That's according to Victor Teo, NCS's leading consultant who was addressing a CIO seminar about Green IT, put on by IT and communications engineering solutions provider NCS and information storage and security firm EMC, at Singapore's Laguna National Golf & Country club.
Teo told the seminar that one full rack of blade servers (about 20 -- 25 physical servers) used enough electricity to satisfy the peak demand of 30 residential homes.
"Organizations with more than 200 servers are currently wasting between US$500,000 and US$1.5 million in under utilized computer servers," Teo said. "The planning cycle for physical to virtual migration generally takes a month, and can be implemented over a weekend."
Expensive power and cooling
Sal Fernando, EMC's chief technical architect for the Asia Pacific and Japan, told the seminar that for every one dollar of technology purchased, enterprises need to pay 50 cents for power and cooling.
"You never actually 'cool' anything," said Fernando. "You just move heat into the environment to make it someone else's problem, which increasingly creates global warming. Data centers create more carbon than the world's airline industry.
"Even your mobile phone charger keeps drawing power after you phone is charged, which causes heat, so you turn on the air conditioner, which uses more energy."
Fernando said that EMC was the first software company to deliver solid-state disk storage, which draws 98 per cent less power than the traditional spinning hard disks.
He forecast that solid-state disk drivers, which have no moving parts and are 30 times faster, will be the future for storage.
One million dollars saved
Charles Koh, the senior vice president of investment house Trusted Source Temasek, told the seminar that his organization was able to save one million dollars in power costs after reducing its 104 physical servers down to just 12.
"We no longer have to worry about server provisioning, we have achieved real estate savings because we need less room, and our staff have a better work-life balance due to our adoption of Green IT," Koh said. "IT must call the shots from the front row with Green IT and this approach must be integrated at the planning stage. We need to be 'cheering from the front' regarding Green IT, which must make economic sense."