New book offers practical guide to greening your data center

Looking for a prescriptive list of questions you should ask and issues you should consider when assessing the energy efficiency and overall "green-ness" of your data center? A how-to guide, if you will?

You might find what you need in the form of a new book from enterprise technology analyst Greg Schulz, founder of the StorageIO Group. The title is "The Green and Virtual Data Center."

What I like about Schulz's approach is that he doesn't really pass judgment on whether or not you should re-adjust your IT initiatives around some greener-good agenda. He's focused moreso on illustrating how some of the technologies you're already considering for the good of your business—virtualization, blade platforms, cloud computing power management—might otherwise be pretty cool for the environment, too. His last section is full of suggestions for how you can apply some of the technologies and best practices discussed pretty easily. Here are five of his general tips, in no particular order:

• "Where practical and possible, power down equipment and enable power-saving modes."
• "Adopt tiered dat protection across applications, servers, storage and networks."
• "Eliminate heat close to the source as efficiently and safely as possible."
• "Use energy-efficient technologies that do more work or store more data per unit of energy used."
• "Explore intelligent, smart and precision cooling and thermal management technology."

Shulz has a lot more ideas, and I can't offer a full-fledged review. So, here is a link where you can find a complete table of contents for the book (so you can see what you're getting) as well as place you can buy it.