How Green Are Your Servers?

We have recently published Enterprise Messaging Server Market Trends, 2008-2011, a study that, among other things, forecasts the market for email servers in North America. One of the issues about which we wanted to ask the messaging-oriented decision makers and influencers who responded to the in-depth survey we conducted for this report was the impact that "green" computing would have on their messaging server purchases in 2009 and 2010.

The answer was "not much impact at all":  53% of organizations said that green computing would play little or no role in their purchase decisions; only 2% told us that it would be a critical part of the decision-making process.

The results of the survey notwithstanding, organizations can save quite a lot of money by reducing the power consumption of their servers, using virtualization, and employing other technologies that can cut the power bill.  Servers consume about 1.2% of the total power output in the United States, for example, so cutting power use could save organizations, particularly large ones, quite a bit.