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The Greening of IT
210 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

A Roadmap for Green IT

This section is based on the article “IBM’s Vision for the New Enterprise
Data Center,” March 2008 (see Bibliography). You can’t make the world
move more slowly. Or change where markets are headed. Or hold back new
technologies while focusing on day-to-day IT operational issues. But there is
something you can do, right now.
The fact is that not all of today’s IT infrastructures were built to support
the explosive growth in computer capacity and information. Many data cen-
ters have become highly distributed and somewhat fragmented. As a result,
they are limited in their capability to change quickly and support the inte-
gration of new types of technologies or to easily scale to power the business as
needed. So how do you find the time and resources to drive the innovation
required to keep your company competitive in a rapidly changing market-
place? How can you react to business needs faster?
Because today’s distributed approach to the enterprise data center is chal-
lenged to keep up in a fast-paced business environment, a new centralized IT
approach is needed. We must rethink IT service delivery to help move ptg
beyond today’s operational challenges to a new data center model that is
more efficient, service-oriented, and responsive to business needs.
This vision for the new enterprise data center is an evolutionary model
that helps reset the economics of IT and can dramatically improve opera-
tional efficiency. It also can help reduce and control rising costs and improve
provisioning speed and data center security and resiliency—at any scale.
It will enable you to be highly responsive to any user need. And it aligns
technology and business, giving you the freedom and the tools you need to
innovate and stay ahead of the competition.
Through our experience with thousands of client engagements, we have
developed an architected approach based on best practices and proven imple-
mentation patterns and blueprints. And our own data center transformation
provides first-hand proof that embracing this new approach simply makes
good business sense.
Right now, technology leaders are challenged to manage sprawling, com-
plex distributed infrastructures, and an ever-growing tidal wave of data,
while remaining highly responsive to business demands. And, they must
evaluate and decide when and how to adopt a multitude of innovations that
will keep their companies competitive. IT professionals spend much of the
day fixing problems—keeping them from applying time and resources to