Preston Gralla

Preston Gralla is the editor of GreenerComputing.

Inside Green IT gives you a behind-the-scenes look at new developments in green technology for data centers, IT managers and anyone looking to save money and make their computing operations more environmentally friendly.

Study: Two-Thirds of Data Centers Face Critical Power Shortages

By Preston Gralla, December 4, 2008

Going green with a data center is no longer merely good public relations, or just a money-saving project. It's about to become imperative for a corporation's survival. That's the inescapable conclusion, when you consider a recent study that discovered that unless data centers figure out a solution to their energy problems, nearly two-thirds of them will run out of power capacity by 2011.

The survey, from the Emerson Network Power, found that 64% of respondents said their data centers were faced with running out of power capacity by 2011, according to InfoWorld.

In addition, 36% of those surveyed said that the main reason they couldn't add...

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Green IT: One Answer to Global Warming?

By Preston Gralla, October 29, 2008

A new McKinsey report is an eye-opener: It claims that Green IT can help eliminate 7.8 metric gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2020, which it says is equivalent to 15 percent of all global emissions today.

The report, available here, says that Green IT can be used to cut carbon emissions via automation and intelligence, for example, in optimizing energy use in buildings, powering smart controls in factories, and making the energy grid more efficient.

The report first warns that IT itself has become a big greenhouse gas emitter. Today, it estimates, IT and related technologies emit 0.86 metric gigatons of emissions every year, which it says is...

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