I became interested in Green ICT after managing a business with ~100 servers for a weather app, so I took note of this story about UK Met Office's efforts. The Met Office is doing many of the right things, but here's the ironic bottom line:

Computerworld's "Top 12 Green-IT Users" list links each organization's name to a sustainable IT mini-case study. These organization include businesses from a variety of sectors, a non-profit, and a government agency. I was stuck by unique and unexpected implementations:

Computerworld's The 5 quickest returns on your green investment is a quick summary of where to find what Gartner characterizes as "low hanging fruit" and "fat". Despite the mixed metaphor, statistics and case study references make this more useful than many summary articles.

The McKinsey / Uptime Institute report Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency, available as both a PowerPoint and a podcast, contains a wealth of current and projected data on energy utilization and GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, including information about what various enterprises are doing. Among its findings:

A "Website Statement of Sustainable Computing" tells your stakeholders what you are doing to minimize your website's energy consumption and carbon footprint. Here's a checklist you can use to construct your own statement, followed by a statement example:

Those of us attuned to audio information can now get podcasts from Sun Micosystems, a company regularly covered by Vertatique. The podcasts cover green computing and other aspects of sustainability and technology. iTunes link: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1605516...

"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.

More

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.

Insight from Sun Microsystems on why energy and heat are becoming a drag on computing performance . . .

Amazing stats buried in a Wired magazine article:

"If it's necessary to waste memory and bandwidth to dominate the petascale era, gorging on energy is an inescapable cost of doing business. Ask.com operations VP Dayne Sampson estimates that the five leading search companies together have some 2 million servers, each shedding 300 watts of heat annually, a total of 600 megawatts. These are linked to hard drives that dissipate perhaps another gigawatt. Fifty percent again as much power is required to cool this searing heat, for a total of 2.4 gigawatts. With a third of the incoming power already lost to the grid's inefficiencies, and half of what's left lost to power supplies, transformers, and converters, the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts.

The article continues . . .