As questions regarding the limits of Moore’s law start to gain force, the one thing that all IT professionals can agree upon is that the costs of energy will continue to rise much faster than IT budgets overall. Some estimates suggest that energy costs may amount to as much as 15%-20% of total IT budgets in the next decade. Against this backdrop, it’s essential that IT organizations devote immediate attention to establishing programs for retiring energy hogs. These programs likely will force inconvenient and unpopular actions, as classes of infrastructure technologies are put under the bright light of energy efficiency. However, we anticipate that emerging energy-based metrics will start being employed to evaluate applications, as well. For example, it may soon become economically justified to retire older client/server applications that require the most powerful clients.
Action Item: IT organizations have to begin incorporating energy-based metrics as part of the value equation for infrastructure and applications technologies. Tracking these measures now could ameliorate potential "panic decisions" later in the event that expected energy price spikes catalyze executive spasms.
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