Going green? Cut down on electric bills

If you want to be "green" in your office, you're going to have to do more than use recycled materials. Being green means paying attention to how much your IT shop is spending on electricity and doing something about it. "There's a lack of information, [IT managers] don't know how much power they're using, and there's a lack of incentive for them to save power," Dennis Szubert, principle analyst at Quocirca, told Silicon.com. He said that data center managers would take more responsibility for how much electricity they are using if they are given more information about what their hardware consumes over the course of a 24-hour period. A survey of 300 businesses in Europe and the U.S. found that only 43 percent of respondents said they have a formal carbon footprint reduction policy. Only 35 percent said they pass that policy on to IT departments as a formal objective. If you want to make your data center more environmentally friendly, a company needs to put in incentives to make it happen, according to Quocirca.

For more on IT and electric bills:
- See this Silicon.com article