Page 309 -

280
280 P P a r t V : a r t V : T T h e G r e e n i n g P r o c e s sh e G r e e n i n g P r o c e s s

From an environmental standpoint, the equipment today is better than it was 5 years
ago, but the stuff available 5 years from now will be better than what we have today, as
shown next.

Equipment and processes
Even though you’ve
replaced old equipment continue to evolve, so you
should continually raise
with new, efficient
equipment... the bar to your
organization’s green
initiatives.

Plus, a lot of wheels are in motion from different companies and organizations to improve
your processes, from a more ecologically responsible perspective. For example, although you
might adopt a plan today that lessens the environmental impact of your organization’s SAN,
in the future there will be a smarter, safer way to deploy your SAN. As such, if you keep up
on what’s evolving, the next time you replace your SAN, you can keep moving forward
toward zero impact on the environment.
Also keep in mind the need for expansion. Even if you initially condense the size of
your datacenter through virtualization, make sure you have the room to expand. That is,
don’t give up all your datacenter space for some other use, because if you do have to
expand and don’t have the room available to you, you run the risk of making bad decisions
because you’re backed into a corner (no pun intended).

Sell the CEO
The benefits of going green seem obvious to us. But they aren’t obvious to everyone. Unless
your management—especially your CEO—buys into the notion that going green is a good
idea, nothing will change.
Although people are inherently good at heart, and they know they should reduce
greenhouse emissions, CEOs also know that their company needs to make money. So the
best way to explain the benefits of going green is by explaining the monetary benefits.
For instance, don’t just say, “Converting our datacenter from old rack servers into new
consolidated blade servers, with the responsibility of old servers virtualized onto the new
blades, will be more efficient.”
You will have lost your CEO at “datacenter.”
Rather, if you can explain that changing from old rack servers to blades will save
US$560 in electrical costs per server per year (and by the way, we have 5000 servers), you
will have the CEO’s ear.