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It's official. Effective today, "green" used in reference to IT and data centers is no longer a first-mover, early-adopter market associated with "tree-hugging" environmentalism. The same people who were wary of the term "green" four years ago when the Institute held its first Symposium on IT's growing energy consumption now have openly embraced it.

The 2006 Symposium audience was about 300 technical managers concerned with the unprecedented stresses on data center power and cooling infrastructure systems.

By contrast, in April 2009, over 1,500 people embraced "green" by registering to participate in the Uptime Institute's Research Symposium and Exposition 2009: LEAN, CLEAN & GREEN, and almost a thousand participated in the conference sessions. Delegates came from 40 US states and 28 countries (compared with seven countries in 2006), not counting those who "beamed in" for the innovative global Cisco TelePresence video conference.

Underwriting support has almost quadrupled in the last four years: in 2009, 74 companies participated as underwriting sponsors and exhibitors, all of them explicitly presenting green products, services, and solutions. The Symposium audience and the sponsoring technology companies made this year's Symposium the largest global Green IT event to date.

We suspect the leading driver still may not be business concerns over the ever-growing carbon footprint of enterprise computing. Perhaps it should be, but we would guess that what has corporate managers concerned are 1) the rapidly escalating operating costs to business of electric power to meet growing computing demand, and 2) the capital costs of new data centers. Regardless of the impetus, the end result is the same: Green is eco-friendly. Green is profit. Both are good.

Delegates at Symposium were insatiably serious about the knowledge sharing that would help them begin to immediately address the concerns of energy consumption, capacity and the demand on the national power grid. This year a number of regional electric power utilities were present to share their concerns and incentives for the enterprise computing user community to improve efficiency.

But IT energy consumption requires nothing short of a transformational improvement.

It's time that the nation's business and government leaders publicly commit their organizations to make enterprise IT and data center energy efficiency a strategic-level priority and set aggressive and quantitative goals for rapid improvement.

Here's why: rapidly growing data center energy consumption is threatening our economy, our national energy security, and our environment. The cost of energy—both in its consumption by IT operations and in its capital investments in new data center facilities, as a consequence of unbridled growth—is straining the nation's energy grid and causing a dramatic impact on the economic productivity of IT.

The serious national and global consequences arising from escalating data center computing energy consumption are a surprise to almost everyone unfamiliar with the issue. Data centers will consume 3% of our electrical energy by 2011—triple what it was in 2000. If ever there was a single issue in our national energy budget that could be easily fixed, it's the amount of energy consumed by data centers. Moreover, every dollar spent on bricks and mortar to expand data center power capacity reduces money available for much more productive use, such as adding to the computing and network capability necessary to enable the global knowledge economy.

IT growth historically has been (and will continue to be) a major driver of economic growth and productivity, as well as a foundational infrastructure that enables both public and private institutions to achieve significant energy reduction throughout their organizations.

While technology innovation has provided enormous gains in IT energy efficiency, the improvements haven't kept pace with the increase in sheer computational volume. Companies are now faced with the prospect of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand their data centers. The result is a huge drag on the benefits of additional IT investment, and this drag will directly affect how much money can be spent on additional IT technology.

The capital cost of data centers is driven by the electricity consumed by IT, so implementing energy efficiency improvements is key to controlling both operating and capital costs, improving productivity, and maintaining the health of the entire IT industry-and indirectly, our IT-driven national and global economy.

The rate of IT energy increase also has serious implications for national energy security and carbon emissions:

• Just keeping up with increases in national data center electricity demand requires construction of two large-scale (500 MW) electric power plants per year, or 20 plants over the next decade at a cost of $20B to $40B.
• If power for these plants is from fossil-fuel steam generation (the only economically and technologically viable at-scale source currently), the carbon emissions from these plants will negatively affect climate change and the health of society for decades to come.
• Data centers consume between 8 and 35% of total energy used by non-manufacturing, information-intensive companies, making the data center the single largest and most concentrated contributor to enterprise carbon footprint.

The US EPA in its August 2007 Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency (Public Law 109-431) identified opportunities to reduce data center energy consumption by up to 55 percent using already-available technologies. Recent federal economic recovery R&D funding through the DOE paves the way for even greater advancements. Despite the EPA Report and general industry agreement that dramatic change is both possible and desirable, our annual measurements of energy consumption increases from 2000 to 2008 among many of the largest data centers in the country confirm that the ever-upward trend continues. Businesses (and government data center operators, too) are generally not taking advantage of what is already known.

We need decisive action from corporate and government leadership to implement already known and readily available technology solutions and engineering practices that have been shown to have positive and rapid paybacks. Some steps are as simple as unplugging IT equipment that is still running but no longer needed. (In some data centers, 15 to 30 percent of deployed equipment is "comatose"-doing no useful work but still turned on 24x7).

Unfortunately, many senior executives still don't know that increasing IT energy efficiency is highly profitable and, based purely on business self-interest, should be a high organizational priority. Because of a lack of senior executive leadership, our nation has continued with business as usual and our escalating, unsustainable trajectory of IT energy consumption is largely unchanged.

But that's about to change. Part of entering the era of Green IT 2.0—the Second Wave—is recognizing that now it's about business: it's mainstream and cannot be ignored. Decision-makers are now open to listening and learning.

We encourage each of you to take action on this issue. At Symposium, you learned solutions that can be planned and implemented immediately as well as strategies for longer term efforts. It's time to be bold. Speak up! Take the actions you can in your company, form collaborative groups to work on common problems, and seek senior management buy-in for your activities.

Read the Green Enterprise IT Awards Finalists and Best-in-Class white papers. You'll learn how other user organizations are getting this work done now and achieving great results (both in very large and more modest initiatives). Read the work of the Institute and the contributions by the underwriters to broaden your knowledge-base. Tell others. The time for change is now.

Will you take action? We hope so. That's why we do this.

Sincerely, on behalf of the Uptime Institute and its individual and corporate members,