"Green IT" has several meanings, depending on who you ask.

• Greening the Tech Equipment Manufacturing Process:  Some view Green IT as an quest to redress the damage wrought on the environment by the manufacturing processes that are used to create technology products.  Lead, mercury, polyvinyl chloride and other hazardous chemicals and compounds are routinely used in tech equipment production, or are produced as by-products of manufacturing processes.  The goal of one segment of the Green IT advocacy is to discover alternative processes or compounds that will reduce the pollution released by chip, circuit board, cable and media manufacturing.
• Greeing Tech Products Themselves:  Inevitably, the pollutants used to create technology products are returned into Earth's delicate ecosystem as hazardous waste.  This has led to a second interpretation of Green IT -- efforts directed toward the creation of greener tech products as well as programs to foster safe recycling or enhanced biodegradability.  They have a major job ahead of them to reverse a longstanding trend that currently sees nearly half of used technology components heading for landfills rather than recycling bins.
• Greening Data Center Operations: The third interpretation of Green IT focuses squarely on electrical power consumed by data centers.  Energy demands for corporate computing are spiraling upward as more equipment is deployed to meet a growing data burgeon.  Despite the contemporary focus on clean power, the preponderance of electrical energy in the world today is supplied through the burning of fossil fuels.  Given the compelling evidence of a causal relationship between carbon effluents produced by burning petroleum and coal based fuels and global climate change, reducing the carbon footprint of data center operations is becoming a modern battle cry.

For many companies, the issue is less about eco-consciousness and good corporate citizenship, than it is about energy supply and demand.  According to analysts, half of data centers in operation today will have insufficient power and cooling by the end of the decade.  There are many explanations, of course.

In the United States, which accounts for about 40% of the digital information created in the world, the power distribution grid has been likened to that of an underdeveloped country.  The reason is simple:  while the financial incentives to produce electrical power are compelling and have led to the steady growth of production capabilities, financial incentives are virtually nonexistent when it comes to building out or improving power distribution.  For one thing, distribution is a legal briar patch:  concerns about the health risks associated with electromagnetic fields generated by high power lines (so-called "cancer clusters") have led to many civil lawsuits against utility companies.  The multi-billion dollar cost to bury power lines underground is one that no energy company wants to bear. 

So, in the USA and elsewhere, the electrical distribution grid is overtaxed.  The impact is already showing up in the Northeastern Corridor and Northern California, two hotbeds of data center operations for the financial services and technology industries.  Utility power is expensive and difficult to obtain in these regions.  Many industry insiders say that this is merely foreshadowing of things to come:  more frequent power outages and brown-outs, combined with increasing per kilowatt-hour costs, are inevitable. 

It has been estimated that the practice of leaving personal computers and workstations on and unattended each year consumes nearly 19.8 billion kilowatt-hours in the US, enough energy to power 1.9 million homes annually.  The cost to US organizations for always-on user computing is an estimated $1.7 billion per year.  That is considerable, but PCs consume far less power than other computing components deployed in enterprise data centers.

Getting greener in data center operations means finding a strategy that will enable organizations to continue processing the growing volume of digital information that has become the currency of modern business while improving the energy efficiency of the IT infrastructure.  This is a technically nontrivial challenge and one that the Green Data Project seeks to address through a community approach that brings together business, the technology industry, and government.

We must begin by performing a root cause analysis before we can determine what can be done.  One thing is for sure:  there are no silver bullet solutions or quick fixes.  Anyone who says that they have a product that will, as if by magic, reduce the power consumed by data center operations is simply trying to sell you a product. 

Next:  What's Consuming the Power?