Taking on green IT from the ground up, the latest issue of Microsoft's Architecture Journal offers expert insight on just about every level of data center management.

The quarterly journal, available for download as a PDF from the Microsoft Developer Network's library, looks at the five key elements of green IT architecture: the physical construction and management of faciltiies, optimizing the platform a data center runs on, profiling the energy usage of the facility, developing the best applications for CPU usage and energy consumption, and making the best use of energy-efficient cloud computing models.

"As computing becomes increasingly pervasive, the energy consumption attributable to computing is climbing, despite the clarion call to action to reduce consumption and reverse greenhouse effects," Diego Dagum, the editor-in-chief of the Journal, writes in the introduction to the issue. "At the same time, the rising cost of energy -- due to regulatory measures enforcing a “true cost” of energy coupled with scarcity as finite natural resources are rapidly being diminished -- is refocusing IT leaders on efficiency and total cost of ownership, particularly in the context of the world-wide financial crisis."

In the introductory article, Lewis Curtis, Microsoft's principle platform architect, lays out the groundwork for environmental infrastructure design. Curtis explains how IT professionals need to shift their thinking about green computing, moving from a product-feature checklist for solving certain one-time issues to a comprehensive sustainability plan throughout the data center.

On top of economic pressures that make energy-efficient computing a must in any business environment, Curtis describes how a combination of corporate, government and consumer engagement with the issue is bringing green IT to the forefront.

Below is the table of content's for the latest issue; download it online at Microsoft.com.

• Environmentally Sustainable Infrastructure Design
by Lewis Curtis

• Green IT in Practice: SQL Server Consolidation in Microsoft IT
by Mark Pohto

• Project Genome: Wireless Sensor Network for Data Center Cooling
by Jie Liu, Feng Zhao, Jeff O’Reilly, Amaya Souarez, Michael Manos, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, and Andreas Terzis

• Profiling Energy Usage for Efficient Consumption
by Rajesh Chheda, Dan Shookowsky, Steve Stefanovich, and Joe Toscano

• Architecture Journal Profile: Udi Dahan

• Application Patterns for Green IT
by Dan Rogers and Ulrich Homann

• Green Maturity Model for Virtualization
by Kevin Francis and Peter Richardson