With just over three weeks until Earth Day 2011, Greenpeace today continued its efforts to convince Facebook to adopt a policy of clean energy to power its data centers. The latest moves in Greenpeace's "Unfriend Coal" campaign, which we've been covering for more than a year -- see here, here, and here for some of our coverage -- is hoping to pressure the social network to switch from coal and nuclear power for its data centers and embrace renewable energy technologies like so many of its IT industry peers.

When you're running a data center, especially one that specializes in cloud computing applications, there are some green practices that are just inevitable. Buying energy-efficient servers, for example, or virtualizing those servers as much as possible. Running that data center on renewable energy, however, is not one an example of low-hanging fruit. But cloud service provider Datapipe yesterday announced that it had completed a year-long project to get all three of its U.S. data centers powered entirely by renewables.

Michelle Moore is on a green mission. The federal environmental executive with the Council for Environmental Quality offers an insider's view of President Obama's Green Gov Challenge and government efforts to rein in energy use in a conversation with GreenBiz Executive Editor Joel Makower.

Deloitte, IBM and Logica lead the global market for sustainable technology services and leave competitors focused on green IT trailing far behind, according to a new report from independent analyst firm Verdantix. The in-depth study compares 15 of the largest global IT services firms, with combined revenues of $324bn, on 49 assessment criteria. Verdantix analysed IT service delivery capabilities for building energy efficiency, renewable energy, intelligent transport, electric vehicles, carbon and energy management software, climate change risk modelling and utility smart grid.

2010 was not a good year in the IT for Sustainability arena. Amazingly, climate change became a non-issue politically, especially in the US. Sustainability slipped off the agenda of more than one major technology vendor, as green IT seemed to evoke more shrugs than urgency from IT professionals. But, as well documented by Joel Makower, sustainability continued to rise on the strategic agenda of leading corporations around the world. Perhaps while becoming less visible in the political arena and the press, sustainability is simultaneously becoming more embedded in the policies and practices of companies large and small.

LONDON, United Kingdom — Although the leading green building certification standards, such as LEED and BREEAM in the U.K., can all be applied to data center operations, those ratings don't do a lot to help keep costs and greenhouse gas emissions down once the compute facilities are up and running. And although groups like The Green Grid have developed a number of metrics to help green IT operations for IT managers and CIOs, green data centers remain a piecemeal affair. A new certification, launched last month by the British Computer Society, aims to bring together the best practices for data center operations, and give owners a LEED-like rating as a badge of green quality.

The U.S. Green Building Council is calling for public comment to help shape the next version of LEED. The first public comment session concludes on January 14 for all Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, including the rating system groups for Building Design & Construction, Interior Design & Construction and Buildings Operations & Maintenance; LEED for Neighborhood Development and LEED for Homes. The material includes proposed standards for data centers, warehouse and distribution centers and hospitality as well as the rating systems for schools, retail and healthcare facilities that were adopted in LEED 2009.

Container-based data centers have taken center stage in recent years, offering customers a cheaper and faster solution for rapidly expanding IT needs. All the big names in IT have developed modular data center systems, including HP, Microsoft, IBM, Wipro and Rackable. But where containers and modular data centers tone down the complexity of building a data center, they also limit flexibility if your company has specific or extreme needs for compute power or locations.

Amazon Web Services is a benchmark in cloud computing. They have added DNS services to improve the performance of AWS clients. With Route 53, you can create a “hosted zone” to add DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for a domain you currently own. Route 53 is also designed to work well with other AWS offerings, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). By using AWS IAM with Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records. In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to the closest EC2 region.

Very few topics generate more buzz these days than news about social networks. Just how big is Facebook, and what, exactly are our kids doing on it every day? How will Apple create a network around music, and what's Google doing about it? It's easy to forget that the world's largest business -- energy -- also represents the world's largest network, a nexus of wires and pipelines, consumers and "content providers" (a.k.a. energy producers) all tightly connected in a $7 trillion a year enterprise.

My industry-analyst duties have taken me to a number of industry and tech-vendor events this fall; in fact, looking back at my calendar I have been out of my home area in Boston for 9 of the last 12 weeks. The upside of all that time in airplane seats is that I get to meet and interact with leaders across the technology industry, including supplier companies large and small, and their customers and partners.

Across all industries, companies have long been touting the green benefits of their products. To a lesser extent, companies are taking a serious look at their own environmental impacts and finding ways to reduce their footprints. And the IT industry has been working to move its green impacts beyond the data center and office desktop out to the larger world of business operations -- a move called, variously "IT for Green" or "Green IT 2.0."

Facebook, as you may have heard, is going green. Or, more accurately, they're starting to communicate their green initiatives. But it's also fair to say that they're still getting a grasp on exactly what it means to undertake a green program, and how exactly they do it. After last week's short item about Facebook.com/green, the home for all things environmental at the social network, I spoke with Kathleen Loughlin, a member of the company's communications team, about the kickoff.

When Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu talks about energy efficiency, he has been known to repeat this mantra: "Energy efficiency is not just low-hanging fruit; it is fruit lying on the ground." As Director of Energy for a large corporation like AT&T, I must admit that my first reaction is slightly defensive: "Wait a minute, it's not that easy." However, the essence of what Secretary Chu is saying is absolutely true. Effective energy management helps reduce a company's environmental impact and benefits the company's bottom line. Below, I have outlined 10 ways that a company can be effective in improving its energy management and efficiency.

The U.S. Green Building Council's new headquarters in Washington, D.C., Citi's new data center in Frankfurt, Germany, and now the new data center for the education services company ACT offer striking images of what it takes to achieve the highest LEED rating for a green building.

Even in this age of highly virtualized data centers, the vast majority of servers remain underutilized: In some cases, 80 percent of servers are under 10 percent utilized. IT professionals that are working in virtualized environments may not even be aware that they're missing one of the key benefits of virtualization. But a new, free application from Viridity aims to give data center owners and operators a quick but thorough analysis of just how much load their servers are carrying.

Colorado State University revealed last week it is using servers and other technologies from Oracle to reduce the environmental footprint of one of its residence halls. The news follows two announcements from Oracle about features its has added to two products in a bid to make it easier for companies to manage their energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and e-waste. The moves are part of Oracle's long-term goal of providing a common set of metrics and analytics across a range of sustainability data sources. "They add to a broad set of capabilities that show up everywhere in our product lines, such as how we design products, how we manufacture products, how we deal with logistics and transportation, how we design logistics networks," said Jon Chorley, Oracle's vice president of supply chain execution and product life cycle management strategy.

IBM and Schneider Electric are joining forces to provide new smarter buildings solutions that combine robust data collection and powerful analytics, enabling owners to better manage energy use at their facilities and obtain greater savings. The partnership with Schneider, an expansion of a longstanding relationship, was among the major developments unveiled by IBM's Al Zollar today at the West Coast Green conference in San Francisco.

SWINDON, United Kingdom — There is no longer any need to build data centers from the ground up, they can be manufactured in a factory and dropped directly into a site, according to global consultancy Capgemini. The firm appears to have proof, boldly claiming to have created the most sustainable data center in the world down in Swindon, where the climate is apparently optimal for the fresh-air cooling system it has implemented.

IBM chose an existing building to house what would become the company's most technologically advanced green data center. Construction on the newly-opened facility reused 95 percent of the building's original shell, while the company recycled 90 percent of the original building's materials. Re-use of the building helped land LEED Gold certification for data center, which the company expects to save more than $1 million in its first year of operation, IBM has announced. "Through local sourcing, recycling and tremendous innovation we've been able to achieve a significant milestone for the company and further solidify IBM's commitment to Research Triangle Park," Bob Greenberg, IBM's senior state executive in North Carolina, said in a statement. "Data centers have always been a critical part of IBM 's global delivery network and this facility, our cloud computing data center, has furthered IBM's ability to deliver innovation and ...

My research team at Forrester helps tech vendor strategists anticipate and navigate in rapidly changing market environments. We can't take a siloed view on specific product and service categories, but rather broaden our perspective in order to trace cross-market dynamics around key issues such as sustainability, globalization, collaboration, mobility, and cloud. This puts tech vendors in better positions to act on emerging demand signals, competitive scenarios, and opportunities to select best-fit partner, channel or acquisition targets.

Although most IT press is focused on the ever-shrinking PUEs of leading-edge data centers (present company included, of course), the results of Digital Realty Trust's data center energy audits show just how big the results are from even "run of the mill" energy efficiency projects. DRT, which builds and manages high-tech real estate, earlier this month published the results of an energy audit of two of its data centers, one in San Francisco and one in Santa Clara, and found that its customers were achieving an average power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.6.

I’ve been in the computer and data center industry for more than 20 years, and have been privileged to participate in the change, evolution and exciting dynamics of this space. As executive director of the nonprofit The Green Grid, I speak with data center managers regularly. A common thread in what I hear is their eagerness to deliver their services in an energy efficient way to the organizations and end-users that rely on them for almost every method of communication and commerce. Here are 10 lessons I've learned along the way:

At the annual VMWorld conference in San Francisco, the titular company laid out its vision for "IT as a Service," a conceptual shift that would move IT departments to providing efficiency and availability for data and compute power, and put the cloud at the core of corporate computing platforms. The products rolled out include: VMware vCloud Director, which enables IT departments to create "virtual data centers;" VMware vShield, a security system for virtualized and cloud computing environments, and VMware vCloud Datacenter Services, which creates "hybrid clouds" that give companies the ability to use both private, internal cloud computing systems and secure external clouds as needed.