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10: Green IT Case Studies for Universities and a Large Company 181

■ Improvements can be made in to the supply-demand model by using a
combination of actual data from newer equipment with the planned data
from older equipment.
■ Legacy equipment that will not be refreshed for several years often does
not have this measurement data capability, so we might have to use a
combination of planned and actual measurements for several years.
■ As cooling consumes a significant amount of power in the data center,
tactical and longer-term cooling improvements can be made to conserve
energy and reallocate that energy to additional IT equipment.
■ Significant mitigation of IT growth was achieved by conserving electric-
ity due to improvements in cooling, adding space by using denser equip-
ment enabled via the addition of power, reducing the number of servers
through virtualization, and more accurately measuring the resources
available.
■ No one technology will mitigate the explosive growth of IT in the indus-
try; gaining space through the use of denser equipment and additional
power will address a portion of the problem. It is the sum of the applica-
ptg
tion of these individual technologies that will significantly address the
mitigation of growth.

In summary, the IT team managed the requirements for significant IT
growth in the data center by conserving electricity, adding power and denser
equipment to effectively gain space, virtualizing the environment to require
fewer servers by increasing server utilization, more accurately measuring the
facility’s resources, and improving cooling by redirection of air flow.

Chapter Summary and Conclusions

From the discussion on green IT for several types of data centers, you can
reach the following conclusions:

■ There are many types of green IT initiatives, ranging from installing
smaller modular data centers to retrofitting large data centers. The case
studies in this chapter demonstrate a significant range in green data cen-
ter types and size.
■ University green IT case studies can provide important lessons learned.
Not only do they have the administrative systems common to any large
organization, but with computation increasingly important for all