No Surprise: Green Sells

While it is a great thing that the much reported on Pike Research report on green datacenters pontificates that 28% of the datacenter market will be occupied by green datacenter gear, I think that really misses the point. The "green" aspects of hardware specific to the datacenter is already no longer an option, it has rapidly become one of the checkbox standards for purchases in the datacenter.

Even companies that are not actively making datacenter changes to take advantage of techniques that reduce energy consumption, like virtualization and consolidation, are already considering the energy efficiency of newly acquired hardware as a purchasing consideration. Frankly, they simply can't avoid it. Vendors are all too aware that energy efficiency is a very high profile concern these days and rather than have their customers have to ask about it with their new products, the majority of hardware vendors are leading with it.

This is a far cry from the days when the introduction of a new server CPU would be accompanied by page after page of performance benchmarks and comparisons to competitors and previous generation hardware. Now the same type of product introduction leads with how much more energy efficient the new generation CPUs are and the value of the workload for the energy expended.

It is simply not realistic to expect that datacenter spending will not reflect this newfound attention to energy efficiency. There is a short window of opportunity for vendors of energy efficiency specific products, be they hardware or software before these types of products will become standards within the datacenter and expected components of larger systems. For example, adding energy usage monitoring software/hardware to your environment as a third-party (and there are a number of vendors in this space) becomes somewhat redundant when the hardware vendors provided API documented instrumentation in their products that allow any external console to evaluate the energy requirements of the device.

For now, "green" is a sales buzzword almost as compelling as "cloud."  But it will soon enough be simply another expectation and no longer a differentiator.