As more organizations go green, one of the most important places to look for energy savings: the IT department. 

IT infrastructure takes up a large chunk of organizations’ energy budgets, particularly when it comes to powering and cooling the data center or server room. That’s why IT is one of the biggest areas companies focus on when they implement programs to improve energy efficiency and sustainability.

Green IT has a number of advantages for businesses. For one, lessening the impact an organization has on the environment makes for good PR, and it can help businesses better comply with environmental regulations.

But perhaps most importantly: Green IT helps companies save money.

A survey conducted last year by CDW found that more than half (54%) of companies had started a program to increase energy efficiency and reduce power consumption in their data centers. And among those with a program in place, 75% had been able to save money.

What are businesses doing to implement green IT programs? The most common actions and technologies being used to reduce energy consumption are:

1. Server and storage virtualization (cited by 65% of respondents)
2. Server consolidation (60%)
3. Implementing hardware with low-power processors (46%)
4. Purchasing ENERGY STAR devices (44%), and
5. Deploying more power-efficient networking equipment (31%).

Green IT still a challenge

Despite that success rate, not all companies have been able to start those green IT programs. It’s especially challenging for smaller organizations that don’t have the budget available to implement new energy saving technologies or design and build state-of-the-art data centers.

In fact, half of small businesses say they don’t care about improving energy efficiency in IT, according to a recent survey from the Uptime Institute. In comparison, 52% of organizations said they cared about green IT in a survey last year, while 58% said so in 2011.

One of the primary reasons for the drop in interest in green IT, according to the Uptime Institute: Small firms are suffering from “green fatigue” after hearing so much about the steps big tech companies like Google and Facebook have done to cut energy consumption — steps that most other firms don’t have the resources to even consider.

However, that doesn’t mean smaller businesses can’t improve efficiency and sustainability — they just may need to approach it in different ways than large enterprises.

Here are some of the steps small and mid-sized businesses can take to save money with green IT:

1. Hold IT accountable

One reason cutting costs in the data center is difficult for many companies is that the group responsible for managing the data center is different from the group held responsible for paying the electricity bill. Among the businesses surveyed by the Uptime Institute, 80% said the facilities department pays for the power used by IT.

To give the tech team more incentive to boost efficiency, many experts recommend moving those costs to the IT budget, or at least holding IT accountable for reaching certain benchmarks.

2. Increase oversight from Finance

Another issue for many organizations is that the CFO and other representatives from Finance don’t provide enough oversight for the company’s energy spending in IT. In fact, 40% of the data center employees surveyed by the Uptime Institute said they have no requirements to report on power usage and costs to upper management. And among the rest, 23% said there is no scheduled reporting and they only offer the information when asked.

In order to increase accountability and ultimately lower that spending, it’s important to have someone with authority over the company’s financial practices look over those numbers.

3. Measure power consumption

Another key step that must take place if IT is going to take more responsibility for its share of the energy spending: The company must accurately measure how much power the IT infrastructure uses. However, many companies lump everything together with the rest of the energy use in their facilities, so they don’t have separate information about the data center and other IT resources.

To fix that, companies can use systems to monitor the electricity that’s sent to the data center. That’s also important because it will help the company measure improvements as new strategies are implemented.

4. Go beyond the servers

Of course, data centers and servers rooms aren’t the only places housing IT equipment that uses a lot of energy. Computers and other devices are used in almost every department.

Therefore, some additional steps experts recommend to improve green IT include:

• Make sure employees’ computers are configured to save power — for example, have the screens shut off when the machine is idle — and consider using software to make sure PCs are shut down at the end of each day
• Change default printer settings to decrease page margins, use less ink and print double-sided, if possible, and
• When looking at power use in the server room or data center, consider not just the power and cooling for the machines, but also the lighting and other less obvious areas.

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CIOs and IT managers are generally diligent about their project budgets and they typically need to justify every investment they make. Their projects are pricey and have to succeed by producing business benefits no matter how complex the deployment.

During challenging economic periods when pressure increases to produce more with less, IT managers may see training programs as a place to cut costs. But that approach can backfire.

Training is one valuable, cost-effective benefit companies can offer IT pros to help fend off competition for current and potential talent. And a new report from IDC Research shows the benefits of IT training for tech projects.

According to the report, projects with little or no training included tend to fail completely, or they fail to meet critical objectives.

Among the 515 IT projects examined by IDC:

• Projects that met most or all of their business objectives provided each team member with 40% more training than projects that failed or only partly succeeded, and
• Projects that spent more than 6% of the budget on staff training were more successful than projects that spent less than 3% on training.

