Green IT Machine

Follow @infoworld

There is a lot of green going on. I've just started looking into Green Data Centers. What are you doing that's green in your Data Center?

Here are some links:

The Green Grid

Cut Server Room Power

Intel Goes Greener

IBM Becomes More Energy Efficient

It seems to me one of the first things you want to do is figure out what your actual energy consumption is so you can tell if something you do to make green accomplishes anything. Large system vendors are starting to offer tools to figure out data center power consumption and cooling requirements. EMC has a power calculator which has EMC and other product manufacturer's power specs and can calc accurate power consumption. HP professional services does a good job planning cooling, power and temperature for data centers. While these are great starts, and highly necessary for planning, but what about real-time monitoring? How do you know if a particular component is consuming more power than it's specification calls for? Monitoring power consumption at least to the rack level seems like a good idea. You might get a warning of something wrong before it showed up in other monitoring.

So what green measures have you found to be effective?

What makes sense cost wise and how did you approach implementing it?

This is an important new topic developing in the IT community. There is a certain amount of hype around it, but a clear interest is emerging to substantially reduce resource consumption contributing to global warming.