Kenneth Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, says he is worried. Despite all the headlines and handwringing over data center energy efficiency, he sees few companies making the substantive changes that might forestall a looming crisis.

The institute fueled industry worry on the topic with its presentation of McKinsey & Company’s “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency—Key Analysis” report at the institute’s symposium in April. The report, which Uptime helped develop, warns that data center greenhouse gas emissions, already substantial, would quadruple by 2020, surpassing the emissions produced by the airline industry.

The report called on the industry to do the following:

• More accurately capture and track the cost of IT and the true cost of ownership of data centers by incorporating facilities cost, making data center costs more transparent and including data center total cost of ownership in application and infrastructure decisions
• Improve IT asset management capabilities, including promoting regular communication among business, IT and facilities managers and including energy efficiency as an important criterion in hardware procurement
• Move accountability for facilities expense and operations to the CIO and appoint an internal “energy czar” with a mandate to double IT energy efficiency by 2012

The study also proposed that the industry use a metric called Corporate Average Data Center Efficiency (CADE) as a standard way of measuring energy efficiency. Because CADE incorporates both IT and facilities costs, it would give companies the insight to drive more-efficient asset utilization, Brill says.

When the report was published, Brill called for senior executives at 10 companies to commit to these principles. As of early August, Brill hadn’t heard from one. “There has not been a single call,” he says. “Nothing seems to be happening at the senior executive level.”

Why not? “It’s such a big problem that it’s hard for people to get their arms around it,” says a frustrated Brill. Even though the issue has been a hot topic, it apparently hasn’t made an impression on top management.

And it is a management, not a technology, issue, says Brill. Fundamentally, it’s a problem of how IT accounts for costs. In today’s corporate structures, data center costs are divorced from facilities costs, so companies don’t realize the total cost of ownership of the data center. In addition, IT departments typically don’t consider long-term operational costs, because they have developed short-term cost accounting models based on the tradition of upgrading to new equipment every two to three years, Brill adds.

“So IT departments link the cost of the servers with the revenue those servers have produced,” he says. “But when you have a data center that lasts 15 years and it has a longer life than the assets that are in it, how do you link that expense with the revenue?”

Soon the situation will come to a head, not only in terms of an energy crisis but also as a cost crisis, and that’s when senior management may finally pay attention. But until then, he adds, “we’re seeing a lot of talk but little action.”

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