RENO, Nevada – A recent survey by Voltaire Ltd. found that although CIOs and senior IT executives overwhelmingly believe that a green datacenter will become mission critical, many lack the budget to implement green initiatives.

Nearly 90 percent of executives surveyed said they believed that greening their datacenters would be crucial to meeting their companies’ business objectives in 2009, and 57 percent said they believed going green gave them a competitive advantage. Yet, 76 percent do not have a committed budget for a greening policy. The survey queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives that attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, officials said.

Voltaire provides grid backbone solutions for networked computing in the next generation datacenter. The company focuses on improving datacenter efficiency by enabling grid computing deployments on commodity server and storage offerings.

“It appears from these findings that senior IT management is still in the planning phases, and they will need to prioritize funding for these important greening initiatives,” said Patrick Guay, executive vice president, global sales, and general manager of Voltaire, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Voltaire Ltd. “Our numbers show that for enterprises, the return on a green datacenter fabric infrastructure using currently available technology is in the millions of dollars. For example, a Fortune 500 company with five datacenters worldwide, and 3,000 servers per datacenter, can save approximately $7.4 million per year.”

Additional findings from the Voltaire survey include:

43 percent of respondents would implement a green datacenter in the next two years;

Reducing power and cooling costs/requirements was ranked by 52 percent of the respondents as the most important benefit gained by going green in the datacenter.

The next most important benefit was helping the environment (37 percent), followed by increased utilization (32 percent), reducing real estate/space requirements (28 percent), and reducing/consolidating equipment needed (27 percent);

Among the respondents who said that going green gives their companies a competitive advantage, 72 percent clarified that it provides a more efficient and cost-effective infrastructure so they can invest more in new technologies.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst, The Enderle Group, said economic realities are having a big impact on green initiatives.

“Even for those that save power where that savings isn’t a benefit for IT (charged out or centrally billed as overhead) the projects don’t have the backing they need at the moment,” he said. “It is unfortunate, but for most companies ‘green’ is a nice to have and in the current economic times things that are a must have aren’t getting funding because there are simply not enough funds.”

Enderle added the market would recover.

“When it does and where there is no extra cost, green vendors are still likely to be favored,” he said.

This column was written by Liam Lahey of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

a>>