Since there is no such thing as a Green Data Center today (in a purist sense), this book addresses what steps you can take and what standards are their to move towards one.  This is a great book to not just read once but refer back to in building your plan.

I’m here at the EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference, where some of higher education’s best and brightest information technology thinkers meet and collaborate about ways to enhance and extend learning.

A lot of them have adopted Cisco TelePresence, not only as way to create new educational and business models, but also as a way to be more sustainable. 

The more conventional way to be sustainable with Cisco TelePresence is to reduce travel between various campuses.  Take a look at what conference attendees had to say about that in this video:

But there’s another twist.  

But that face-to-face is so necessary, and not just because of the language and cultural barriers inherent in international discussions.  Negotiations on climate change can be contentious:  agreements have considerable impact on national economies and rates of growth, and they touch emotional hot buttons around the fair distribution of responsibility between industrialized and developing countries.  It’s a bit like a holiday gathering of a large, extended, and occasionally dysfunctional family.

You know what I’m going to write next:  Cisco has a solution, and it has something to do with telepresence technology.

The smart grid is not just about smart technology – it’s also about how people use that technology to be smarter about their own behavior.

Business and municipal leaders have figured this out, and they’re addressing a critical piece of the climate change puzzle: empowering consumers to help reduce global warming by being smarter about their own behavior.

Smart Meters

As part of my research for a recent article about Smart Grid Strategies for a Global Marketplace on News@Cisco, I interviewed Kjartan Skaugvoll, vice president and general manager of Sales at Nuon, a Dutch utility company. He feels strongly that consumers can play a big part in addressing climate change, and he’s really enthusiastic about how smart meters in people’s homes, connected to an intelligent electric grid, can help educate people about their energy consumption, so they can make changes in their behavior accordingly.

Flash to last February, when we launched Cisco EnergyWise. Most analysts and press were very positive. Cisco EnergyWise was seen as innovative because it took advantage of this simple fact: Networking is so ubiquitous that it touches every part of a business. Why not exploit this to give the network more relevance, and solve bigger problems than just passing packets? And this was just the beginning.

Thinking about it, the same piece of advice is good for business and residential customers who plan to use demand side management (DSM) to cut energy costs. A key feature of the smart grid, demand side management lets utility customers cut energy costs by shifting energy consumption to times when power costs less. While off-peak pricing may not be available from your utility now, it will be in the future. And it can make a big difference in your energy costs and your carbon footprint. But taking advantage of DSM requires planning, and that’s something you can start right away. Working with an energy Demand Response (DR) expert such as EnerNOC (www.enernoc.com) to plan your DSM program is immensely helpful, but first do some homework on your own.

We’ve recently embarked on an logical extension of the Advanced Services we’ve been providing for efficiency assessments for the last 24 months.  Our Facilities Design Specification Service is uncovering some interesting new approaches to energy efficient data center design.  Since you only get a very finite window of opportunity to make changes to an environment like a data center, modeling is key.

We use 6sigma from Future Facilities for highly detailed thermal modeling and good old Visio for everything else.  However, we are using with great success an intermediary application, Google SketchUp. Hats off and many thanks to the Google crew for giving this incredibly powerful yet simple tool away.  While we do use the pro version, most of our customers can use the free version to simply convey design intent.  Say goodbye to whiteboards.

You may have already used it and most likely have seen the 3D buildings in Google Earth.

A good report was issued last week from The 451 Group, written by Andy Lawerence.  They issued another insightful report last year called Eco-Efficient IT and appear to be an analyst body spending some real cycles on digging past the Green veneer.  While we’ve not purchased this most recent report “Data Center Management and Energy Efficiency Software”, the executive summary is worth the very simple registration process.  Without giving too much away there are a few key points I thought worthy of highlighting:

1)  There are already as many as 9 distinct approaches to energy management in data centers
2)  Traditional organizational structures are being challenged
3)  The business case is already very attractive

On this last point, there is a lot of room for real financial savings with very little capital expenditure.  To simplify for the sake of blog’eese; the way we are assessing it in the team I lead for Energy Management Services is as follows:

There is an old saying, “you catch more flies with honey.”  This especially applies in the US where we enjoy a representative democracy.  While this political system moves slowly, it does move.  Given the corporate sway on this political system, one could argue that influencing large corporations is as important as governments today.  To that end I’ve prepared some points that might help my fellow environmentalists better influence a company like ours to accommodate a particular agenda:

1. Corporations are publicly traded.  Therefore any corporation you want to influence must show fiscal responsibility (aka profit).  Find a way to make the connection between what a corporation sells or could sell and your particular agenda.  I have developed several examples under the planning tools section of Cisco’s Efficiency Assurance Program that tie economics to CO2.  In the case of global climate change, there are no better business cases out there for environmentalism than energy efficiency and brand recognition.
2. Deliver your message in a professional manner.  Professionals in any field are called that for a reason.  They are either good at what they do or have been around long enough without making any career limiting mistakes.  I hold the environmental community to the same standard.  Spend the time to author a solid plan (mirroring a typical business plan format is a good start) that makes defensible claims on the cost of environmental impacts in current and/or future forms, then link it to the business in a meaningful way.  If you’ve already done this and a Corporation doesn’t bite… guerilla tactics won’t help.  Persistence and adaptation will.  I have a Green collar today by picking small battles that can be won while marching towards a larger plan.