23 Oct 2008

Environmental awareness needed on data centres, BCS says

The IT industry is not sufficiently clued up about the impact data centre management is having on the environment, a report has claimed.

IT firms need to improve their knowledge of the tools and methods they could potentially use to both reduce the cost of storing their data and cut carbon emissions, argued the British Computing Society's (BCS's) research report, published this week.

Zahal Limbuwala, chair of the BCS Data Centre specialist group and co-writer of the report, said many firms wrongly estimate the costs of improving energy efficiency within their data centres.

"While money may be needed to make the changes initially, this will be more than recovered by the savings made by using less energy … especially with today's rising energy costs," he said.

Increasing power consumption and carbon emissions are problems the IT profession needs to address, the report suggested.

Tony Crowhurst, Microsoft's UK business intelligence manager, earlier this month argued that a managed data centre helps firms to renew their business plans and achieve success thanks to greater flexibility.