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

What This Book Covers

This book includes the following topics to help you understand green data
centers and your potential role in creating and maintaining them:

■ The significant role data centers have in the world’s consumption of elec-
tric energy and carbon footprint.
■ How companies are offering services and products to help reduce data
center energy use—for example, IBM’s Big Green $1 billion annual
investment in green data centers.
■ How IT employees (for example, corporate CIOs (chief information
officers), IT architects, IT specialists, and IT project managers) can help
drive the implementation of green data centers.
■ Case studies of organizations implementing green data centers.
■ Details on the best ways to measure data center energy use and report to
your executives. Because “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” the
first step is to start the measurement process and understand the need to
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continually improve your measurement process. This is necessary to bet-
ter quantify the savings due to your energy initiatives.
■ Study of the different ways to measure server utilization and look at
trends. You need to answer the question: How has customer server virtu-
alization increased server CPU utilization?
■ Continuing follow-up on the literature on green data centers because
technology is progressing at a fast pace. The U.S. EPA is key to following
the U.S. government recommendations and incentives for data center
energy efficiency.
■ Survey of emerging technology for server and storage enhancement to
reduce data center energy use. This includes the following:
♦ Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), overall storage manage-
ment, tiered storage
®
♦ Server virtualization enhancements such as PowerVM , VMware
enhancements, and such
♦ Active energy management
♦ Enhanced cooling technology
■ Analysis of emerging technology for server and storage enhancement to
reduce data center energy use.