Organizations ranging from corporate entities to the federal government are simultaneously, furiously working to fill the gaping void in the green data center certifications and awards space, striving to replace LEED as the de-facto standard for green data centers.

The proposed accolades run the gamut from professional development/personal achievement awards due to be announced by The Uptime Institute this month, to official stamps of approval from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Ben Stewart, senior vice president of facilities at the hosting firm Terremark, has been watching the development closely. According to Stewart, once a credible certification is available, hosting companies will have to pursue them to be competitive.

“We’re already doing things toward that end,” Stewart said. “We’re monitoring what’s going on through the Green grid, The Uptime Institute, and the EPA… so when the programs do become available, we’re able to put our signature on the bottom and submit the paperwork.”

On the other hand, Stewart doesn’t expect the rest of the data center community to be quite as aggressive, simply because they won’t have the same benefit. “For companies like us and [hosting company] 365 Main — being green, comparing ourselves to the rest of the industry and making ourselves better is good for business,” Stewart said.

But colocation hosting data centers are a small percentage of the data center market, and Stewart said, unless the utilities offer more incentives, the majority of data center operators aren’t going to jump through hoops unless there is something in it for them.

“We’re trying to attract customers to our facility, to show we’re leading edge,” Stewart said. “With a company like Citibank, people don’t equate them with their data center.”

Stewart isn’t your typical facilities guy — he’s definitely leading edge, and he’s about to take that ethic to the next level. “We’re building a new data center in Amsterdam at Schipol Airport and we’re looking at using the waste heat to de-ice the runways,” he said. “Europe is so far ahead of us on this stuff — they’ve given us five ways to put our waste heat to use rather than exhaust it. We’re learning an awful lot.”

Green IT = Smarter air conditioning
Data center efficiency isn’t real sexy when it comes down to it — unless you think Plexiglas, bristled grommets and caulk are sexy, in which case, this is definitely the Web site for you.

Primarily, the organizations pushing for greener computing are focusing on the infrastructure efficiencies in the data center — whittling away at the amount of cooling needed per unit of computing power. And that’s about as sophisticated as it gets.

There are definitely bigger fish to fry (like reducing the amount of servers needed for a certain job, thereby reducing the amount of overall power consumption), but infrastructure is one of the only places in IT where people seem to have any agreement.

The holy grail of green IT is determining what amounts to “useful work”. It’s pretty simple to determine how much power Server X uses, and how much power it takes to keep it cool. But how do you measure the usefulness of the work Server X produces?

How much do you lose to bloatware (inefficient code)? How “useful” is the server that runs an application twice a month? And what determines “useful” anyway, revenue dollars, per CPU cycle, per watt?

You can bet these questions will be debated for years to come.