Green Audits
According to IDC, the costs of server management, including power and cooling costs, will outpace the costs of buying these servers by a factor of four times and eight times respectively.*
In addition to this, the amount of data held by companies is growing exponentially but resources are not. By 2011, the world’s stored information is set to double every 11 hours. 
The main contributors to rising costs of infrastructure management are:
- Rapid growth in the number of IT assets, resulting in server sprawl, which in turn limits the flexibility of the IT infrastructure to meet new demands,
- Low average utilization of these physical resources, which is a result of running on dedicated systems, which results in poor return-on-asset,
- Added complexity in managing the increased number of systems.
The tell-tale signs that you may need to carry out a green audit on your infrastructure are as follows:
- Do you have a large number of single-workload servers?
- Are you facing a major technology refresh?
- Are you under pressure to reduce your IT budget?
- Are you paying too much for hardware maintenance?
- Can your servers handle seasonal or unexpected peaks in demand from business units and customers?
Key benefits
Benefits of a Green Audit analysis early in your planning include:
- Establishing a business and technical justification for pursuing makeover initiatives within the environment,
- Helping establish a financial roadmap on the timeline and effort required to get there,
- Identifying major technical challenges early on and developing mitigation strategies, and
- Helping benchmark the current environment with industry peers.
* SOURCE: IDC, 'The Impact of Power and Cooling on Data Center Infrastructure', IDC May 2006
The Bell Micro Technical Team have the skills and capability to carry out Green Audits.
If you are interested in delivering a Green Audit please contact your Bell Micro IBM Account Manager for more information.