Study: End Users Confused About Green IT

More than 60 percent of end users are confused and unsure what to buy when it comes to green IT solutions, said Rakesh Kumar, a research vice president with Gartner. Other issues include knowing what technology is even available today vs. what will be available in the future, and how quickly the savings through such technology can offset their costs, according to Gartner.

End users want to lower their energy costs and they believe technology can help do that, but they need proof that new equipment can deliver cost savings, Kumar said. Solution providers, he added, are in a prime position to accurately educate customers and provide the solutions.

"That message is paramount to the reseller community. [Green technology] has to be able to provide true efficiency gains," Kumar said. "People will spin there on appropriate green technology. What they will not do, is be seduced into spending money on technology that does not deliver value, particularly financial value with a 12-to 18-month payback period."

Gartner breaks down green IT into short-term, midterm and long-term activities. The research firm expects end users to focus on eight green areas during the next 24 months: data center facilities design, advanced cooling technologies, modeling and monitoring software, virtualization and server consolidation, processor design and server efficiency, energy management for the office environment, integrated energy management for the software environment, and combined heat and power.

Midterm green IT activities, about two to five years out will revolve around green IT procurement, asset life cycle programs, environmental labeling of servers, video conferencing, changing people's behavior, green accounting, green legislation in data centers and corporate social responsibility.

Longer-term activities, up to 20 years out, are causing some of the "greenwash" confusion for end users, according to Gartner. For example, users are unsure whether carbon-trading programs will become the norm or whether it's possible to recycle energy from data centers.

Solution providers can help clear up some of the confusion, Kumar said. For example, they can tell end users that some of the technology is not where it needs to be yet, he said.

"It takes two to four years before the base-level infrastructure is a balance between traditional compute performance and energy efficiency," Kumar said. "It takes that long for severs, storage, networking boxes, to go through design changes to balance out their core requirements and be energy efficient. For products to get to that level, there has to be a change in design criteria," Kumar said.

Most large vendors have a clear understanding that they need to change the way they design products, Kumar said.

"They know if they do not change the way they design, they potentially miss out on business. It's as simple as that. Data center energy issues have seen projects delayed, the acquisition of technology deferred. They are very aware if they don't do something, business will be lost," he said.

Solution providers looking to bring green IT to their customers should start by helping organizations manage their assets more effectively, Kumar said. That is accomplished through server consolidation, virtualization, asset management software and other tools that can help them determine where their energy is going.

"The next stage is the emerging market for software management tools. It could be specific to a specific piece of hardware or it could be agnostic. It will allow the user to regulate the energy flow to a particular server," Kumar said.

Francis Poeta, president and chief technical architect of P&M Computers, a Cliffside Park, N.J.-based solution provider that provides green IT solutions, agrees that some end users are confused about what to do.

"From a personal perspective, they have that understanding. But from a corporate sense, that's where the confusion is. How can they know how much electricitiy on a given floor is being utilized by the systems. And even if they could conceive that, how could they know how much air conditioning is being added because of the systems," Poeta said. "It's very confusing. It's a bunch of grains of sand that add up to a sand dune."

Thus far, P&M Computers has focused on green IT in the server room because that's easier to explain to customers than at the desktop level, Poeta said. "If you're going from 20 servers or 50 servers down to four, there has to be power savings," he said.

But even then, it's not an easy analysis because some older servers may have processors optimized for 10 percent utilization, drawing less power, while newer servers in virtualized environments may run at 60 percent utilization, drawing more power. All told, green IT offers a tremendous opportunity for solution providers, Poeta said.

"You can say we have a better take [on the environment]," he said. "[We can say] here's all the claims of what green computing is and here's how it impacts your particular business."