Consumer goods giant Unilever has started a European datacentre decommissioning programme affecting 5,000 servers, and will consolidate most of its transactions from separate territorial datacentres down to two primary locations.

The firm refused to detail the exact number of datacentres affected by the initiative or dates when the facilities would be discontinued, citing “employment-related” issues.

Understanding where to focus is a key green IT challenge, said Unilever’s Europe vice president of IT services Paulo de Sa.

“Guidelines and regulations are beginning to emerge, but the rules are not as straightforward as they could be,” he said.

“There is a lot of work to be done to grasp what they mean and how corporations need to align to them.”

Globally, Unilever will consolidate its datacentres over two years. In Europe it expect the plan to affect 40 per cent of its servers.

“Global IT sensitisation to the issues started in late 2006, strategy, planning and mobilisation during 2007 and ongoing execution into 2008,” said de Sa.

“Heavy deployment and acceleration of server and storage virtualisation technology in 2007 was a key driver in green datacentre strategy.”

The group is in a seven-year contract with Accenture to implement a unified European IT platform. Datacentre operations in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Turkey and Middle East are run under a £340m outsourcing deal with HP.

Meanwhile, Tesco has recently completed a carbon audit of its datacentres as the latest stage of an IT-driven programme to reduce the group's carbon footprint.

“We now know the scale of the problem, and are focusing on mobilisation and investigation as opposed to boasting how much we have saved,” said Tesco’s group technology and architecture director Mike Yorwerth.

“What we have learned so far is that we can use IT as a force for good. We may need to increase the carbon footprint of IT to reduce the overall carbon emission of Tesco ­ hence the reduction on a like-for-like basis.”

Yorwerth said the industry needs to understand the wider impact of IT in reducing the overall problem of climate change.

“Eighteen months ago, nobody was talking about green IT,” he said. “In a year’s time, hopefully everyone will be doing it, whether it is for the right or wrong reasons.”

Unilever's Paulo de Sa and Tesco's Mike Yorwerth will be speaking at the Green IT 2008 conference in London on 7-8 May. For more details visit www.greenituk.com