Companies are gearing up for large investments in green computing intiatives. These recent news announcements reflect that -

- OMG to Acquire Green Computing Impact Organization (GCIO). OMG had been working with GCIO on maturity model -

Prior to the merger, GCIO and OMG already had a relationship for work on OMG’s proposed Green Computing Maturity Model(TM) (GCMM(TM)). GCMM will be a formal industry standard way to define, assess and monitor the sustainability of an organization across all aspects of the business. GCMM looks at all facets of the business such as facility management, corporate procurement / supply chain, governance, business processes, business operations and business data and provides a means for companies to model and measure their “green” maturity.

-  IT firms begin sharing internal green practices with clients

- Enterprise Management Quarterly says 2009 is going to be a good year for green IT. Cites IDC report:

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.

- Top CIO challenges for 2009: C Gopalratnam, Chief Innovation Officer, Cisco India

Green IT: Going green marries corporate social responsibility with cost management. CIOs will need to closely assess the cost benefits associated with green practices so they are justified and stay on course.

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