Rackable Systems, BPM Forum Team Up to Spread the Green IT Word

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PALO ALTO, Calif. -- After conducting a pilot survey of IT professionals and finding widespread interest in green IT issues, the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum and Rackable Systems have announced plans to open a new sustainable IT project to the wider business community.

Think Eco-Logical is the mantra driving the program, and it aims to educate IT professionals and business executives on the benefits and opportunities available to companies of all sizes by incorporating efficiency goals into IT refreshes.

Eco-Logical as a name highlights the two benefits to green IT: environmental savings and economic ones. As we reported yesterday, Hewlett-Packard expects to save a billion dollars a year through its IT overhaul, and many companies are seeing benefits similar in scale -- if not in size -- from a host of green IT plans.

In launching Think Eco-Logical, Rackable Systems has published a white paper introducing the ideas as a "new IT mandate for eco-consciousness" and business sense. In the white paper, the groups lay out the two main threads of the project:

By addressing internal and external IT sustainability imperatives, organizations can reduce power usage and optimize facility utilization, thereby satisfying the social responsibility of reducing carbon footprints and improving environmental conditions.

By focusing on business drivers and achieving IT efficiencies, corporations can significantly reduce costs and boost performance and flexibility.

The Think Eco-Logical campaign is kicking off with two industry surveys, both examining commitments and goals toward improving the environmental performance of IT. The surveys are aimed at two separate sectors: one for the media and entertainment industries, and one for the internet and e-commerce industries.

Both of these sectors are seeing hardware and energy costs skyrocketing as a result of ever-increasing demand for data storage and delivery needs. And although some companies in these arenas have made commitments to green IT, a http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/reportcard/article.asp?parentid=1361 study from UCLA found that despite those commitments, California’s film industry is the state’s second largest polluter, with only the oil industry having a greater negative impact on the environment.

The launch of Think Eco-Logical follows on the heels of two other campaigns that promise to make data centers in particular much more energy- and environmentally friendly. Last week, the European Commission announced a code of conduct for green data centers, while earlier in November the U.S.-based Green Grid proposed a "mile-per-gallon" metric for data centers. Both are signals of a broader industry-wide shift in thinking about green IT as a business benefit as much if not more than a way to boost a company's CSR goals.

Full details about the Think Eco-Logical campaign are online at http://www.rackable.com/thinkecological.