Green: inevitable future, necessary evil, marketing ploy, excuse for legislators, or all of the above? ‘Green’ is a word of which the emotional resonance continues to build, and which is yet to be fully understood or widely applied in the data center sector. This is something that our review publication Grow a Greener Data Center: A guide to building and operating energy-efficient, ecologically sensitive server environments seeks to address.

The author, Douglas Alger, sets a clear agenda for the ‘greening’ of the data center space. One of his key tasks in the book is to demystify a term – green – whose meaning has become cluttered and abused. The book therefore offers a measured exposition of what, in practical terms, ‘green’ means.

Alger is Cisco’s IT architect for physical infrastructure and is responsible for developing architecture roadmaps, solutions and policies for the physical infrastructure of one of the largest and most geographically diverse facility portfolios in the world. He therefore brings a considerable body of knowledge and experience to the book.

Starting from his working definition of a green data center as “a computing environment that uses resources in a more efficient manner and has less impact upon people and the environment”, Alger has assembled a comprehensive digest and exposition of all green topics as they relate to the data center environment, including:

• An introductory section on going green and what might encourage or discourage companies from doing so (or indeed force companies to do so);
• Measuring ‘green’ data centers;
• The implications of going green for all aspects of data center design, build and operation, including discussions of strategy, management, power, cooling, cabling, usage of materials and chemicals, selection of equipment, automation, virtualisation, and site selection.

One of the main problems in writing about data centers is that despite a largely common definition of purpose, most data centers are different from each other in critical aspects of design, technology adoption, management, location and so on. The author overcomes this by presenting each topic in terms of key points and options to be considered, and by providing extensive illustration, tables, charts, case histories and links to further information. The mix of observation, interpretation, opinion and information add to the usability of the publication – it is intended as a guide to options rather than a ‘one size fits all’ prescription. The writing style makes use of bulleted key points, notes, boxed information and section summaries, and these all confirm that this is a practical guide, perhaps ideal for your Kindle as you walk around your data center.

This guide serves as a comprehensive introduction to the issues of data center design, build and operation. It will also interest those with a non-technical interest in data centers, since it discusses the legislative, environmental and social context of data center activity. And for those actively involved in the design, build or operation it provides a guide to ‘greening’ the data center across all areas of technology and management. As the author reminds us, this ultimately means reduced data center operating costs and improved ROI.

This review first appeared in DatacenterDynamicsFOCUS. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition