UK companies lack ability to measure energy use

Many UK companies have adopted green policies on power consumption without having any way of measuring their progress, a new survey has found.

According to hardware vendor Extreme Networks, which found that 64 per cent of British organisations had implemented a "Green IT" strategy, only 20 per cent of them had found a way to measure IT-related energy expenditure.

Extreme, which carried out the survey in conjunction with its partner, Data Integration, could offer little explanation for this apparent disconnect with companies' aspirations and the actuality although the company was keen to point out that the notion of calculating carbon emissions was still very new and that organisations hadn't yet got their heads around methodology.

"We are only at the start of the green journey, over time IT Directors will all be measured on the amount of power consumed by - at the very least - their area of the business," said Extreme's regional director for UK and Ireland, Paul Phillips.

He added that this was a situation that he expected to see change very quickly.

"Currently this landscape is still evolving. All of the recent tenders that we are responding to ask about power consumption of the products being proposed. Depending on the equipments location -for example a hosted data centre- this is critical as there is a power budget allocated and once this has been used, then it's used. Even if hosted on site getting enough clean power to a comms room is becoming a challenge."

However, there were some signs that the message was getting through. According to the survey, 78 per cent of UK companies already recycle their IT equipment and 49 per cent are actively looking for network technologies that can reduce energy consumption.

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