According to the report, well-trained IT teams tend to focus more on planning, improving infrastructure and other elements that increase the value of the project and allow the company to save money in the long term.

IT training can help retention

Experts also say providing IT training to staff members is a key way organizations can help retain top tech talent despite increasing competition. In a fast-changing field like IT, employees appreciate the chance to keep their skills up-to-date.

In addition, many companies complain their IT departments lack critical skills, and training current employees is a good way to overcome that problem when hiring from the outside is too difficult or cost-prohibitive.

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So your IT team orders the latest and greatest and feels like they’re doing a good job by future proofing your network. However, many companies make the mistake of buying more before they really need it. Below are three simple things you can do to make sure that you have optimized your existing network assets before you invest in new capacity:

1. Understand real utilization

If you use a Network Management Software (NMS), look at the historical usage and growth of usage over time. Are your users regularly exceeding 80% of their bandwidth? No? Then you probably don’t need to invest in more capacity at this point. Were users at 10% last year but 70% this year? Maybe. Before you take this as proof that you should upgrade, you really need to understand why the growth occurred. If it’s because they are streaming movies all day, it’s probably a bad bet. If you don’t use an NMS or aren’t monitoring end user ports, make sure to take advantage of the utilization information you already have on your switch. For example, with Cisco switches, when you do a show interface you can quickly see the output rate. By default this is 300 seconds (5 minutes). For the purpose of better understanding the real utilization, try changing this to a larger value like 600 seconds.

2. Distribute backplane port traffic

Now, to be fair, sometimes you really do need the new hardware and you have bottlenecks that are hard to identify. One that still gets overlooked is the backplane utilization. For example, on a Cisco 6500 blade, the ports are in groups of 8 ports on a shared bus to a backplane. You can see how busy your backplane is by running the show system command and looking at the Traffic and Peak values. Next to the Peak value you will also see Peak-Time. This is an easy way to see when your network is really under a high load. If you have heavy traffic on one of your groups, you should consider better distributing them to minimize the impact of the backplane oversubscription. This is a great way to squeeze some extra performance out of your existing infrastructure.

3. Snapshot to Evaluate WAN traffic use

For most admins, the LAN isn’t really the problem. The WAN is the more expensive and limited connection. This is where you need to really understand what’s going on. Many companies regularly upgrade their connections to the Internet because when they look at the utilization information, it’s always extremely high. You have probably heard about NetFlow and how everyone wants you to buy a product to collect the flows so you have a long term picture of what’s going on in your network. However, don’t overlook what you already have. If you just need some quick information, many platforms will give you a quick snapshot of what type of traffic is flowing through. For example, the Cisco ADSM is a great tool to get short term information about what exactly is going across the wire. It’s better to investigate a long term collector so get deeper analysis and alerting, but the built in ones will do in a pinch (or an outage).

There are many ways to get the most out of what you have. The key is to understand the technology you already have available to you and really spend the time documenting what’s going on. Don’t wait for the last minute budget crunch or network crunch to try to put something together. Monitor your network bandwidth and resources to understand what normal usage and growth is so you can make the best decisions about when and where to spend your precious upgrade dollars.

About the author: This post was submitted by Mac Turner, Group Product Manager for Solar Winds.

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What’s a CFO to do?

The folks at CFO.com have come up with three key actions you can take to trim the IT budget and get the most for your tech dollars.

The bottom line for increasing the bottom line:

1. Move operations that you can to the cloud.
2. Consolidate vendors – many big IT providers are now offering a suite of complete services for your size business, and
3. Fix problems before they get out of hand – don’t wait until things break or there’s a crisis.

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Technologists in these niche disciplines can expect to make 6%-9% more in 2012. That means Finance will need to build these costs into their tech budget to keep these folks on-board or to hire new staff to meet the challenges in these areas.

Overall, base compensation for information technology (IT) professionals is expected to rise by about 4.5% in the coming year. Systems and networking engineers are pretty strong demand as businesses look to boost their capabilities and move to cloud computing.

Mobile applications developers will also see a rise in demand for their services because of the tremendous proliferation of mobile devices. Starting salaries for mobile application developers are expected to rise 9.1% over 2010 levels to a range of $85,000 to $122,500 in 2012, according to the staffing firm’s newly published Salary Guide 2012.

