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2: The Basics of Green IT 17

projects such as data center consolidation, server consolidation, virtual
servers, virtual storage, flexible test systems using virtual resources, and
so on. Typically, servers and data storage devices at a data center are
“refreshed” on a four- to five-year cycle. That’s similar to the typical
three-year refresh cycle on your corporate desktop computer or corporate
laptop. The thinking is that computer technology is moving so fast that
to keep our productivity up, our companies should provide new laptops
every three years—or so. That provides a great opportunity for establish-
ing green data centers—because chances are many of the devices at your
data centers are about to go through a refresh cycle. The new servers
should be procured with an energy-efficiency policy in mind. In addi-
tion, the replacement servers need to be recycled in an environmentally
friendly way.
This chapter gives details on the benefits and problems in moving to
green IT.

Organizational Issues in Addressing the Problem

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Organization is one of the first issues to address for green IT. The
organization issue usually starts with who manages and controls the IT
power bill. Often, the CIO doesn’t pay the electricity bill, and the power
cost for a data center is allocated to the different groups in the building
based on square footage. That’s a good deal for the data center group,
but it doesn’t provide motivation to reduce energy use in the data center.
We know that the cost of powering and cooling the data center and com-
munications closets is escalating. In early 2008, Gartner correctly pre-
dicted that by 2009, power and cooling costs would be second only to
salaries in many IT budgets. This issue on the IT power bill does not try
to solve the climate change problems. It is focused directly on the
energy conservation solutions now available and their impact on the
enterprise bottom line. The Uptime Institute is a research-based aca-
demic group founded to serve data center owners/operators and senior
facilities engineers across the U.S., searching for leading practices for
data center facilities and infrastructure systems design, engineering, and
operations.
The organization measures the energy waste in data centers resulting
from power supply, distribution, and cooling. According to Institute
data gathered from the 85 large-scale corporate members in its network,
it takes 2.5 watts at the building’s electricity meter to deliver 1.0 watt