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• Communicate your successes to your staff.
• Communicate successes to stakeholders inside and outside the organization.

Certifications
If you want to go green, there are plenty of certifications out there that can help guide you.
For example, Energy Star, EPEAT, and RoHS can help you find equipment that does a good
job of lessening your power consumption and the toxins introduced into the environment. If
you want to build or remodel your facilities with environmental responsibility in mind,
LEED can certify your efforts.
However, at this point in time there is no certification, specifically, for a green
datacenter. Do you need any sort of certification to go green? Technically, no. However,
having a formal certification in place could be a good idea.

Benefits
First, a certification would mean that industry has come together and agreed on what
parameters must exist for a datacenter to be so certified. Industry would have to decide on
such factors as the following:
• Maximum power consumption
• The types of equipment allowed
• Cooling guidelines
• The materials allowed in equipment
• End-of-life procedures
This wouldn’t be a draconian edict handed down by industry. However, it would dictate
what needs to exist for your organization to achieve this future green certification.
A green datacenter certification would be a great thing. Not only would it give
organizations the opportunity to say, “We just got our green certification,” but it also would
provide a roadmap to achieve that certification. Just looking back through this book, you can
tell that greening your organization is a lot like eating an elephant. Where do you start?
The answer to both eating an elephant and greening your organization is simple: You start
anywhere.
A green datacenter certification would give you the exact things you need to do, so you
don’t need to get bogged down in so much detail. Instead, you can focus on the exact things PART V
you need to achieve to gain certification.
Realities
Is a green datacenter certification a pipe dream? We don’t think so. Although there’s nothing
front and center right now, the fact that greening your organization in general and your
datacenter in particular are big issues right now—and with the state of our environment
being what it is (not to mention the price of a gallon of gas)—you can expect that greening
the datacenter is going to become more prevalent and that a certification will be developed
sooner rather than later.