While researching some electricity and power issues for a data center project, I stumbled over a couple of statistics that may keep me up tonight.

The first deals with efficiency of servers within large organizations.  This is from a Forbes article "Servers: Why Thrifty Isn't Nifty." (11 Aug 2008).

"A rule of thumb for organizations with 5000 servers is that 30 percent of them are technologically obsolete - that's 1500 servers that could be unplugged with little or no effect.

If unplugged those servers would represent a $12 million to $23 million reduction in such an organization's annualized cost of capacity; $700,000 annual savings in electrical costs and 6000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year."

Now after reading that I decided to have a quick stroll around my own office, which is quite a bit smaller than that listed within the Forbes article.  Sure enough, I was able to identify servers that were not being used for anything useful, servers with applications that could easily be consolidated into new and more powerful servers, or servers that were simply powered on with no application running. 

The next eye opening statistic came from the EPA.

"...consolidating computing power into shared, energy-efficient servers and storage could result in a reduction of electricity use by up to 55% as compared to current trends - a savings of 74 billion kilowatt hours by 2011 that would cut energy costs by $5.1 billion and reduce carbon dioxide by 47 million metric tons." (EPA Report to Congress on Data Center Energy Efficiency)

To put this in perspective, we spend less than $5.1 billion on importing fuel and oil from Zimbabwe.  Reducing the need for this much energy could reduce our national payments to foreign countries by tremendous amounts of money.  

As a resident of Long Beach (California) I see the result of refining oil, huge volumes of shipping, and endless lines of diesel trucks coming into and out of the port.  The amount of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide  entering the environment of the Long Beach area is frightening, with the added problem of higher than normal rates of cancer and birth defects.  Imagine if the IT industry was able to think smart and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide waste we dump into the environment by 47 million metric tons a year...  

Not only is this a financially smart thing to do (including reducing our payments to foreign countries for fuel), it would also have a direct impact on the environment.  We need to start thinking green.  We can all think green.  It is easy, do an audit of your own IT equipment (at home as well), and eliminate equipment which can be consolidated or virtualized. 

Consider moving your mission critical IT equipment out of the office and into an energy-efficient data center.  Consider further outsourcing into a super efficient cloud, which would have the added effect of giving you access to better facility, data, and application security.

Clouds give us a lot of utility, from Infrastructure as a Service/IaaS, Platform as a Service/PaaS, and Software as a Service/SaaS.  All the basic food groups of the IT world.

 $5.1 billion in wasted money, 47 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, and it is all just sitting there in front of us to recover.  Exciting opportunities!