Survey says: Increase IT Efficiency or Risk Worldwide Brownouts

A new survey by Siemens AG examines IT efficiency attitudes and practices of Fortune 2000 companies and reveals that while many companies feel increased efficiency is important, most are unsure how to go about it.

While 87 percent of companies surveyed think energy efficiency is important, only 48 percent have goals for improving their efficiency, and even fewer have actually begun to take action. Of particular concern is the rapidly growing number of datacenters, says Siemens.

Datacenters in the U.S. use more electricity than all U.S. color TVs put together, and their energy consumption rate is skyrocketing at 12 percent a year. Ken Cornelius, chief executive officer of Siemens One, said, "If we do not start looking closely at our data centers now, 70 percent of the world's data centers will have tangible system disruptions by 2011 and the systems will experience world-wide brown outs over the course of the next five years."

So why aren't companies more invested in improving their data center energy efficiency?

• 72 percent said the size of the investment was the primary barrier.
• 38 percent said lack of specific information on the ROI for making changes.
• 38 percent cited server down time required to implement changes.

• 34 percent were concerned about running legacy software on new systems.

Other concerns revealed in the finding:

• 27 percent worry a "brown out" or exceeding process capacity will affect their data centers.
• 27 percent are worried about losing data.
• 15 percent worry about aging facilities.
• 10 percent are concerned about high energy costs.

America’s servers and data centers consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, or twice as much as in 2000, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.