Study: India leads the pack in green server rooms

Even in a down economy, India’s small- to medium-sized companies are investing in initiatives that reduce the environmental impact of their information technology.

About 63 percent of Indian IT shops have completed a retrofit of existing server rooms to increase energy efficiency, or have a pilot project underway, according to a recent study. It’s similar in Brazil, but IT companies there tend to favor building new server rooms before modifying existing ones.

The “Green IT” study, authored by New York’s IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Canada’s Info-Tech Research Group, surveyed more than 1,000 IT companies with 100 to 1,000 employees from 12 countries to understand why such initiatives are undertaken, and how the results translate into cost savings, business value and environmental benefits.

The study found businesses that complete green IT initiatives realize significant cost savings along with superior environmental performance. In terms of green server rooms, countries like India and Brazil led the charge.

The study said also more than 55 percent of Indian companies are going to, or have already, commissioned third-party environmental audits, purchased emission credits or improved their supply chain efficiency to reduce energy consumption. 

Almost two-thirds of the companies surveyed said they currently, or are planning within the next 12 months, to add virtualization technology to their servers, consolidate storage systems or retrofit server rooms.

India faces challenges in its booming data storage industry because of the country’s energy shortfall. Virtualization and other energy-saving measures have been recommended to help Indian companies deal with the challenge (see Booming data-center business creates troubles for India).

The report’s findings are related to another study by the country’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which said India’s electronics waste is growing at a rate of 10 percent per year. India is expected to receive 434,000 metric tons of e-waste such as televisions, computers, phones and appliances (see E-waste growing 10% a year in India).

Such concerns have prompted the western Indian state of Maharashtra to crack down on e-waste with new regulations that address the massive problem in cities such as Mumbai and Pune (see Maharashtra starts to regulate cities' e-waste).

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