For IT going green is more than just a catch phrase.

What does it really mean to be green in IT? Is it just decreasing a datacenter’s power consumption by making the cooling process more efficient and thus consuming less energy? Is it addressing the footprint of the data center and examining the infrastructure to ensure that the design is as efficient as possible? Is it taking a hard look at what runs across the data center in terms of applications and services to find redundancies? The answer is that all of these options must be considered in order to make a sustainable approach to efficiency in the data center. The difficulty in taking this approach stems from the way IT typically serves the business. Datacenter staff focuses on ensuring that the hardware resources they manage can be reliably maintained. Application developers focus on making their applications solve the business requirements. IT managers want to ensure that they are in total control of the resources they need to succeed, so shared resources are viewed with skepticism. These three efforts are often at cross purposes. Focusing on how the hardware is easily maintained is a supply side view of the problem, which often causes any particular application’s hardware to be sprawled across the datacenter inducing unnecessary delays. Focusing on the needs of one application will usually cause significant over-provisioning to handle period peak loads causing every system to have excess capacity that cannot be reused. Hands on scope of control for all aspects of system delivery will guarantee that reuse is discouraged, and that common services are de-emphasized. So while everyone is doing what they think is best for the business, datacenter utilization grows. In the current economic downturn where growth has been stalled or reversed, emphasizes the lack of correlation between business growth and IT expense. This situation wastes energy and money. Datacenter growth is not going to correct itself because it is likely that one of the downturn’s aftermaths is greater regulation, more compliance and more sophisticated risk modeling, all of which will increase the need for datacenter resources, even as business growth is stalled. Moving to a greener datacenter is not just PR savvy; it is a key survival trait and will become a competitive advantage because IT growth and business growth should have a reasonable correlation. Becoming green involves technical changes, but those changes, radical as they can be, pale in comparison to the cultural and organizational changes required to enable an IT organization to become green. IT must become more business aligned, and this alignment must translate to changes in the datacenter. This alignment must start with an understanding of how each business line uses the totality of the technical solution to satisfy the day to day services that the business must perform. In large organizations with thousands of applications, this will seem like a daunting task, but so is building another datacenter. It is important to remember that in most large organizations, 30% of the applications consume 70% of the infrastructure during peak. Making a 25% efficiency improvement in those applications could yield a 15% overall datacenter improvement across an enterprise. Technology is not enough, process is not enough, but both are necessary, but they are only the beginning. IT becoming green means a paradigm shift in terms of how application work is viewed. More on this in the weeks to come.