Green Spending

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and CFO Research Services recently put out a study called “The Next Wave of Green IT,” based on a survey of senior finance and IT executives. The majority of the survey respondents say their company spends at least 5 percent of its IT budget explicitly on green IT initiatives. More than one-third report their spending is at least 15 percent of the IT budget, while 14 percent indicate that at least a quarter of their IT budget is earmarked for these expenditures.

The Deloitte study suggests that the first wave of green IT comprises virtualization, data center infrastructure, power management and new technology on the desktop. The second wave, the study says, will be marked by broader change in processes, behavior and company culture.

On Feb. 10, Google announced its new Google PowerMeter, a tool designed to provide consumers with information about their home energy use in real time. The tool, still in the prototype stage and not yet available to the public, will be free for both private and commercial use.

On Feb. 17, Rackspace is launching a new carbon calculator, developed by NativeEnergy, to help SMBs estimate their carbon footprint to mitigate their environmental impact.

Recent research shows that 40 percent of all IT carbon emissions are generated by desktop PCs—double the amount of data center emissions. Products such as Verdiems Surveyor are designed to improve IT network efficiency by intelligently placing PCs into lower power settings when not in use.

Cisco Systems is expected to launch in February EnergyWise, software that the company says will monitor the energy consumption of electronic devices in the workplace and switch them off when idle.

Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics AX is designed to help execs and IT administrators reduce their company’s carbon footprint and save money by monitoring everything from energy costs and consumption to greenhouse gas emissions. A demo of the dashboard can be found at http://mediadl.microsoft.com/MediaDL/WWW/D/dynamics/enviornmental/DashboardDemoLow.wmv.

VMware recently launched its first free, open-source virtual desktop client. The client will enable IT managers to host all of their companies’ user desktops in the data center with the ability to provision computing power and storage space as needed. The client can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-client/.

The Green Grid consortium published its first data center energy-efficiency reporting guidelines: PUE (power usage effectiveness) is a ratio of total facility power divided by IT equipment power; DCIE (data center infrastructure efficiency) equals IT equipment power times 100, divided by total facility power. The bigger the number, the better.

Advanced Micro Devices rolled out in February five new Phenom II processors for high-end desktops and gaming PCs, including a set of energy-efficient tri-core and quad-core chips.