Green IT Puts Green in Your Pockets

It's a shame when environmental investments don't pass ROI hurdles. The fuel savings of hybrid cars for example, often don't outweigh their higher costs -- and the US government is still stingy about making up the margin in the form of tax credits.

But when it comes to powering IT data centers, going green is a smarter investment than staying with the status quo.

IT managers like to run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server (also known as virtualization) because it's cost effective and efficient. But virtualization can also reduce power bills by more than half. Not bad considering power consumes 40 to 50 percent of a data center's operating costs.

But it doesn't stop with servers. It's been said you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much storage (the latter increased fourfold in the past two years alone). While lots of information is legally required to be archived, a process called "data minimization" helps you unload information you're storing, but will never need. Another way to save, considering that your storage devices consume 25% of your power bill.

Then of course, there's PCs - which have low compute demands (about 10 percent each day). Thanks to AMD and Intel, new chips produce twice the power with half the energy.

And do you really need air conditioning? Of course you do, but consider water cooling for your server racks, another big saver.

Experts at Gartner, Stanford University and Jason Lochhead (from a company called Data Return) say just about any data center can pocket green in their pockets by checking out energy efficient techniques all across the board from servers to storage to PCs. Most companies can save $1million or more. What better reason to go green?