2007, some 85% of respondents said environmental factors are important in
planning IT operations. But only a fourth of survey respondents have actually
written green criteria into their company's purchasing processes.

Enterprises that have started the green journey, however, have found that reducing
total energy requirements can be accomplished through some fairly straightforward
improvements that don't take years to implement or bring return.

Consolidate and virtualize

Consolidating IT operations, and using virtualization to reduce sever footprint
and energy use, are the most well-recognized and most-often-implemented efficiency
strategies of the past few years. Some of the largest technology organizations
in the world have recently completed major data center consolidation projects,
including Advanced
Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard,
Intel and Sun
Microsystems.

Arlin Sorensen, chief executive and president of Heartland
Technology Solutions, a value-added reseller with eight locations in five
states, wanted his IT department to support new growth in the business. But
he didn't want to relocate the primary data center from its headquarters in
Harlan, Iowa, where Sorensen first began the company on his farm as a hobby
in 1985.

The company was running about twice the number of servers it had space for,
and temperatures were hitting the mid-80s. By moving to newer and more efficient
blade servers from HP and using virtualization software from VMware,
Heartland has been able to remove about half of the physical hardware in the
data center

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