There are 10 other IT roles that Robert Half says will enjoy pay hikes of at least 6% in 2012:

• Senior Web developer: starting salaries will range from $85,750 to $118,500 in 2012, an increase of 6.9% on average
• Data warehouse analyst: starting salaries will range from $88,000 to $119,000 in 2012, up 6.7% on average
• Software engineer: starting salaries will be in the range of $78,250 to $119,500 in 2012, up 6.6% on average
• Database developer: starting salaries will range from $82,000 to $119,750 in 2012, up 6.9% on average
• Software developer: starting salaries will range from $70,000 to $111,000 in 2012, up 6.5% on average
• Business intelligence analyst: starting salaries will range from $87,750 to $123,500 in 2012, up 6.3% on average
• Data architect: starting salaries will range from $97,500 to $134,250 in 2012, up 6.2% on average
• Network architect: starting salaries will range from $95,500 to $137,000 in 2012, up 6% on average
• Data security analyst: starting salaries will range from $89,000 to $121,500 in 2012, up 6% on average, and
• Web designer: starting salaries will range from $53,750 to $88,000 in 2012, up 6% on average.

Is your organization seeing an increase in the cost of hiring tech pros in these areas? Let us know in the comments section below.

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“I&O represents approximately 60% of total IT spending worldwide, so with IT budgets remaining tight, it’s no wonder that I&O cost-cutting pressure continues to be intense,” said Jay Pultz, vice president and analyst at Gartner. “When it comes to I&O cost reduction, there is no ‘magic bullet,’ but best results can be achieved by implementing as fully as possible the 10 key cost reductions we have identified.”

Gartner analysts said that due to priority conflicts and resource constraints, few I&O leaders said they have implemented 50% or more of the total cost reduction opportunities these 10 key actions offer. However, depending on where an organization is now, fully implementing these 10 cost-cutting suggestions can provide significant savings.

The 10 key actions to implement to reduce IT I&O costs include:

Action 1: Defer Noncritical Key Initiatives
I&O leaders need to re-examine their key initiatives to determine which ones to focus on as near-term priorities. In doing so, there are three major questions to ask: Does the I&O key initiative strongly support a high-priority business initiative that needs to be completed in the near term? Does the I&O key initiative lower the I&O cost structure in the time frame required? Does the I&O key initiative lower risk by upgrading I&O to prevent major outages or severe performance deterioration?

Action 2: Re-examine Networking Costs
When it comes to I&O spending, the data center and the network claim the lion’s share of costs. Because nearly half of the network expenses go to telecom service providers (TSPs), network managers need to continue to renegotiate contracts with these vendors to ensure that their contracted rates are market-based. Substantial steps can also be taken to optimize network costs by refining the design and sourcing of their networks.

Action 3: Consolidate I&O
I&O consolidation is closely related to standardization, integration and virtualization. In the past, the rise of distributed computing and other trends drove the decline of large data processing sites. Now, however, data centers are rising in importance, and Gartner expects this trend to continue throughout this decade, as server rationalization, hardware growth and cost containment drive the consolidation of enterprise data processing sites into larger data centers.

Action 4: Virtualize I&O
Servers run at very low average utilization levels (less than 15%). Virtualization software increases utilization typically by fourfold or more, which means for a given workload that can be virtualized, a company can typically reduce the number of physical servers by fourfold. Conservatively, this means hardware and energy costs are each reduced by more than 50%. As with consolidation, virtualization can be applied to many I&O platforms: Unix servers, storage, networking and client computing.

Action 5: Reduce Power and Cooling Needs
In the past, newly built data centers often opened with huge areas of pristine white floor space, fully powered and backed up by an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water- and air-cooled, and mostly empty. With the cost of mechanical and electrical equipment, as well as the price of power, this model no longer works. New design approaches can result in data centers that utilize significantly less power, take up less space and cost much less. 

Action 6: Contain Storage Growth
Compute, networking and storage capacity are all growing at annual double-digit rates, with storage growing the fastest by far. Gartner predicts that, by 2016, enterprises will install 850% more terabytes than they have installed in 2011. Throwing terabytes at the problem is no longer a viable solution. With capacity growth far outstripping cost declines, tighter control is required. Multiple approaches need to be adopted — including the use of storage virtualization, automated tiering and storage resource management (SRM) tools.

Action 7: Push Down IT Support
Support for end users and the enterprise typically is about 8% of total IT spending, and most I&O organizations have at least four tiers of support, each with a different cost point and level of expertise. To reduce costs, organizations need to drive those support calls down to the lowest tier that can satisfactorily resolve users’ issues.

Action 8: Streamline IT Operations
I&O accounts for approximately 50% of the total enterprise IT head count, and most of the I&O staff is involved in operational processes of a day-to-day and tactical nature. To contain head count and associated costs, these processes need to be streamlined and as efficient as possible. This typically entails implementing ITIL, the de facto standard framework in IT operations. The principal goal is to improve service management and quality, but ITIL has been known to reduce operating expenses as well.

