Symantec study reveals Global 2000 struggle to adopt Green Data Centres
ConvergenceAsia staff
03/12/2007

Global infrastructure software company Symantec has announced the findings of its worldwide Green Data Centre report, a supplement to the company’s recently released 2007 State of the Data Centre study.

Nearly three-fourths of respondents state they have interest in adopting a strategic green data centre initiative; however, only one in seven have been successful at implementing a green data centre. Symantec defines a green data centre as having increased efficiencies in energy usage, power consumption, space utilisation and reduction of polluting energy sources.

“Data centre managers are running out of space and energy costs are skyrocketing, so they are motivated to ‘green’ the data centre for cost reduction and efficiency purposes,” said Darric Hor, general manager of Singapore, Symantec.

The report findings indicate that cost savings and constant business pressure to maintain performance and meet increasingly aggressive service level agreements are the main reasons for implementing many green strategies. “For them it is beyond environmental concerns – it is about meeting business goals and reducing costs,” he added.

Data centre managers indicate that software designed for server consolidation and server virtualisation are the most popular solutions in creating energy efficiencies, with 51 and 47 per cent indicating plans to consolidate and virtualise servers respectively. In fact, 68 per cent of respondents indicate that reducing energy played a role in their decision to implement virtualisation and server consolidation.

Respondents also revealed that most data centre managers are at least planning to implement power management products, with 30 per cent implementing on selected equipment, 13 per cent on equipment throughout the data centre, and 34 per cent either planning to use or currently evaluating.

Slightly more than a third of companies based in the US said they have corporate green policies, while almost 60 per cent of companies from Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) and 55 per cent of European companies have them.

Server consolidation and virtualisation implementations are more prevalent in US-based companies and surpass implementations in other parts of the world. In contrast, while there are fewer APJ organisations currently implementing consolidation/virtualisation strategies in their data centres, the majority of IT managers (88 per cent) from this region who do, cite energy consumption and energy reduction as the primary reason.

The Green Data Centre report is a companion study specifically focusing on energy efficiency issues in the data centre. The two-pronged study includes an online survey fielded in 14 countries, in-person focus groups in Hong Kong, London, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo, one-on-one telephone interviews in Mumbai and Singapore, and a teleconference focus group in Canada.

A total of 77 data centre managers participated in focus groups and telephone interviews, while 800 data centre managers completed the online survey.

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