Four reasons to cultivate greener IT

…Right now, energy supply looks to be struggling to keep up with demand. A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory concludes that, thanks to the industry shift to low-end servers, global power consumption has doubled since 2000 to more than 123 million kw/hours. Power demands are expected to increase by 40 percent come 2010 — and that’s assuming that per-server power consumption remains at 2005 rates.

Or consider what Gartner proclaimed at the end of 2006: Half of datacenters will run out of power by 2008. As explained by Timothy Morgan at ITJungle:

“Gartner did not, by the way, literally mean that datacenters would go dark in two years after blowing some fuses or melting under their own heat. What Gartner did say was that by the end of 2008, 50 percent of the datacenters in the world would not have enough power to meet the power and cooling requirements of the high-density computing gear that vendors are increasingly peddling.”

Although this prediction doesn’t mean it’s time to get hysterical, or start training an army of hamsters to power your server farm, it should certainly be a compelling reason to start looking at ways to conserve energy.

InfoWorld