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Green IT: The fastest transition from concept to commodity ever

Green IT isn't gone; it's just everywhere you look.
Written by David Chernicoff, Contributor

Reading Larry Dignan's coverage of the Gartner Symposium earlier this week I found that I wasn't surprised by some of the changes that Gartner had made in their Top 10 Technologies You Can't Afford to Ignore predictions between this year and last. Actually I was amazed that Gartner was good enough to drop Green IT from their list.

Peter Judge, writing for eWeek Europe, took the tack that removing green IT from the list meant that Gartner thought that green IT was done. He then made a good case for why green IT was a very practical technology and that it was on the verge of a huge growth curve.  And frankly, I think that's why Gartner dropped it.

While I've commented on this in regard to longer term forecast, the simple fact is that Green IT is no longer something that technology executives will need to go looking for; in fact, they would be hard pressed to find a vendor who doesn't make some sort of "it's Greener!" claim for the latest iteration of their products for the datacenter.

I know vendors hate to think that their products or technologies have been commoditized, and will go a long way to prove that is not the case, but the issue here isn't the products or technology; it's the idea that energy savings and environmental responsibility (in some form) are a part of the feature set for current and future generations of datacenter products.

Reducing datacenter operational expenses by making sure that equipment upgrades are more energy efficient, that the power demands for cooling are reduced, and that physical plant changes or new construction take all possible advantage of environmental factors to reduce ongoing power expenditures or reduce the amount of environment control equipment that needs to be purchased just makes sound fiscal sense. IT executives didn't really need to be pushed into making their facilities greener, they just needed to have the financial side pointed out to them, and have vendors decide to offer green choices.

Vendors jumped on the green bandwagon with both feet, putting the green stamp on just about every new product coming out for the datacenter.  This isn't a bad thing; but it quickly became almost just another checklist item for datacenter purchase decisions.

Voila! Instant commoditization.

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