Corporate sustainability initiatives are growing rapidly in scope and levels of financial commitment. According to Panel Intelligence’s Quarterly Sustainability Tracking Study, despite the poor economy, 80% of the 65 corporate sustainability executives at Fortune 500 companies surveyed said they will be maintaining or increasing funding for green initiatives. As businesses and public sector organizations incorporate sustainability into their operations through “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR) initiatives, they are looking to reduce energy usage, recycle, and reduce their overall environmental impact in areas such as printing, employee commuting levels, and even IT operations – especially the data center. For example, many organizations have already embraced virtualized data centers to increase server utilization, as well as embarked on replacing old IT infrastructure with energy-efficient, recyclable infrastructures.

Green IT supports all of these priorities and can ultimately boost the bottom line – particularly when you focus on “greening” your data centers. Historically, companies have deployed one server per application, which has driven rapid data center growth and increased data center complexity, management costs, and power demands. About 40% of total data center costs are energy related, so reducing power usage by even a small percentage can result in substantial cost savings. Power is needed to not only run data center devices, but also to cool them.  According to the IDC, “Air conditioners, power converters and transmission use almost half of the electricity in the datacenter, and IDC estimates that data centre energy cost will be higher than equipment costs by 2015.”

What does this mean for your business? If your company can become more energy efficient through green IT initiatives, you can cut your energy costs and achieve significant bottom-line savings. Looking ahead, every percent decrease in your power usage will likely result in even higher savings and competitiveness, as all evidence points to the formation of a perfect storm on the energy front that threatens the sustainability of nearly every business and public sector organization dependent on its data centers.

Getting Started
It’s true that the vision of proactively managing data center energy usage and costs is, for most companies and public sector organizations, a forward-looking vision. Most organizations just aren’t there yet.

But the fact is, as the “perfect storm” of energy-related trends converges upon your organization, any steps you take to reign in energy use, costs, and CO2 emissions today will lead to greater long-term competitiveness and sustainability. By investing in an innovative Data Center Performance Management (DCPM) solution within your data centers, you can leap-frog ahead of your competitors in terms of your ability to realize the significant cost savings that Green IT can deliver. And you can realize these benefits incredibly quickly; nlyte’s customers typically have a fully-implemented DCPM solution deployed within a month, enabling them to immediately identify capacity and energy savings opportunities that directly benefit the bottom line.

For more information about nlyte’s DCPM Suite, download our white paper titled, “Moving the Data Center from Chaos to Control: Best Practices in Data Center Performance Management with Integrated Processes and Technologies,”. This paper explains how DCPM addresses the complex challenges data center managers face today and explains how the nlyte DCPM Suite provides an integrated, complete solution that helps companies move from data center chaos to data center control, quickly and efficiently.