September 3, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- While a majority of chief information officers and other senior IT executives strongly agree that an environmentally friendly data center will become mission-critical in the coming years, yet many "lack the 'green' to go green," according to a new survey.
Israeli server and storage switching and software developer Voltaire (voltaire.com) released the results of its survey Wednesday, finding almost 90 percent of executives polled said making their data centers more environmentally friendly is crucial in meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009, but 76 percent said they do not have a committed budget for a greening policy.
The survey, which queried CIOs, chief technology officers and other IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, also reported that 57 percent of respondents said going green gives them a competitive advantage.
"It appears from these findings that senior IT management is still in the planning phases, and they will need to prioritize funding for these important greening initiatives," Voltaire global sales and general manager executive vice president Patrick Guay said in a statement.
Reacting to these findings, Voltaire has announced its "50-50-300 Pledge," which gives its Voltaire unified fabric partner companies 50 percent off on server interconnections power and cooling, 50 percent off on hardware allocation and usage, while promising as much as a 300 percent increase in application performance.
Voltaire has also released an efficiency calculator, to estimate network energy and cost savings.
"We help them with the analysis and data collection in order to validate the savings they will achieve," Guay said. "Our numbers show that for enterprises, the return on a green data center fabric infrastructure using currently available technology is in the millions of dollars. For example, a Fortune 500 company with five data centers worldwide, and 3,000 servers per data center, can save approximately $7,400,000 per year."
