Slideshow: 5 Tools to Prevent Energy Waste in the Data Center

"The downturn has resulted in green IT trends for data centres, client devices and asset lifecycle management, as well as re-shaped return on investment (ROI) models," Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Datamonitor and the author of the study, Can Green IT Bloom in an Economic Downturn.

Green IT that eliminates the need for capital expenditure, such as data centres virtualisation, data centre design and layout, and asset lifecycle management, has become increasingly important as IT budgets remain constrained. While IT budgets are likely to remain flat this year, cost-effective green IT is likely to increase in demand, according to Datamonitor.

Restrained IT budgets also mean that green ROI models are becoming compulsory and shorter. In order for green IT vendors to satisfy new ROI requirements, they are being forced to develop more efficient and greener IT solutions.

Also, organisations that face critical data centre limitations, such as a shortage of floor or rack space, are looking to software or outsourcing alternatives to building new data centres or upgrading existing facilities. Those alternatives include IT leasing, managed services, virtualisation software, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

However, the greatest demand for data centres green IT will be for data centre virtualisation, according to Datamonitor. Data centre virtualisation is becoming more holistic, whereby various assets, including servers, storage, communications infrastructure, and business applications, are being virtualised across a pool of data centre hardware.