Template:IDC data Sep-07
From Lauraibm
Full article: Today's “Green T” may not be as Healthy as we Think (27-Aug-07)
Marketing departments at many of the leading manufacturers have been spending more time on using mathematics to support the supposed green initiatives being touted than on making tangible and material engineering changes to the design of their solutions to realize true environmental benefits.
One of the most blatant examples of this practice is where a hardware manufacturer exploits increased disk drive densities and advertises that the new generation of their products are now suddenly dramatically more efficient per unit of storage. While this is an undisputable fact, it does not in fact address the root cause, which is the unmanaged explosion of data being stored.
The problem with using denser IT as an energy efficiency strategy is that companies are being asked to store more data, and for longer periods of time to comply with regulatory demands - so no matter what the storage technology, more data is being created and stored.
Many companies tackle this problem through software, by applying de-duplication, single-instance storage, or compression methods that result in an overall reduction in the amount of data stored. While these software solutions certainly achieve a more measurable and arguably more tangible result, these approaches also do not address the same root cause identified above – the unmanaged explosion of data being stored.
In order to really make a dent in reducing energy consumption, we must work with the creators of content and data. The effort towards data reduction and therefore less reliance on ever increasing storage capacities must be collaborative and universal.
This IDC analyst seems obsessed with data volumes as the cause of all IT-related environmental damage. For instance, 'The wide accessibility of free internet storage and content depots (such as social networks), which IDC forecasts will be a major driver of storage capacities, encourages individuals to generate more content and to leverage the availability of these free resources without much thought towards the collective environmental impact.'
