25 facts you should know about green IT

What's the biggest power hog in the datacenter? Who urged the president to support green federal datacenters? Find out these answers and 23 more facts below

If you have a Facebook account, you've likely been tagged by a friend to share 25 random things about yourself. The trend has spread like wildfire; a lot of people evidently enjoy digesting bite-sized nuggets of titillating trivia about their peers. But why limit the "25 random things about ..." format to people? Allow me to present 25 random facts that you should know about green IT. Don't worry, though: I won't tag you to come up with 25 of your own.

Green IT for the datacenter
1. Ninety percent of companies with large datacenters will need to add more power and cooling within the next two years.

2. A study by McKinsey found that among a total of 458 servers at four production datacenters, 32 percent (146 in all) were running at or below 3 percent peak and average utilization. These types of zombie servers are prime candidates for unplugging to free up space and power and reduce cooling needs.

3. Speaking of which, companies can reap a 65 percent reduction in server count through virtualization -- though your mileage may vary.

[ Learn all about virtualization with David Marshalls' Virtualization Report. ]

4. Increasing the set point temperature in your datacenter by just one degree can reduce energy consumption by 4 to 5 percent (though there are caveats about going too high).

5. Datacenters produce around 0.3 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. The airline industry produces 0.6 percent, and the steel industry produces 1.0 percent.

6. According to a study conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (PDF), DC (direct current) delivery systems can be 20 percent or more efficient than current AC (alternating current) delivery systems, be more reliable, and potentially cost less in the long run.

[ Read more about the benefits of bringing DC delivery systems to the datacenter. ]

7. The EPA estimated in 2006 that the typical enterprise datacenter had a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating of 2.0 or higher. (Ratings below 2.0 are better for the environment.) Through equipment efficiency improvements alone, combined with current practices, the number should reach 1.9 by 2011. The EPA predicts that "state-of-the-art datacenters," using exotic energy-efficient power and cooling technologies such as liquid cooling and combined heat-and-power energy generation solutions, could reach a PUE of 1.2.

8. Google has a reported PUE of 1.21 across its six company-built datacenters.