3. Share The Data--And Perhaps The Pain

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Microsoft is trying is trying a new way to keep energy costs low: charging business units by the amount of power they use in the data center, rather than the space they take up on the floor. That's forcing developers writing in-house and SaaS apps to think about how much power their apps will use even as they code them.

Microsoft's data center chargeback model is really about using carrots and sticks to force cultural change. Developers are paying attention to which of two data query methods might save a watt of energy, and choosing that method even if it might make the process slower by a nanosecond or two. Business units are driving efficiency in the selection of the hardware they'd like to see and making the right choices in the amount of hard drives. "You have to [encourage] the behaviors, that's really the bottom line," says Christian Belady, Microsoft's principal power and cooling architect.

But that might not be the right fit for everyone, depending on whether the gains from doling out energy costs are big enough to merit line-of-business managers spending time on it. An interim step might be just sharing that information, publicizing any progress the companies' green efforts deliver.

4. Recycle More

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E-cycling is getting more prevalent. Forrester Research found earlier this year that 40% of companies have some sort of computer hardware recycling initiative in place. But that's not enough with millions of computers and cell phones reaching end of life every year--2.6 million tons of business and consumer e-waste in 2005, the last year for which the Environmental Protection Agency has data.

Nonprofit environmental justice group Basel Action Network estimates 60% to 80% of e-waste is exported, often to emerging markets with lax regulations, so companies should know where recycled computers end up. U.S. Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, introduced a resolution to change federal policies allowing export of e-waste, since it's not deemed hazardous waste, but it hasn't gotten traction.

Donation is a potential alternative or supplement to recycling. Health insurer Highmark donates PCs to nonprofits and churches and is working to do recycling also. Programs like Dell's Asset Recovery Services promise to overwrite or shred hard drives, remove labels, and confirm the data disposal complies with relevant regulations.

Cell phone recycling is worse. A Nokia study found only 3% of cell phones are recycled worldwide, and nearly half in that study didn't know recycling phones was possible. Yet, from Nokia to Hewlett-Packard to private companies like ReCellular, cell phone recycling programs are free or cheap.

5. Don't Forget To Measure ...

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Bryant University built an energy-efficient data center, working with IBM, which points to it as state of the art in green. And it is. But Bryant's Siedzik says the university made one mistake: It didn't take good measurements of its energy use before it started down its green data center path. "We needed to get better data on where we were coming from to measure how successful we were once we arrived," he says.

Green Grid board member Roger Tipley, who works for HP, recommends companies measure total data center energy use every 15 minutes and monitor at the subsystem level as well to help companies develop baseline metrics and find trouble spots, taking measurements over the course of a year. But even a simple survey of inventory, as Highmark did before building its new data center, can turn up unexpected problems. "Server guys would just hang on to dead servers just in case," says Mark Wood, Highmark's director of data center infrastructure.

There are plenty of tools out there from companies such as Johnson Controls to measure power use by circuit or by device, as well as things like airflow. Bryant uses IBM Tivoli Monitoring Power Management to be able to see things such as consumption by individual server, so that during low utilization periods it can cap the power that's fed to the system by strategically turning off individual CPUs.