‘Gas-guzzling’ PCs Pose IT Power Issues

A panel of UK IT chiefs says rising electricity costs are becoming a major issue for IT reliability, just as a new report claims the UK’s 200 largest publicly listed companies are wasting a combined £61million ($114 million) per year by not using energy-efficient PCs and by leaving IT equipment running overnight.

Compiled by Andy McCue on the silicon.com website, the panelists made their comments while taking part in the publication’s “CIO Jury.” Ten of the site’s 12-man CIO Jury IT user panel said power consumption is - or is likely to become - a significant issue in relation to the energy efficiency of their IT operations.

According to some members of the panel, the rising cost of electricity for IT is undoubtedly something that is pushing this issue up the agenda for other IT chiefs.

Paul Broome, IT director at 192.com, told the panel that “suddenly our ISP has woken up to power issues and this hurts. We have to either pay more by spreading the load across more racks or replace power hungry kit.”

And the panelists say simply switching equipment off overnight to save money doesn’t really work, as it presents the IT department with other issues.

Ian Auger, IT director at ITN, said: “We are looking to make savings where possible but turning off CPUs at night is an issue as this is the downtime we use to push out updates to our client machines to avoid impacting performance during normal business hours.”

To read the full article, click here: http://www.silicon.com/ciojury/0,3800003161,39158945,00.htm