Do CIOs give a damn about sustainable IT?

Bob Sullivan sounds discouraged. Five years after skyrocketing energy consumption in data centers grabbed the attention of IT, many CIOs still don't care about sustainable IT in data centers, says the senior consultant with The Uptime Institute.

Why not? Because organizational priorities and incentives to be more energy efficient are still misaligned, he contends. Most IT organizations still don't see the power bill, have no idea how much power they're consuming, and frankly don't care. And why should they? The power bill goes to the facilities group, which often reports to the CFO or to a separate real estate organization. That means many businesses are still leaving money on the table, he says.

Yes, CIOs cared about energy efficiency several years ago, when they couldn't get enough power to the building, or when those new fangled high-density blade server racks were overheating. "The people who got into trouble implemented some basic best practices," the crisis abated and the rest of the problem was forgotten, Sullivan says.

To many CIOs, profitability comes from system availability and application rollout - not from counting carbon emissions and energy consumption. "They have no vision for energy efficiency," and that attitude is holding back progress, he says.

Some CIOs haven't done even the most basic best practices work, he says. For example, after running out of data center power, one CIO had his staff root out and turn off orphan servers and storage devices - which added up to an astounding 25% of total equipment. Having accomplished this "sustainability" goal, the CIO's focus went back to focus exclusively on availability and reliability.

Not every organization operates in this way. Large data center operators and cloud computing vendors like Google are ahead of the curve. Indeed, businesses that do focus on energy efficiency tend to be more innovative - and profitable. But, says Sullivan, many corporations right nearby in New York City's financial district, with data centers as big as 6 megawatts, haven't done much to increase efficiency or reduce their carbon footprint. Even implementing some basic best practices could reduce power bills by 25%. With power from ConEdison at 12 to 16 cents per Killowatt-hour (according to a ConEdison representative I met here today), the savings add up - if the CFO it taking a wholistic approach to reviewing those costs. Even then, unfortunately, the potential savings as a percent of total revenues don't always warrant that kind of attention. "For many businesses the data center electricity bill is less than 1% of revenues. IT may not be a focus," says John Stanley, analyst with The 451 Group.

But some companies are paying attention. Shikwan Kwan, a facilities project manager attending the conference here, works for a large securities depository and clearing business downtown that has been aggressively pursuing those dollars. The recession - and a change in leadership, including a new CIO - resulted in a top-down focus on efficiency. "We're a lot more cost conscious now," Kwan said during a lunch conversation. Faced with a mandate to cut budgets, the facilities group cut down on lighting in the data center and turned up thermostat set points, raising data air intake temperatures into server racks to conform with the latest ASHRAE guidelines. The equipment ran just fine - no changes to the IT infrastructure were required.

The business did have one organizational advantage over some of its peers, however: The facilities organization is an organizational unit within IT.