Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

There's been a lot of hubbub lately about the greening of IT, and it's going to get worse. Unlike most buzz/noise fronts that come and go, this one didn't start in the marketing department. It began with someone finding out that they had reached the end of the line when it came to adding another "wafer-thin" piece of IT gear. They were either out of room, out of air conditioning or out of power--problems that can't be instantly solved with a big check.

Most of the noise around green IT is centered on servers. From an infrastructure perspective, servers sit atop the food chain. They're also the presumed culprit when it comes to IT power and footprint problems, which is wrong, but it's about to be a moot point. Let's say I agree that your dual-core mega machines suck more juice and blow more heat than the participants of a tequila swilling, buffalo wing eating contest. Let's also agree that it will only get worse for a while, as we've conditioned our industry to make sure it comes out with chips that pump out twice as much for half the dough year after year ... until they approach the temperature of magma and your PC needs its own power grid. Do we need another 8 billion instructions per second capability to launch Word? No.