With all the fanfare for Al Gore, receiving an Oscar, Emmy and the Nobel Peace Prize all in 2007, one would think that global environmental concerns rank No. 1 on the list of "corporate social responsibility."

Unfortunately, economics and internal operations have often overridden environmental concerns in the past. But now, green cannot be ignored.

An obvious place to start is the IT data center. In 2006, according to an Environmental Protection Agency study, US data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of US$4.5 billion. That is equivalent to the average power needs of 5.8 million households for a year.

On a global basis, 1.8 percent of all power inclusive of cooling is used by the data center. That extrapolates to a corporate cost of almost US$8 billion -- with almost 80 percent of that power being wasted!

Numerous studies exist on power consumption in the data center. An Emerson Network Power study found data-center power consumption broke down this way: 50 percent by air conditioning, 26 percent by servers/storage, 11percent by communications equipment, 10 percent by power-distribution equipment and 3 percent for the lighting.

A 2006 white paper from the American Power Conversion Corporation indicates that power consumption is approximately distributed 48 percent in cooling systems (33 percent chiller/cooling tower, 4 percent humidifier and 11 percent air conditioning); 30 percent IT equipment; and 22 percent electrical systems (16 percent UPS, 4 percent power distribution, 1 percent switching and 1 percent lighting).

Extensive research by IBM has uncovered a number of not too obvious environmental facts. With respect to data center equipment, one would expect storage to be the candidate for the "bad guy" award. The reality is that tape and disk storage produce the lowest heat load (watts/equipment per square foot).

Next on the list is 2U and larger compute servers, then high-density communications equipment, then 1U blade and custom compute servers and finally the "worst offender" -- extreme-density communications equipment. (That category includes routers/switches, PBXs, and appliances like firewalls and load balancers.)

IBM is not alone in identifying communications equipment as the worst offender in the data center. An independent study by storage vendor Hitachi Data Systems indicates that data-center power usage is distributed 25 percent for storage, 25 percent for servers and 50 percent for communications equipment.

Almost all major IT vendors including IBM and Cisco< have green initiatives aimed at the data center. Although similar in some respects, their approaches are markedly different.

One can understand why Cisco focuses on its product strengths to make green customer recommendations for virtualization; removal/replacement of older equipment; and equipment consolidation of discrete firewalls, SSL offload and load-balancing devices onto its switch/router platforms.

Internally, Cisco has established a goal to deliver 90 percent efficient power supplies for its equipment. It has also instituted global advice services for customers on how to improve data-center environmental efficiency using a variety of techniques from the simple -- "plug up unwanted holes" -- to the complex -- "district cooling" (for example, using local sources such as outside air for cooling).

IBM has taken another tactic using innovative analyses and technology to focus on the total data-center problem, beginning with a suite of services to measure, audit/diagnose, build, cool, virtualize and manage the green data center. To accomplish these services, IBM has developed tools for hot-spot measurement; power trending; server/storage power efficiency, variable storage assessment; etc.

To accelerate the green initiative, IBM has coupled these services with ROI-based recommendations. Using its own data centers and customers as test cases, it has uncovered a "gold mine" of (less than two-year ROI) hidden cost savings by greening the complete data center, including power distribution, cooling, lighting and IT equipment.