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The Greening of IT
158 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

administrative systems common to any large organization, but also with
computation increasingly being a key element of all research projects, the
need for centralized and energy-efficient computing has never been greater.
Historically at large universities, many of the computers used for research are
dispersed throughout the campus, often in spaces not designed for the
multinode clusters required for HPC. In most cases, these dispersed comput-
ers are administered by graduate students rather than IT professionals. Also,
each group of dispersed computers usually operate at much less than full
capacity because the computer resource for one research project cannot be
shared with other research projects because each have their own computer
systems.
In my experience, universities are similar to any organization in that dif-
ferent groups with their own computer resource are often skeptical about the
benefits versus the loss of flexibility and control in moving to a centralized,
shared computer resource. Different groups in a corporation or university
often question the benefits of shared computing from performance, accessi-
bility, and security aspects. However, the global economic meltdown in the
second half of 2008 has provided a substantial additional motivation to move
ptg
to green data centers because of the promise of substantial economic savings
in addition to the societal necessity of reducing energy consumption to bene-
fit the environment. The Columbia University case study discusses the uni-
versity’s proposed solution for addressing these concerns.
The Lexington, Kentucky, corporate data center case study should give
valuable lessons learned for improving the energy efficiency of any large
legacy data center. This data center, originally at 61,000 square feet and
bursting at the seams, is far larger than any of the data centers I’ve worked on
and should give encouragement to any IT group looking at creating a green
data center out of a very large data center that at first might appear to be
“beyond repair.”

Bryant University Scalable Modular Approach to a
Green Data Center

The Bryant University (Smithfield, Rhode Island) green data center is a
state-of-the-art project based on the concept of a “Scalable Modular Data
Center.” The IBM modular data center used at Bryant is similar in concept to
Google’s “Data Center in a Box” design. The modular design concept is to
build small and easily expand as needed. Google’s design is a container