Green IT gaining importance, says HP

Green IT is moving higher up the agenda than ever before, according to HP, as it unveiled its ProCurve networking initiative.

Ben van Kerkwyk, the global product manager for HP's ProCurve, told IT PRO that the programme reflected an increasing focus on green IT in enterprise computing.

"Companies spend the same on cooling in the data centre as they do on electronics, so naturally there's a large trend to optimise. You could say it's a green initiative in every sense of the word," said Kerkwyk, hinting at the green of company dollars as much as green in the environmental sense of the word.

"Our new 6600 switches offer front-to-back cooling, as opposed to side-to-side. It enables data centres to optimise for smart cooling. We can also turn off unused ports on our switches as even when not being used they can used a couple of watts of power," he claimed. "Also, our SFP+ interconnects are much lower power than standard fibre connections."

He said that while networking accounts for only 10 per cent of the cooling costs of a data centre it all adds up. "There's been a fundamental shift in utility costs," he said, referencing difficult global conditions.

Much of what HP has put into its new products has come from its own experiences, Kerkwyk said. "We reduced more than 80 data centres down to six, and heavily reduced the number of applications we ran. We're one of the biggest IT shops in the world and we learned a lot from our own experiences."