Roel Castelein, EMEA Marketing Chair said:
“Whilst organisations are always looking to maximise their CSR, by not implementing clear definitions of what constitutes energy efficiency, many IT leaders are failing to tap into the contribution that data centres could provide to achieve these results. This lack of definition also makes it difficult for organisations to measure and monitor how the data centres could be improved over time to become greener.”
In addition to these findings, the research identified virtualisation as the most common energy efficient strategy, with 42 percent of respondents adopting this method. Virtualisation has become a popular option for organisations recently, as they continue to benefit from the lower number of physical servers - especially those running for prolonged periods of time - reducing the overall energy required to power and cool them.
The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing resource efficiency in IT and data centres, conducted the research in October 2015. The survey studied responses from 150 IT decision makers at end-user organisations, including companies who run their own data centres as well as colocation data centre providers, from across the UK, France, and Germany on data centre resource efficiency.
Key findings include:
- 88 percent of respondents say that the design and operations of their data centres are an important part of CSR strategy;
- 43 percent do not define energy efficiency objectives, casting doubts over both how they are monitored and their CSR strategy contribution;
- 42 percent of respondents claim to use virtualisation making this the most popular strategy;
Roel concluded:
“While it’s encouraging to see the adoption in virtualisation strategies, an understanding that defining energy efficiency objectives of data centres can positively impact an organisation’s CSR strategy is key. By working in unison with both existing and new members, we hope to spread the importance of implementing clearer definitions and the potential for both data centres and CSR to work in tandem, rather than being viewed as separate strategies.”
