No one now doubts the wisdom of going 'green' - reducing the environmental impact of IT on the world. Before long the IT industry will have overtaken the airline industry as a polluter of the environment. Most organizations now have initiatives underway to reduce their carbon footprint, adopting more responsible policies to lessen any detrimental impact of IT on the world.

Strategies range from the quick and simple such as 'think of the environment before printing this e-mail' to the longer term and more complex such as virtualizing your server estate. Capacity management has a role to play in helping you ensure you can implement green strategies that optimize your infrastructure and maximize the green savings to be made.

This is vital, because there are challenges in going green with all aspects of your IT infrastructure and you need to get it right. Getting it wrong means your environmental conscience might still feel good, but your business will suffer as a consequence. Failure to implement sound, sustainable strategies will result in spiralling costs or poorly performing infrastructure with the inevitable impact on your business goals.

We're all trying to go green in an IT context that is becoming ever more complex. From a server perspective, everyone now accepts that by virtualizing our vast ranks of under-utilized servers, we can do more with less: reduce power consumption, reduce data center space, reduce air conditioning required and more. This promises a 'double bubble' of benefit: lower costs and lower carbon footprint. Fewer servers means less staff time required to manage them. Your business benefits as you save time, save energy and save money.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. It's so quick and easy to roll out virtual systems that Gartner is already warning of 'virtual sprawl'*. Too many under-utilized virtual systems means we will simply perpetuate the mistakes of the boom in physical distributed servers: too many boxes; too many staff needed to manage them; too much power consumed to no purpose; data centers larger than necessary meaning increased cooling costs. We'll be spending money and using natural resources when we don't need to.

Power consumption is a particular case in point. A server or cluster will consume the majority of its power at low levels of utilization. Sweat that asset, use it more, run it at higher utilization and the additional power consumed is negligible compared to running it at very low utilization.

Metron and our athene® software are all about maximizing the benefits of going green. Good capacity management will enable you to identify how well you can utilize your IT infrastructure while still meeting business requirements. Using resources more fully through effective capacity management means savings are maximised on:

• server costs when virtualizing
• power consumed in the data center
• environmental costs to support the business

* Fundamentally, we believe virtualization sprawl can be a much bigger problem than physical sprawl, Thomas Bittman, Gartner