With all the fanfare for Al Gore, receiving an Oscar, Emmy and the Nobel Peace Prize all in 2007, one would think that global environmental concerns rank No. 1 on the list of "corporate social responsibility."

Unfortunately, economics and internal operations have often overridden environmental concerns in the past. But now, green cannot be ignored.

An obvious place to start is the IT data center. In 2006, according to an Environmental Protection Agency study, U.S. data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of $4.5 billion. That is equivalent to the average power needs of 5.8 million households for a year.

On a global basis, 1.8% of all power inclusive of cooling is used by the data center. That extrapolates to a corporate cost of almost $8 billion -- with almost 80% of that power being wasted!

Numerous studies exist on power consumption in the data center. An Emerson Network Power study found data-center power consumption broke down this way: 50% by air conditioning, 26% by servers/storage, 11% by communications equipment, 10% by power-distribution equipment and 3% for the lighting.

A 2006 white paper from the American Power Conversion Corporation indicates that power consumption in data centers is approximately distributed 48% in cooling systems (33% chiller/cooling tower, 4% humidifier and 11% air conditioning); 30% IT equipment; and 22% electrical systems (16% UPS, 4% power distribution, 1% switching and 1% lighting).

Extensive research by IBM has uncovered a number of not too obvious environmental facts. With respect to data center equipment, one would expect storage to be the candidate for the “bad guy” award. The reality is that tape and disk storage produce the lowest heat load (watts/equipment per square foot).

Next on the list is 2U and larger compute servers, then high-density communications equipment, then 1U blade and custom compute servers and finally the “worst offender” — extreme-density communications equipment. (That category includes routers/switches, PBXs, and appliances like firewalls and load balancers.)

IBM is not alone in identifying communications equipment as the worst offender in the data center. An independent study by storage vendor Hitachi Data Systems indicates that data-center power usage is distributed 25% for storage, 25% for servers and 50% for communications equipment.