Hardly a day goes by without some expert offering energy efficiency advice to the IT world, and there is plenty of attention being paid to data centers as part of this. But a new Gartner survey finds that despite all the talk, only seven percent of the 130 infrastructure and operations managers surveyed said their top priorities include procurement of green products and pushing vendors to create more energy efficient technology.

"Although the green IT and data center energy issue has been on the agenda for some time now, many managers feel that they have to deal with more immediate concerns before focusing attention on their suppliers' products," Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, said in a news release.

And he adds, "In other words, even if more energy efficient servers or energy management tools were available, data center and IT managers are far more interested in internal projects like consolidation, rationalization and virtualization."

Nearly half of the respondents have not yet considered metrics for energy management, according to the survey. Gartner issued recommendations for improving energy management. They include:

• Raise the temperature at the server inlet point up to 71 to 75 Fahrenheit, but use sensors to monitor potential hotspots.
• Create a dashboard of data center energy-efficient metrics that provide data to different levels of IT and financial management.
• Improve use of the existing infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization before building out or buying additional data center floor space.

For more on the energy-efficient data center:
- see this CIO.com article

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