Gartner has a press release on Green Data Centre.

It’s good to hear Gartner is thinking beyond power.

Gartner Says a Green Data Centre Means More than Energy Efficiency
Analysts to Examine the Concept of the Data Centre as a Living Organism at Gartner's Data Center Summit 2008, 21-23 October in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Egham, UK, October 20, 2008 —

Power and cooling will drive the evolution of data centres into becoming conceptual models of intelligent “living organisms” as organisations need to improve energy efficiency and become ‘greener’, according to Gartner, Inc.
“If ‘greening’ the data centre is the goal, power efficiency is the starting point but not sufficient on its own,” said Rakesh Kumar, vice president at Gartner. “’Green’ requires an end-to-end, integrated view of the data centre, including the building, energy efficiency, waste management, asset management, capacity management, technology architecture, support services, energy sources and operations.”

Then they go on to discuss Ideas I put in my Living Data Center post.

“Data centre managers need to think differently about their data centres. Tomorrow’s data centre is moving from being static to becoming a living organism, where modelling and measuring tools will become one of the major elements of its management,” said Mr Kumar. “It will be dynamic and address a variety of technical, financial and environmental demands, and modular to respond quickly to demands for floor space. In addition, it will need to have some degree of flexibility, to run workloads where energy is cheapest and above all be highly-available, with 99.999 per cent availability.”

They make 6 points.

Achieving an optimised, reliable and efficient data centre environment requires a holistic and integrated approach, which can be broken down into six stages:
1. Pick the location according to a strategic facility strategy. High-bay, warehouse-type buildings provide more efficient rack layout and airflow
2. Develop the site on a modular basis
3. Include chillers and high-ventilation air conditioning units (HVACS). Build all new large facilities with chilled fluid plumbing at the outset
4. Introduce some recycling and alternative energy sources
5. Put in monitoring tools
6. Manage the server efficiencies. Move away from the ‘always on’ mentality and look at powering equipment down

and, promote their Gartner Data Center Summit on Oct 21 – 23.

No surprises in this press release, nothing really revolutionary. Just common sense when you think about the problems.