Green IT for Dummies®

Chapter 18. Greening the Facility

In This Chapter

• Paying less for lighting

• Maintaining your landscaping

• Improving your indoor environment

• Recycling in your office

• Working with greener facilities management and security systems

Electronic equipment consumes lots of energy and creates many other environmental problems related to its manufacturing, materials, and disposal, but IT shops have other major opportunities for green improvements that don't involve stuff mounted in racks. To put things in perspective, take a look at how power for a typical IT facility is divided:

• Forty percent of the power consumed goes to servers, storage, and ancillary equipment (we talk about ways to green the data center in Part II).

• Another 40 percent goes to air conditioning the server room (we specifically address cooling in Chapter 10).

• Some 15 to 20 percent goes to providing conditioned power to the IT shop (UPS losses, PDU transformer losses) and to the other data center systems like lights and management systems.

In addition to lighting, we talk about other greenable elements you should tackle, including the heating and cooling of the facility as a whole and office recycling. By the way, these elements apply to the whole of your office environment — not just the data center — and your whole organization can be greener by applying these principles.

Lighting for Less

Office lighting usually burns all the time and, therefore, consumes considerable energy. In a typical office building (not a data center), lighting ...