This question is the title of a recent story in CIO Insight. The article opens:

"Green IT" lets companies put on their eco-friendly faces and proclaim their love of the environment. It is also a bean counter's dream, in which innovative uses of hardware and software drive down energy and infrastructure costs. But is the former just clever marketing to wrap around the latter, which includes initiatives businesses would be taking anyway?

My immediate reaction: "Does it really matter?" . . .

Peterson has been involved in “green computing” through the Vertatique project, an effort to share information about sustainability in computing and electronic media. He believes the concept is achievable and eventually could be used to transform existing data centers . . .. Peterson acknowledged that Yahoo and Google believe some of the information about their green data centers is a proprietary competitive advantage, but he said others such as Sun Microsystems approach their green computing work more openly. . . “I think it's very achievable,” Peterson said. “The technology and practices to do so are pretty well defined. There is a lot of work being done on this elsewhere in the country, especially in California.”

Wisconsin Technology Network - 23 Jul 2007

"Virtualization" generally refers to any abstraction of computing resources. In the Green ICT context, it refers to consolidating multiple logical resources onto fewer physical resources. For example, hosting multiple web sites on a single server may make the most efficient use of that hardware. The power and HVAC load due to idle computers is reduced, but care has to be taken to ensure quality of service. Vertatique.com is hosted this way to minimize its energy/carbon impact.

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The BBC recently reported on the UK's effort to combat cyber warming, which it defines as "carbon dioxide emissions from the production, operation and disposal of computers"

A public-private task force know as "Green Shift" has some very specific goals:

The Sierra Club's magazine hit a Vertatique double in the March/April issue, but I could not find any indication the Club, magazine, or web site practices green computing.

1.  A profile/interview with Sun Microsystems' Dave Douglas on green computing and related topics.

2.  Stats on sustainability issues in movie productions . . .

Attendees of Interop 2007 in Las Vegas this week can attend several relevant sessions within the conference's Data Center Summit track.

Sustainable computing is getting enough traction in the IT community that commercial information providers are getting involved. Ziff-Davis is offering this online event: http://presentations.inxpo.com/Shows/ZiffDavisEnterprise/VTS/04-24-07/We...

This is the title of a presentation by Dave Douglas, the vice president of eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems, based on experience at Sun's Broomfield CO data center. View the slideshow as published by CIO Insight.

This is the title of a recently-released white paper from The Green Grid initiative. The paper provides a good overview of some of the contemporary ideas on how to create a "green data center", has a checklist to use in planning, and discusses some heat management techniques like Closely-Coupled Cooling. View the complete white paper.

Vertatique commentor David Washburn  recently called our attention to a presentation by Sun Microsystems' CTO, which focused on the class of large computing users with high-growth demand. I was disappointed that the CTO only tangentially talked about power consumption, but his remarks got me thinking . . .