CIOs struggle with a set of challenges that refuse to be solved easily. One underlying issue in most organizations is that IT is poorly aligned with the company’s overall business processes and mission. Despite huge ongoing investments in enterprise applications, compute and storage capacity, network bandwidth, and security, many CIOs continue to experience low utilization rates, limited or unmeasurable ROI, and an inability to deploy critical applications rapidly.

Going green is clearly on everyone’s mind. It is only a matter of time before every company will be forced to talk about their IT (and data center) operations in terms of their carbon footprint. This paper is not intended to be a diatribe on rising temperatures and sea-levels, and is not meant to give the reader advice on the effective recycling of office waste. Instead, the goal is to raise the awareness that the concept of a green data center need not be a big splash effort – it can start small. By following some simple but practical steps, you will quickly have an operation that is truly “green” - both economically and ecologically speaking.