Cassatt IT Energy Survey & Roundup

Today we at Cassatt announced our very comprehensive survey of IT energy Efficiency, and released a companion White Paper as well. Although I initially blogged about initial findings back in January, since then we've been doing analyses and going back to respondents and collecting 1st-hand 1:1 data and quotes that elaborate on the raw data. (I might add that excerpts of these interviews are included in the white paper).

The Survey was a really wide-ranging look at the IT industry - who's taking what initiatives, where are the industry pain-points, what sources of information are trusted, etc., and we found a few surprising data points as well. Such as

• Where most enterprises go for "green" IT information may not be where you think
• The degree of energy waste in different departments is more acute than you might believe
• The willingness of some professionals to take new/different approaches to power management is more aggressive than we believed
  

More Surveys:
I've been spending time researching a number of other very excellent data center surveys being conducted, and you should look at them together to provide a rounded-out picture of the state-of-the-industry. Here goes:

• My initial blog from January about the Cassatt survey
  
• My follow-up blog citing additional 3rd-party surveys (from AMD and SearchDataCenter) that had been conducted in the market
  
• My third blog - from March - citing more excellent survey work, this time by the Uptime Institute as well as from Gartner Research
  
• An excellent piece by Stacey Higginbotham (at Earth2Tech) that references the BPM Forum study outlining how energy consumption is still out-of-control
  
• A piece I found on Greenercomputing.com referencing a report by Lean and Green Leadership. A free synopsis of the report is available for download.

One last note: a significant finding in our own survey was that most IT managers still turn to their equipment vendors for guidance on energy efficiency -- rather than to independent sources. So my final plea is that you look hard at the surveys, conclusions and recommendations that come from independent sources as much (or more) than the data that comes from the big vendors. Besides the surveys above, fantastic work is also coming out of The Green Grid, The Uptime Institute, as well as from the EPA.