Action 9: Enhance IT Asset Management (ITAM)
ITAM by itself doesn’t reduce I&O costs; however, it is a very effective tool to identify and assess cost reduction opportunities. ITAM can help determine the life of certain assets, defer upgrades and eliminate or combine software licenses, as well as replacing certain maintenance service contracts with a time-and-materials approach. IT asset repositories are generally the most effective tools to help in this endeavor. These tools can maintain dates, manage changes to assets and send out reminder emails to ensure that the life cycle process is proactively managed.

Action 10: Optimize Multisourcing
Sourcing is perhaps the most strategic decision facing I&O leaders today. The decision is not as simple as whether to outsource or insource all of I&O. IT leaders can make separate sourcing decisions for virtually any I&O component, system or function. The key decision criteria are controlling those aspects that are of strategic and critical importance to the business, playing to the strength of available staff, defining clear lines of demarcation, keeping the number of vendors involved to a small, manageable number and determining what makes solid financial sense.

The full report from Gartner is available here.

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One leak you might want to try plugging in the IT budget?

Software you’ve paid for but aren’t using.

Many companies waste upwards of $100 per user on unused licenses, according to a survey by software vendor 1E.

Of the 500 IT pros from the U.S. and U.K. surveyed, more than 87% said their organizations have software licenses that have never been deployed, commonly known as shelfware.

But even the licenses that are deployed aren’t necessarily being used. Four out of five survey respondents believe each of their organization’s PCs contains more than $100 worth of unused software.

In total, 1E estimates that companies in the U.S. and across the pond waste $15 billion a year on unnecessary software costs.

Time for a software license audit?

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A recent budget impasse has forced the state into a government shutdown. As a result, the state’s Office of Enterprise Technology (OET) has furloughed roughly 75% of its 338 employees, ComputerWorld reports.

The IT employees that remain can only provide services that have been deemed “critical,” including security and communications. Other functions such as upgrades, patching and help desk support for non-critical applications are off-limits during the shutdown.

Experts warn the furlough could have a big impact on the state’s IT infrastructure as problems with those non-critical services linger and become more difficult to fix down the line.

What would happen to your firm if you lost the services of these folks? Do you have plan in place to keep things up and running? Are your techies cross trained and equipped with the passwords and logins necessary to keep things operational?

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “disaster planning” doesn’t it? How do cloud services figure into the picture?

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IT’s managing the equipment that sucks huge amounts of energy, while the facilities folks have to pay for it — and have none of the control that’s needed to mandate efficiencies of scale or consumption.

Though it might not get as much attention as big hardware and software purchases, energy use can be a large part of any IT department’s budget — and one that can usually be trimmed significantly.

Many power-saving methods come with high price tags of their own. But a recent InfoWorld story points out some less conventional ways to cut the energy bill that organizations can achieve for little or no cost:

1. Turn up the heat in the data center – While conventional wisdom states that server rooms should be kept below 70 degrees, some experts say you can safely go higher. For example, Google’s energy chief Bill Weihl told attendees of last year’s GreenNet conference that 80 degrees can be used, as long as hot and cold air are kept separate from each other. (The prevents condensation, which can be dreadful for electronic components.)
2. Cool with outside air – This method does have some start-up costs, but some companies have great success cooling their data centers by pumping in cooler air from the outside.
3. Power down servers that aren’t in use – Some people claim frequently turning servers on and off can lower their life expectancies — but experts point out there’s no evidence that’s the case. Therefore, some recommend powering down servers when they aren’t in use, provided there’s no need for them to become available immediately.
4. Send servers’ hot air to the rest of the building – IT can help the company cut energy costs elsewhere by sending heat generated by servers to other parts of the building to keep the rest of the office warm. After all, there’s no point in firing up a furnace when the company already has a bunch of heat-generating machines, right?
5. Use solid-state disks (SSDs) when possible – SSDs have come down in price recently, allowing more companies to reap the potential energy savings they can provide. The non-spinning drives are best used for read-only storage where there’s less danger of the disks wearing out.

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Whether it’s the fallout from the Wikileaks documents or the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that are prompting the move, the administration is looking for  ”considerable growth” in cybersecurity research.

When all the projects and proposals are added up, cybersecurity research and development spending by the government will increase 35% to $548 million next year.

This will also likely mean a boost in IT jobs and spending with tech companies, so the industry as a whole will get a much-needed jolt.

But for folks outside the tech industry, it will be a double-edged sword. While most business will benefit from better cybersecurity measures that will likely come from the spending, it’ll also have to compete for IT talent from the same pool that the feds will draw from.

That could make tech salaries rise and workers tougher to come by.

Like we said, double-edged sword.

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