For example, as sensor technologies become sophisticated and inexpensive, they represent additional components available for designing solutions. We are going to see many control system solutions across many types of processes as a result of this technology evolution—resource consumption representing just one example. Finally, virtualization technologies are making it possible to drive asset utilization up substantially. With these technologies reaching a level of maturity for large-scale production use, IT can drive efficiency and lower energy consumption.

David Douglas: I agree with Marv, but think those are probably the least common drivers right now. Practical power and cooling issues, and cost and availability of power are the more common rationales. I’ve only talked to a dozen or so large companies who are truly making decisions based on environmental concerns—though the list is growing. The good news is that no matter which of the reasons drive you to reduce power and get more efficient, the environment wins.

I also very much agree with Jon’s point about needing to align energy and capital costs. The amount of energy required to power $1 worth of computing equipment has been steadily rising. Ten years ago the amount spent on energy was a small fraction of the amount spent on equipment, so it’s not a surprise that we see the spending disconnect. Today these numbers are getting closer, and if trends continue, they will pass each other sometime in the future. So the discussion about who pays has been on track to become an issue, independent of the whole green movement.

Koomey: HP has the latest published graphs on the cost of infrastructure per dollar of IT equipment, and the data shows that power and cooling infrastructure costs passed IT costs in 2004. That means that for every dollar expended on IT equipment, there’s more than one dollar spent on the infrastructure to run it.

Douglas: That’s interesting. I was pursuing a slightly different point, which was that the actual energy cost to power the systems plus the infrastructure is approaching the depreciation cost of the equipment on an annualized basis. I have some IDC data that shows the curves crossing sometime soon after 2010. [IDC is a sister company to CIO.com’s publisher.] Since this is dependent on the local price of electricity, the belief is that the curves have already crossed in some expensive locales.

John Davies: David is correct when he says there are only a few companies making decisions based on environmental concerns.