The obvious first step for reducing any organization’s energy use is to measure it and then find ways to lower it. So why is it that the overwhelming majority of CIOs—owners of their companies’ information technology infrastructure and consumers of huge amounts of energy—never see a power bill?

 

As ludicrous as that sounds, it’s quite common. The power bill goes to the facilities team. And it’s particularly unfortunate when you consider that at a large company, technology can consume as much as 40% or more of the power used.

 

Thankfully, it’s a problem that’s easy and affordable to begin to tackle. Connecting the IT and facilities departments in any organization, from businesses to governments, can slash power use and increase efficiency with something as simple as using a few electric meters. In Dell’s case, we managed to add 35% more computing capacity without using one additional watt.

 

Once the CIO knows how much power all those machines and related cooling systems are consuming, it’s hard not to find ways to be more efficient. For example, a server in one location is running a particular software program, has plenty of unused capacity and is burning electricity.

 

Across the room, there’s another server doing the very same thing. Introduce virtualization software, which lets one machine do the work of many, and you’re immediately saving power and money while minimizing the impact on the environment.