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

■ The Uptime Institute—Organization of Data Center Operators
http://uptimeinstitute.org/
The Uptime Institute, mentioned previously in this book, is a con-
sortium of data center operators that focuses on tools and strategies
to maintain the serviceability and reliability of data centers. It sets
various data center performance levels through the tier system,
which dictates equipment redundancy and data center environment
criteria to maintain a specified level of system availability. Uptime
has been adding energy optimization as another critical criterion for
data center operation and reliability and one that needs to be fac-
tored in when considering data center reliability and availability.
■ EPA/DOE—Environmental Protection Agency/Department of
Energy
http://www.energy.gov/
Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories such as Lawrence Berkeley
National Labs and Pacific Northwest National Labs are cooperating
in development of research and best practices for green IT.
ptg
Government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) are leading the effort to standardize metrics to measure energy
consumption. Organizations are taking on the responsibilities that
they can deliver on—not worrying about turf.
■ EU Code of Conduct—European Union Code of Conduct
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/html/standby_initiative_
data%20centers.htm
The European Code of Conduct for data centers was published in
2008 ahead of the Energy Star Rating for Data Centers and is a great
piece of work to identify and quantify improvements to a data center.
■ AFCOM—Association for Computer Operations Management
http://www.afcom.com/
AFCOM provides education and resources for data center managers.
It devotes a portion of its efforts to assisting data center managers to
identify energy-efficiency activities.