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12: The Future of Green IT for Corporations 207

1. Communicate Green IT Plans and Appoint an Energy Czar

A first step is to measure current energy use and establish a baseline.
Chapter 2, “The Basics of Green IT,” and Appendix A, “Green IT Checklist
and Recommendations,” give details on measurement options and a checklist
to get started. Chapter 7, “The Need for Standard IT Energy-Use Metrics,”
describes the different energy-efficiency metrics. Communicating to all
employees your organization’s plans and goals to save energy via green IT is
an important step. That communication, in addition to plans and goals,
needs to include the organization that will be driving the effort. It is a good
idea to designate a focal point, with a title. The title doesn’t need to be offi-
cially “energy czar,” but, in essence, that should be the role of the focal point.

2. Consolidate and Virtualize
The significance of consolidating and virtualizing IT is the topic of
Chapter 6, “A Most-Significant Step—‘Virtualizing’ Your IT Systems.”
Consolidation of IT operations and using virtualization to reduce server
footprint and energy use are the most well-recognized and most-often-
ptg
implemented efficiency strategies of the past few years. The checklist in
Appendix A provides a good way to start with an inventory of where you are
with green IT, and this checklist emphasizes consolidation and virtualization
as key steps.

3. Install Energy-Efficient Cooling Units

Chapter 8, “What About Chillers, Cooling Tower Fans, and All That
Cooling Equipment Usually Ignored by IT?,” describes the significance of
energy-efficient cooling (cooling accounts for half of data center energy use).
Although energy-efficient data center cooling is not something we IT people
usually are involved with, the significance of an energy-efficient data center
needs to be appreciated as part of your green IT plan.

4. Measure and Optimize

Chapter 7 describes IT energy-use metrics. Over the past two years, The
Green Grid has grown from 11 founding members to a consortium of more
than 150 companies working to improve data center energy efficiency.