Greening data centers isn't a top priority for smaller businesses, but it should be. Even companies with just a few servers in a closet can realize gains in energy efficiency, reliability, and business continuity. Asking the right questions will help your businesses reap the benefits of green IT

Richard Baughman, director of IT at Shentel Telecommunications, a diversified communications company, hasn't thought about Green IT yet. Not that there isn't plenty of talk about the topic from the media, analysts, and advocacy groups, but for many IT leaders in smaller businesses, such as Baughman, the trend hasn't gained traction.

Shentel Communications, for example, has between 30 and 40 servers in its production, failover, and test/development environments. The total cost of running the data center where most of those servers are co-located is relatively minor and Baughman has bigger fish to fry than cutting data-center power consumption. Shentel's business is growing. To support that the IT group is now overhauling the infrastructure from a 15-year old green screen application, built primarily to run a telephone company, to a system that can easily scale to support new services. Baughman and his team are focusing on that project to provide the business with better CRM functionality, an integrated dispatch application for orders and tickets, a flow-through provisioning system, a self-care platform, and a customer care dashboard.

"As a small company, our resources are limited and focused on a couple of higher-priority projects that will have significant value to the business - going green with our data center would not have that big of an impact to our business costs," says Baughman. "I can see us doing something in the future about this, but as of right now, it's not a priority."

Nor is it likely to be a priority for most smaller companies in the immediate future. Some experts speculate that it will be a good five years before smaller businesses start feeling pressure to green their data centers. In contrast, large companies increasingly are all too aware of the toll their expanding data centers are taking on their organizations: a study released by AMD found that in 2005, data centers and their associated infrastructure consumed the energy equivalent of five 1,000 MW power plants - that's 5 million kW. Not only does that have an impact on the environment, but also it adds up to real money in power costs.

In smaller companies, data centers may be running in an inefficient way that introduces unnecessary costs. However, some recommended practices that work for larger companies may be overkill in these environments. For example, if your data center has less than five server racks, following hot aisle/cold aisle practices - a method of cooling servers that produces constant air circulation through the racks - isn't necessarily pragmatic. On the other hand, even an organization with just a few servers in a closet may realize some small but happy returns - not only in energy efficiency, but also in reliability and business continuity - by virtualizing them down to a single physical system.