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Temperature Monitoring

Temperature Monitoring Feature


January 25, 2010

Green IT Getting Lots of Lip Service, Not Much Other Action

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


A recent Gartner (News - Alert) study suggests that the lack of accurate dashboards in data centers is causing wasted energy costs – and impairing proper compliance requirements.

The interactive Gartner Webinar conducted in April 2009 among more than 130 attendees from the infrastructure and operations management found that data center and IT managers are not paying sufficient attention to the process of measuring, monitoring and modeling energy use in data centers.

Gartner found that although green IT issues remain at the top of the agenda, “respondents consider vendor and green procurement a low priority activity for the next 18 months.” Fully 68 percent of respondents thought data center energy management is their “most important” green IT issue for the next 18 months, but only seven per cent consider green procurement and pushing vendors to create more energy efficient and greener solutions as their “top priority.”
 
Leading research groups and related vendors estimate that threats from IT environment issues will cost business and industrial organizations somewhere between $50 billion to $100 billion this year in terms of downtime and related costs.
 
In a recent interview with TMCnet, Michael Sigourney (News - Alert), senior product specialist of AVTECH, said.” that for less than $2 per day, companies can implement temperature monitoring and achieve significant cost savings while increasing uptime and better serve customers.

Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, said that this finding is “further affirmed in client conversations which reveal that, although the green IT and data center energy issue has been on the agenda for some time now, many managers feel that they have to deal with more-immediate concerns before focusing attention on their suppliers’ products
 
In other words, Kumar said, “even if more energy efficient servers or energy management tools were available, data center and IT managers are far more interested in internal projects like consolidation, rationalization and virtualization.” And frankly it's hard for this reporter to blame them.

When asked which energy management metrics they will use in the next 18 months, 48 percent of respondents have not even considered the issue of metrics. One wonders how, without metrics, they would think they could get enough accurate data to evaluate basic costs, proportioning these costs to different users and setting policies for improvement.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Erin Harrison