Business Accent

What Data Center Crisis?

Tech marketers must keep green IT messages credible says Christopher Mines. He examines the need for energy efficiency in data centers and assesses initiatives to improve efficiency and greenness in corporate data centers.

Christopher Mines

Technology vendors, trade publications and industry analysts all have latched onto crisis language to describe power and space shortages in corporate data centers. Let’s all calm down. Forrester surveyed enterprise IT professionals and found a moderate level of interest in improving energy efficiency in their data centers, but nothing that warrants the ‘crisis’ label. It is in everyone’s interest to tone down the language and keep the focus on realistic assessments and initiatives to improve efficiency and greenness in corporate data centers.

Tech marketers push green IT by hyping a crisis

Systems vendors including the press are pushing the panic button on the energy situation in corporate data centers. A quick scan of vendor Web sites and trade press articles over the past 12 months shows a striking similarity, emphasizing the crisis situation that large companies face in their data centers.

• “IBM Unveils Plan to Combat Data Center Energy Crisis.”
• “Gartner Predicts Data Center Power and Cooling Crisis”
• “Coping with Data Centers in Crisis”,
• “Research shows that more than 70 percent of customers are in a crisis mode, unable to properly cool the gear they need to meet their business goals.”
• “London faces data center crisis.”

The term crisis exaggerates the situation

Vendors and the industry press would have us believe that the sky is falling or, at least, that most corporate data centers are melting down under the power requirements of growing application demand. Forrester believes that the language is overheated, because;

Energy efficiency is a slow-motion issue. This is not Y2K, where every corporate IT organization faced a certain deadline for action. Every IT systems vendor is on the case, working to improve the efficiency of their chips, systems, and solutions. Over time, such incremental improvements will largely address what, for most companies, is an incremental problem.

Anecdotes do not make a widespread crisis. Certainly there are instances of organizations facing serious issues with powering, cooling, or expanding their data centers. But oft-repeated anecdotes about individual customer situations are in danger of becoming conventional wisdom, blithely applied to the majority of enterprises.

Most enterprise IT organizations do not see a crisis in their operations. When we asked IT professionals at 140 enterprises in North America and Europe, we found that the crisis is considerably overstated; only 15% of this sample was ‘very interested’ and another 23% ‘interested’ in response to the question, “What is your company’s level of interest in increasing the energy and electrical efficiency of the data center?” That level of concern does not make a crisis. Further, 23% of the respondents said that they were only ‘slightly interested’, and a whopping 32% were ‘not interested’.

This is not a crisis, at least not one at the widespread level that is implied or asserted by the vendor hype.

Tone it down please

Vendors are doing themselves a disservice by over hyping what they are calling the ‘power crisis’ in corporate data centers. Most vendors are on a long-term path toward significant improvement of the environmental sensitivity of their products and their operations; crisis language, reinforced in the technology trade press, risks undermining the credibility of vendors’ green IT efforts. Our interviews with enterprise customers reveal hunger for more information from vendors about their green efforts, but overwrought language will turn them off.

Target messages to specific customer needs

Instead of hype, tech marketers should pull apart the power situations and issues faced by large customers and offer specific, targeted recommendations and services. We find that three dominant customer scenarios are often mixed together in vendors’ green market approaches. Vendors should get specific about their solutions for different customer requirements to:

• Manage localized hot spots in the data center. The first step here is to reconfigure equipment or add precision cooling to take the heat off one particular rack of equipment. Another option is to virtualize server workloads and consolidate many underutilized servers into fewer, highly utilized machines.
• Add computing capacity in a constrained space. This is an issue for some financial services companies with data centers in city-center locations. Typically, these customers will bring in more cooling capacity (and associated power) to allow greater density of computing gear, or they may again go for virtualization, which would result in equipment consolidation, to free up space.

Add computing capacity in an existing power envelope. This is the ‘our utility can’t bring us more juice’ scenario, which is rare but scary enough to get lots of attention from corporate IT shops. In this case, companies will pursue server/storage virtualization; upgrade older servers to new, more energy-efficient models; upgrade old infrastructure like uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and computer room air conditioners (CRACs) to free up electrical capacity; or combine these approaches.

Focus green marketing on the most receptive customer segments

Rather than the blanket ‘scare ‘em and then save ‘em’ marketing approach represented by the crisis language, tech marketers should:

• Tune green IT messages to particular industries and customer segments: Our initial enterprise surveys and interviews found a higher degree of environmental awareness and activity among government agencies, energy and utility companies, and financial services firms. Many companies in Western and particularly Northern Europe are ahead of their counterparts in other regions.
• Emphasize that energy efficiency saves money even in the absence of a crisis: A panic-button mentality is not required to find customers interested in cutting their energy bills. Green marketing should emphasize that environmental and economic incentives align; companies do not have to make RoI tradeoffs in most cases.

The author is Senior Vice President, Forrester Research. He researches the overarching relationships of enterprise IT buyers with their strategic suppliers, especially the advent of environmental considerations in IT decision-making (“green IT”). He advises global technology suppliers to improve their market position and strategy execution. He can be reached at cmines@forrester.com.