Who should be responsible for your company's energy initiatives? Your organization may be grappling with the answer to that question. Controlling IT energy consumption has become a high priority for many companies as a way to lower costs, maintain business operations, and reduce their impact on the environment. It can be a rather daunting challenge, given that so many areas of a company's IT infrastructure -- from the desktop to the datacenter -- contribute to power usage, not to mention that various departments have vested and sometimes conflicting interests in those operations (for instance, users want might want more computing power -- but another department has to pay for it).

We've all heard the line about 'realigning IT with the business', which is sort of like saying we want our 'pivot to make better passes to the shooters' -- duh. But as crazy as that sounds, it's reality -- and it isn't getting better, it's getting worse.

There's no question that some companies pursue green solutions because it's the right thing to do. But plenty of them also do it for the cost savings.

Information technology is going green. At least IT systems vendors are, with announcements of new energy-efficient servers, data centre power and cooling products, and device recycling initiatives coming thick and fast these days

As heavy power users, IT departments have a key part to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And apart from the environmental impact, they need to make sure they don't exhaust their capacity. A recent Gartner report notes that 50 percent of data centres will have insufficient power and cooling capacity by 2008

Here are some frightening realities: You can't buy any more power in the cities of Boston or Houston, and other cities are either on the tapped-out list or about to be. It doesn't matter if you are Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, you can't buy any more. That, my friends, is a pretty harsh reality.

Server prices are dropping, performance is increasing, and IT is consuming less space. So why is total cost of ownership headed through the roof?