The Lean & Green program provides research and resources for companies seeking to conserve power.NEW YORK—Add yet another special interest group to a growing cadre of teams focused on helping make data centers become more eco-friendly.
The Business Performance Management Forum, in a partnership with storage vendor BlueArc, launched a program on Sept. 25 called Lean & Green: Reducing IT Energy Drain for Business Gain.
Lean & Green, based in Palo Alto, Calif., joins such established entities as the Environmental Protection Agencys Energy Star program, The Green Grid alliance, of Portland, Ore., and AFCOM, a data center user group based in Orange, Calif.
The initiative will work to educate CIOs about ways their IT organizations can benefit the environment, reduce power usage and lower costs through more efficient computing and data storage practices.
Guided by an advisory board of noted environmental, business, and technology authorities and funded heavily by sponsoring storage vendor BlueArc, the Lean & Green program aims to create a body of information about the issues and opportunities presented by green computing, offer ways to address the accelerating energy demands and rampant waste of the data center and create methods to increase IT yield and data productivity.
"Our goal is for Lean & Green to become a comprehensive and trusted knowledge exchange and best practices source," said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the BPM Forum, the parent group of Lean & Green.
"Lean & Green will examine all facets of this critical issue of environmental computing, foster communication and disseminate reliable information that executives need to make a positive impact on their companies and on the environment," said Neale-May.
To read more about finding economic green in green computing, click here.
The program will address the crisis of mass power consumption in the corporate data center, estimated by the EPA to be as much as 1.5 percent of all power used in the United States in a year. Energy expenditures and requirements have doubled in the last five years, and computer disposal is the fastest growing type of waste in the world, according to top Stanford University researchers and Greenpeace.
"Organizations must embrace the need to improve the environmental impact of data systems and facilities," said Steve Daheb, BlueArc senior vice president of marketing and business development, in San Jose, Calif.
"The beauty is that they can now do this while maintaining very high performance, reducing datacenter utilization and lowering costs at the same time."
Lean & Greens first project is a new white paper titled "Lean & Green: Taming the Data Center Colossus: How to Achieve Dramatic Environmental and Business Benefits." The paper has input from BlueArc, Dell, Enterprise Strategy Group and others.
Lean & Green has commissioned a survey of IT professionals and executives to measure and quantify their current needs, concerns and attitudes as they weigh decisions about investing in green technology and downsizing the data center.
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