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• Analyze “what-if” scenarios, including room layout or infrastructure changes as
well as cooling capacity changes or failures.
• Ensure that a proper cooling solution has been achieved by addressing areas of
overprovisioning and smoothing out isolated hotspots.
Dynamic Smart Cooling
We talked about it a bit in Chapter 4, but HP’s Dynamic Smart Cooling bears inclusion here.
The system is designed to deliver 20- to 45-percent savings in cooling energy costs, or allow
additional equipment to be added to the datacenter while keeping costs steady.
The system uses an intelligent control node to continually adjust air conditioning
settings based on real-time air temperature measurements, which are based on feedback
from sensors positioned on IT racks.
HP is implementing this program in its six new consolidated datacenters in three
geographic zones of the U.S.

Rackspace
Rackspace, a Houston, Texas–based IT hosting company, realizes that it can’t be all things to
all people. While the company wants its customers to take advantage of the computational
power in its servers, it also wants to be a responsible company. To do both, Rackspace
allows its customers to meet in the middle.
When buying a server, customers can select either one with basic specs, or they can choose
a server that has been built with green IT in mind. A visit to their website (www.rackspace.com,
also Link 9-6) shows how you can buy a preconfigured, greener option. A basic model and its
greener counterpart are shown in Figures 9-7 and 9-8, respectively.
But that isn’t to suggest that the servers are the greenest options on the planet. They are
just better than regularly configured servers.
“We’re trying to find a sweet spot between performance and being green,” says PART IV
Rackspace CIO John Enright. “We tried to find the best mixture of components. You can get
high performance, but then you lack efficiency. As you go further down, you get more
efficiency, but less performance.”
Rackspace is also seeing a surge in customer demand for consolidation. As such, they’re
offering VMware on their servers and virtual machines on those servers.
Embracing a New Idea
Rackspace ventured into the realm of efficiency because their United Kingdom and
European datacenters were mandated to be more efficient. While adhering to European
Union laws, Rackspace decided to implement better efficiency company-wide.
“Green awareness has certainly been up recently, but two years ago when we started,
there really was none,” said Enright.
Soon, customers were asking for greener solutions.
“It took on a life of its own,” remembered Enright.
At one point, Rackspace hosted a “Green Day,” which allowed vendors to come in and
talk about the environmental benefits of their products. The next step was to survey their
customers and find out if they would be willing to pay extra for more efficient equipment. It
turns out that they would.