Data center power and cooling projects are an important part of environmentally friendly initiatives, but IT needs to become more involved to properly support "green" objectives in the business at large, according to research by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

In its report "IT Powers Green Business," ESG recommends organizations adopt a holistic green business/IT approach to proactively link planning for green business requirements to information management and data center infrastructure investments.

The most popular green projects being implemented worldwide are not led by IT. According to ESG's global survey of 1,000 business and IT executives, the most widely adopted green initiatives are waste reduction via recycling (90 percent); energy conservation and waste reduction via changes to manufacturing and business processes (69 percent); and business partner and supply chain programs that promote efficiency (67 percent).

Initiatives led by IT, or that heavily involve IT, come in further down the list. Forty-five percent of respondents to ESG's survey cited data center/IT power and cooling; telecommuting was mentioned by 41 percent.

According to ESG, senior business leaders who strive to save money and be seen as good corporate citizens champion more than half of corporate green programs. Seventy percent of these executives track the success of their green initiatives by measuring energy cost reductions. By comparison, 40 percent of IT decision makers are likely to judge the success of green programs by tracking how much data center power and cooling requirements can be reduced. Almost as many look at the impact of green initiatives on IT operating expenses. Only 29 percent of IT decision makers report using contributions to line-of-business green success as a key metric.

Business decision makers are failing to see IT as an enabler of green projects outside the data center, ESG found. The demands of green business initiatives have far-reaching implications for IT. Internal metrics and audit systems must be used to track green projects. This information may be fed into compliance and reporting systems. Data generated by partners, suppliers, and customers may need to be accessed. Each of these requirements involves IT building them into infrastructure, applications, and databases.

From an information management perspective, green projects rely on information indexing and search and retrieval capabilities that provide access to current and historical information and support business analysis. Business intelligence tools that can analyze data from across several data sources are paramount for tracking the effectiveness of green initiatives. Information backup and disaster recovery solutions ensure the ability to comply with regulatory compliance requirements.

Data reduction technologies like deduplication can be used to eliminate redundant data and delay the purchase of new storage hardware. Virtual servers and infrastructure, already being used to power green projects in the data center, can extend their benefits to line-of-business initiatives by making it easier for IT to migrate data between platforms according its retrieval needs.

How IBM Can Help
Software and services are both key to developing an IT strategy that supports company-wide green projects. In addition to providing the software and services necessary, IBM has valuable experience with using IT to drive environmentally friendly projects. IBM has reduced emissions and increased efficiency in its own IT operations, and plans to double the computing power in its Green Data Centers without increasing power consumption.

IBM software that can drive successful green projects include process optimization with collaboration tools, information sharing across supply chains and business groups, effective reporting and compliance tools, and modeling software to measure and optimize carbon footprints. IBM Tivoli software can monitor and manage infrastructure, tracking everything from thermal footprints to resource consumption.

Virtualization and information lifecycle management solutions are important parts of any green storage project. As information created, captured, revised, routed, approved, published, and then archived or destroyed, IBM Information Infrastructure software enables quick access to that information, driving storage efficiency.

In some cases, a new data center that's equipped to handle new, energy-efficient hardware is the best way to prepare your infrastructure for green initiatives. But when that's not possible IBM can help organizations gradually change their infrastructure over time.

IBM services that can drive green projects include data center assessments from IBM Global Technology Services. The assessments include server and storage power and cooling trends assessments, data center best practices assessment, thermal analysis and optimization, and storage optimization and integration services.