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

business practices of decreasing operating expenses and boosting prof-
itability. Here are the significant discussion points:

■ Organizational issues in going to green IT
■ Regulations as factors for change
■ Motivation for executives to move to green data centers
■ Issues of product end of life and asset disposal, procurement policies, and
such
■ The basic steps required for green IT
■ The role of software, applications, and process workload for green IT
■ Laptops and other distributed and mobile equipment as an important
part of green IT
■ The need for energy measurement and management
■ Resources to get the latest information on green IT

Green data centers can be built from scratch, or they can be modified
ptg
traditional data centers. Currently, there is no demarcation point as to
when a data center becomes green. There are some simple metrics like
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Infrastructure
Efficiency (DCiE) for energy efficient data centers, but these metrics
don’t cover the entire scope of the data center. We can postulate that a
five-passenger automobile is energy efficient if it gets at least 30 miles
per gallon on the highway. We can have similar criteria for what makes a
bus, light truck, or large 18-wheeler energy efficient—or, even better, a
“green” bus or truck. Efforts are underway to establish metrics for
energy-efficient or “green” servers. The work to establish standard server
and data-storage energy use metrics is discussed in detail in Chapter 7,
“The Need for Standard IT Energy-Use Metrics.” Establishing energy
use efficiency for a server or data-storage device is considerably more
complicated than for an air conditioner. A large data center creates an
immensely complicated environment to place on an energy-efficiency
scale.
We know that when we consolidate server and data-storage resources
to reduce server equipment cost, server management cost, and data cen-
ter space, we also significantly reduce energy use. Thus, the starting
point for a green data center is to optimize (for example, use the mini-
mum) the amount of equipment (and hence floor space) needed through