Grow a Greener Data Center by Douglas Alger

What It Is
In a nutshell
This book discusses energy efficiency and how to measure what “green” means in the context of a data center. Furthermore, it discusses current methods to make data centers greener from both the facilities and IT perspectives.

Organization
There are 10 chapters but I will group them as below:

• Chapters 1 and 2 (Basics of Green and Measuring): This group of chapters discusses the fundamental questions of what green is and how to measure the degree of greenness. A noteworthy point is that international activities, regulations and metrics are included in addition to those of the U.S.
• Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 (Facilities focus): This group of chapters discusses a comprehensive coverage on buildings, power, cooling, cabling, and refrigerants and fire suppressants from the energy efficiency perspective.
• Chapters 8 and 9 (IT focus): This group consists of a short chapter on IT hardware energy efficiency [chapter 8] and chapter 9 of comprehensive coverage on IT from consolidation and virtualization viewpoints.
• Chapter 10 (Greening beyond Data Centers): This chapter covers somewhat miscellaneous but relevant information such as e-waste.

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   Avoidable Mistakes that Compromise Cooling Performance
   in Data Centers and Network Rooms

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Review
The book contains timely and invaluable information on the issue of greening data centers. Each chapter contains appropriate and ready-to-apply subject matters. For example, the power section covers the IT gears impacts, power/GHG emission relationship, renewable energies, PDU/UPS efficiency, generators, lighting and overhead/underneath access. In addition, the cooing section discusses heat recovery/reuse, economizer, VFD, air/water, CFD and sealing gaps.

I was pleasantly surprised that the IT coverage was not skimpy but included discussions on consolidation/virtualization were given to cover all three of the IT gears, namely server, storage and network. The chapter 9 alone can be a good material to discuss some part of the state-of-the-art at a data center in the IT context.

Room for improvement or extension
Even though Alger covered the state of the art in both facilities and IT, I would like him to extend to cover software from the energy efficient perspective, maybe in a separate book or report.

After physical entities, such as facilities and IT hardware, are taken care of, the next step is to make software more energy efficient. Reference: I recently chaired a session on this topic.

Tags: Data Center, Green Data Center, Green IT