Government, business and the tech industry are abuzz today with "green" initiatives.  Mounting concerns over climate change and rising energy costs are generating momentum for change in three key areas:

• Greener Technology Products:  Developing products whose components contain lesser quantities of chemical elements or compounds known to damage or pollute the Earth's ecosystem.  Producing recyclable or bio-degradable products is also a part of this effort.
• Greener Technology Manufacturing:  Improving techniques for developing technology components so that they do not produce significant levels of ecosystem unfriendly waste products, consume inordinate quantities of utility power (thereby contributing to carbon effluents thought to contribute to climate change), or otherwise compromise the delicate balance of nature.
• Greener IT Operations:  Reducing the power consumed by data center operations, which are thought to be serious users of utility power and major contributors to the carbon footprint.

The Data Management Institute (DMI) and Archive Management.org (AMO) applaud the sincere efforts of tech manufacturers, government regulators, and business leaders to develop programs and processes that will preserve the environment for future generations.  At the same time, we are concerned by the misinformation -- and in some cases disinformation -- that is being promulgated by some vendors in the industry to promote their products as "green solutions." 

The Green Data Project, as the name implies, asserts that technology greening is inextricably linked to sound data management.  Green IT begins with Green Data. 

The proliferation of digital information is a given. The mismanagement of this data burgeon is what leads to wasteful technology infrastructure.  While we are all in favor of improving the environmental friendliness of technology and its associated product manufacturing processes, the Green Data Project argues that the most intelligent and strategic approach to slowing the acceleration of power consumed by data centers is to manage data better. 

Storage technology, mainly in the form of large disk arrays, is becoming the biggest consumer of energy in contemporary data centers.  However, at present, as much as 60 percent of the capacity of every disk drive that is used to store digital business information contains stale, duplicated, contraband or otherwise useless data.  Our collective failure to apply data discipline to our business information system storage -- to purge junk data and to archive data with little chance of re-reference onto greener archival media -- is what drives the acquisition of more and more energy consuming hardware year after year, increasing exponentially the carbon footprint of IT in the process. 

Environmental impact notwithstanding, the storage industry is more than willing to sell customers more disk arrays to help them to store more junk data. Far less effort is being expended to help organizations manage their data better, forestalling new acquisitions.  Current capacity management technologies, including data compression, block de-duplication, thin provisioning and other others, while touted as "green," are not.  At best, these products are tactical solutions that can help buy time.  Intelligent IT planners may be able to leverage these technologies to defer the deployment of additional storage hardware for a brief period, providing time for businesses to develop and implement a strategy that will put their data into an effective scheme of management.   

The Green Data Project opens this discussion thread for strategic planners in business and IT.  By building this community of consumers and vendors, we are setting out to identify techniques and best practices for green data management.  Cogent discussion and analysis are needed immediately to offset the cynical and counterproductive efforts of those in the industry who are paying lip service to the idea of Green IT only to promote their wares. 

We invite both business and industry to participate in this discussion and we hope that our efforts will be noticed by regulators and legislators who are today struggling to develop incentives that will encourage firms to become more information efficient and ecologically savvy.

Welcome to the Green Data Project.