The Economic Meltdown

Plenary Session with Kenneth G. Brill, Executive Director at the Uptime Institute, speaking at the 21st Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '07), on the topic of costs and power consumption in data centers. The net economic productivity of IT is threatened because server power consumption improvement is occurring at a slower rate than the increase in computer performance. As a result, the enterprise TCO per unit of computing has not been falling nearly as rapidly as senior executives might think. The one-time benefit of killing dead servers and virtualization will defer this new economic reality, but CFOs, CTOs, and CIOs need to change their economic decision models now or risk investing in new applications that can't pay back their real costs.