So going green seems to me a relatively new label to old data center problems / considerations. Power consumption, air conditioning, floor space, rack density. Outside the data center, green means things like low emissions, ride your bike to work, clean energy, reduce your carbon footprint, recycle, or even plant a tree.

So where it makes $ sense, go for the green. Here’s some areas that I think of and make a lot of sense to consider when going data center green:

Servers:
blade servers - increase rack density and decrease power consumption per server ratio (power, cooling, less EOL junk in 5-10 year)
server virtualization - reduce server count and better utilize compute cycles (power, cooling, less EOL junk in 5-10 year)

Storage:
Archiving - if sent to a idle medium like tape or idle disk (power and cooling)
Thin provisioning - or any other storage virtualization that allows for better utilization and deferred storage purchase (power and cooling)

Networking:
Data center interconnect aggregation - SAN and TCP/IP blades combined in an enterprise switch. Reduces Networking equipment footprint (power, cooling, less EOL junk in 5-10 year)

I’m sure there are many more you all can think up, but what you don’t see a lot of out there are clean energy solutions hitting the data center. Solar, wind, geothermal heating/cooling etc… The above technologies attempt to reduce how we consume resources in the data center, but what about shifting to a cleaner source of power for the data center. Unfortunately in my experience this is left up to NSTAR to figure out.

-James Brissenden, GlassHouse Senior Consultant, Storage and Data Protection