A day does not go by without news of businesses folding, people being laid off, and those businesses that remain cutting costs to maintain any hope that they can run in the black next year.  Most businesses, including government, are quickly finding out that greening their IT can help them do this.  Green IT is one of the easiest ways to begin saving money for your company right away.

In a report called IDC Predictions 2009: An Economic Pressure Cooker Will Accelerate the IT Industry Transformation, the IDC predicts that global economic worries combined with an overall decline in IT spending, will help to increase the adoption of energy-efficient technologies and other green IT strategies.  The IDC says that Green IT spending will actually grow, but it will be “disguised as cost-cutting” as companies adopt technologies with a rapid ROI.  Things like power management systems, energy-efficient computers and servers, or facilities management technologies for offices and data centers will be embraced.

At the 2008 conference of the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO), the leaders of state government technology said that the ongoing budget crises they were facing, along with high energy costs, were the main reasons for greening their IT operations.  A poll conducted at the conference found that 46 percent of the CIOs are using consolidation as their top green strategy for 2009. 

Data centers are running out of power, and organizations do not have money to build new ones.  According to InfoWorld, Emerson Network Power conducted a survey of data center operators and found that 64 percent of respondents said that their data centers were faced with running out of power capacity by 2011.  36 percent also said that the main reason they could not add additional computing capacity to their data centers was a lack of power.  Out of these respondents, only 25 percent had a strategy to reduce energy use.

One of the biggest keys to green IT is to improve the productivity of servers by increasing server utilization.  That way, fewer servers are required to meet an organization’s computing needs.  This can easily be done by consolidating servers.  By consolidating your servers, you can save money and energy.  Servers take up a large portion of a data center’s real estate.  If your servers are not operating at their maximum capacity, then that is money and energy that is being wasted.  Servers have far more computing power than most applications need, so instead of having a dedicated server for each application, it is logical to consolidate multiple applications onto single servers.

According to GreenerComputing, Dell was faced with the prospects of building a new data center several years ago.  They had all the plans in place, including the blueprints.  However, they ended up implementing green IT strategies to their existing data centers, and they did not have to build the new one.  In addition to the enormous cost savings of not having to build the data center, Dell saves around $30 million per year in other costs due to their greening efforts.  It seems that companies simply cannot afford to not go green in these economic conditions. 

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