NAS vendor ONStor decided to have a look at the space, power and cooling challenges data center operators are encountering. Their findings aren't pretty.

After surveying 369 IT managers in the U.S., ONStor discovered that a whopping sixty-three percent of them ran smack into a wall without warning. One day, out of the blue, they simply ran out of room or couldn't provide power for more systems.

Awesome! Though this may help to explain why VMware is having a bang-up year.

But wait, it gets better...

Another alarming statistic was that although the power consumption of an enterprise's data center is massive, 40 percent of respondents have not discussed a green initiative within their company; 60 percent reported that they had a green initiative in place, would have one in place in the next two years, or had at least talked about it with management.

One must wonder how many of that 60 percent are actually following through. But enough negativity, let's go play with the org chart!

"11 percent report interest in creating a chief energy officer position." Ha! Good luck getting that OK'ed by your Chief *Executive* Officer. May we suggest a CSO, instead?

Here are a couple of other interesting tidbits gleaned from the press release:

At their current data growth rate, 43 percent of respondents could stay in their current infrastructure for only six months to one year if they changed nothing

24 percent reported that the cost and time of building another data center is the most serious issue driving the reduction of data infrastructure power consumption

Half of respondents favor service-level agreements (SLAs) and chargebacks to IT disciplines for power and capacity consumption, but only half of them either have implemented these policies or know they will be doing so

[via TreeHugger]

Photo: "Things you don't want to see in a datacenter" - skreuzer/Flickr - Creative Commons