4. Get the C-level execs involved

Last week, I wrote about how getting end-users involved in your greening process is essential. The fact of the matter is, a company-wide green computing effort becomes a whole lot easier and potentially successful when you have buy-in from CXOs. The question is, how do you get the CEO or CFO to care whether your datacenter becomes greener?

For starters, demonstrating how "green = efficiency = savings" can help. Telling a CXO, "We can reduce our carbon footprint by 20 per cent and our annual energy costs by $500,000 if we do this" makes for a compelling double-whammy argument, hitting on the bottom line benefits as well as the increasingly valuable CSR (corporate social responsibility) efforts that are attracting more investors and customers.

Dashboards depicting energy usage and savings over time (see No. 1) can also help make your ongoing case. Being able to point to a chart and show a significant drop in power waste after installing a new CRAC system or implementing a virtualization project, for example, can pave the way for funding approval for future green efforts.

5. Put virtualization on the table

As with most technologies, there are caveats to virtualization: It's not for everyone, and it's certainly not easy to implement. That all said, though, virtualization was among the favored technologies discussed at the Uptime Symposium, because it can potentially jettison or reassign a huge chunk of your organization's hardware.

As reported by Tom Kaneshige, "IBM started moving the workload of its 3,900 servers to 30 virtualized System z9 mainframes running Linux. Big Blue expects to cut energy consumption by 80 per cent, or more than $2 million in energy costs. Meanwhile, NetApp consolidated 343 servers to 177 via virtualization and replaced 50 storage systems with 10 new ones."

6. Consider outsourcing

Ponder the potential benefits of offloading all or some of your energy-consuming IT needs to a third party. It's entirely possible that an outside provider can offer service less expensively and more efficiently than you can manage.

For example, instead of hosting your own e-mail servers, what if you turned to a service such as Gmail or a hosted version of Exchange? Instead of investing in more storage gear, how about looking at a service such as Amazon S3? You can keep climbing up the ladder here, going so far as to outsource nearly all of your datacenter needs to a third party.

These were but a sampling of lessons and themes from the Uptime Green Enterprise Computing Symposium. I aim to hone in on other topics such as AC vs. DC and "datacenters in boxes" in future posts.