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13

CHAPTER

Greening Your

Information Systems

n the preceding dozen chapters, we’ve looked at various issues germane to your
organization and its environmental impact—specifically we’ve focused on your IT
Idepartment and its actions. In this chapter, we’ll take all the various information we’ve
covered and show you how you can lessen your IT department’s impact on the
environment.

Initial Improvement Calculations
Let’s say you’re overweight and one day you decide, “That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m losing
weight tomorrow!” For the next 6 months you eat right, you exercise, you get plenty of rest,
drink lots of water, and the weight is just pouring off. It’s coming off so nicely that a friend
comes up to you and says, “My gosh, you look great. How much weight have you lost?”
It feels good to have lost weight, but because you didn’t step on the scale for a starting
weight, you have no idea how much weight you’ve lost.
It’s the same way with greening your organization and IT department. If you don’t
know how much power you’re consuming, you won’t be able to compare it to results as you
proceed. But unlike someone who has lost weight, it’ll be harder to see the benefits of your
efforts. True, you can compare electrical bills from when you started to when you finished,
and you’ll see results there, but you can also take advantage of other opportunities to track
your progress.

Selecting Metrics
There’s a lot you can measure—and a lot of it isn’t even that difficult—to see you how
you’re doing in your efforts to go green. Let’s take a closer look at the metrics you can use.

Power Usage Effectiveness and Datacenter Efficiency
Two metrics have recently been introduced that help measure data center efficiency: Power
Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Datacenter Efficiency (DCE). PUE is defined as
PUE = Total facility power/IT equipment power

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