Two new tomes offer tips to guide your Green IT strategy

Believe it or not, I have a stack of 10 business books on my desk right now, begging to be read and reviewed. Two are pertinent for the loyal Green IT folks in the GreenTech Pastures, so I felt it appropriate to mention them as a scan some of the content.

The first, called "Foundation of Green IT," was written by Marty Poniatowski, Chief Technology Officer of data center design and integration company based near me in Teterboro, N.J., Computer Design & Integration (CDI). Before I go ANY further, I will disclose the fact that I know about the book because I help the company with some communications and marketing work. But if I didn't think it was pertinent, I wouldn't mention it.

In any event, "Foundation of Green IT" focuses on best practices that CDI uses to apply Green IT philosophy in the data center. The company's services team in server and desktop consolidation and virtualization, and power and cooling design contributed content and ideas. The thing that makes this book interesting is that it is real: The lessons are based on real-world case studies from CDI’s 15 years in the data center business.

You can download a chapter of the book by visiting this link on the CDI Web site. Marty also encourages people to follow his Twitter comments at martypgreenbook.

The second book you might want to look up is called "Green Tech: How to Plan and Implement Sustainable IT Solutions." So, it too is sort of an instruction manual. The authors are Lawrence Webber, who is a senior project manager for Insight Corp., and Michael Wallace vice president of application engineering at Result Data. Like Poniatowski, the authors feel the same pain that you do as data center managers or IT professionals.

This book is pretty basic: It outlines the legal ramifications of green computing, outlines the impact on energy usage and provides an overview of some of the IT asset disposal and manufacturer programs that are available to companies as tactical measures. There's some useful information on how to construct business case arguments for your senior management, with tips on how to measure the impact of certain actions (or non-actions). The book is structured to offer advice against these three goals:

• How to rethink your purchasing goals (by looking at a three-to-five-year operations cost model for all new hardware instead of the lowest short-term procurement price)
• How to evaluate what you already have (servers, printers, storage) and figure out how to utilize it better
• How to plan NOW for how to dispose of equipment at the end of its life