Market forces, rather than legislation, are driving companies to consolidate servers and develop more efficient power and cooling systems in data centres.
Speaking at the Infrastructure Operations and Data Centre Summit keynote in Sydney this week, Gartner analyst Matthew Boon told Computerworld the federal government's carbon reduction schemes will not result in changes to data centres for most organisations.
"The data centre will have a marginal influence on and provide only a small contribution for the carbon reduction scheme," Boon said.
"Improvements in data centres are driven by the business; it has never really been driven by legislation."
Bleeding-edge green technologies will be left to organisations with the largest data centres, according to Gartner analyst Simon Haywood, such as cloud computing providers, while smaller businesses will continue with low-capex, high ROI deployments.
More than half of Australian businesses use virtualisation to cut costs, compared to the global average of about 35 percent, according to Gartner figures.
Boon said CIOs are looking to virtualisation to solve increasing processing demands.
"Virtualisation is the only way forward for many - CIOs have to take a business orientated approach," he said.
He said business should be weary of software licensing agreements, chargeback mechanisms, and application sprawl which can weaken security.
He said businesses should demand ROI from virtualisation projects within six to 12 months.
