Energy Efficiency: Round Table

While most of the conversation at ARN’s Sustainable IT roundtable focused on energy efficiency, a critical issue that can’t be forgotten is asset disposal. E-waste is a massive problem around the world and one that’s not easy to contain, Symantec’s Jose Iglesias said.

So how can the channel demonstrate environmental savings to their customers and drive interest in sustainable solutions? ComputerCorp’s Michael van Zoggel said integrators can only do what they can do and what they can measure and justify.

It’s one thing to talk about greening your own infrastructure by better utilising or buying more energy efficient assets, but what happens when those computing resources are being delivered by a third-party provider? Is outsourcing in fact, a way to minimise your carbon impact?

A collection of images and industry expert comments from ARN's sustainable IT roundtable.

Awareness of IT’s environment impact, as well as the enablement role it plays in improving society’s carbon footprint, are now dominant considerations for Australian IT providers and their customers. ARN recently brought together a panel of industry experts to discuss how far we’ve come in the quest for sustainable IT. This roundtable was sponsored by Symantec.

Although heavy-handed messaging has led to a great deal of scepticism in the market, there’s no doubting that environmental concerns are creating serious market opportunities. ARN recently brought together a group of IT industry thought-leaders to talk about myths and margins.

ARN recently brought together a panel of industry experts to discuss a range of datacentre issues.

While there are no silver bullets for current power and cooling issues, Cisco’s datacentre general manager, Dylan Morrison, said partners could help their customers make the best of current environments by looking to consolidate, virtualise and automate wherever possible.

While power and cooling issues in the datacentre are among the biggest in the IT industry today, EMC’s A/NZ president, David Webster, said there’s a view out there among some vendors that the concept of the datacentre will be irrelevant in the future.

One issue put to the panel at ARN’s recent datacentre roundtable was whether the economy was headed into recession and, if so, what impact this could have on IT spending.

Brian Corrigan, ARN (BC): Datacentre power densities are increasing, due to the increased uptake of blade servers and SAN systems, while electricity costs are quickly growing. Is the industry headed for a crisis and, if so, what can be done about it?