Grow a Greener Data Center makes the business case for greening data centers, and presents technologies, design strategies and operational approaches that can help any company improve the energy efficiency and "eco-friendliness" of their IT facilities.

Alger's techniques save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in energy costs, and cover all the bases of the server environment -- cost-effective water and conservation, recycling, and e-waste management.

From the book's Chapter 2, "Measuring Green Data Centers:"

There's an often-used management adage that says you can't manage what you don't measure, and it certainly applies to Data Centers.

You not only need to accurately gauge your Data Center's capacity and resources to operate the facility effectively, but you also need to know how quickly you consume those resources and what type and quantity of byproducts the Data Center produces to know how green it is. Taking measurements is also crucial to determine the impact of any green improvements that you make upon the server environment. Without such information you can't know whether those upgrades have been successful, and if so to what extent, how fast their return on investment is, or how to prioritize future Data Center upgrades.

The reason to measure Data Center efficiency might seem obvious, but many companies apparently don't see value in doing so. Surveys of more than 1,500 Data Center owners and operators at DatacenterDynamics conferences in 2008 indicate that fewer than one in three were using a Data Center efficiency metric and fewer than half definitely intended to use them in the future.