Barney's Blog

Blog archive

Energy Crisis Forcing Action

Many believe in environmental causes. But convincing capitalist bosses to change the business to save trees, fleas and bees is tougher than getting Ann Coulter to stop dyeing her hair (or shut up).

For IT, green computing isn't as much about saving the environment as saving green -- as in dollars. Now that energy costs are increasing and budgets are falling faster than Hanson's album sales, IT and their businesses' bosses are getting serious about green. That is, at least, according to reseller CDW who recently polled IT pros.

Virtualization may be the best way to save on power. You can literally turn a single server into 12 separate machines and the increase in energy use is marginal. The problem with most existing virt solutions is there's a huge investment in new hardware and software -- and after that, you can start saving dough. The spending might be entirely logical, but CFOs all around the world are still choking on these proposals.

For an increasing number of people, this math does work and virtualization adoption is increasing faster than a Caster Semanaya 800-meter run (or press leak). CDW reports that server virtualization adoption went from 35 percent last year to 30 percent this year.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 14, 2009


Featured