Cooling your datacenter with outside air, and what's on the top of your mind?

Found at Enterprise IT Planet’s Green IT news weekly roundup, two items of interest to us HPC types

According to a survey by IDC, 68 percent of IT executives rated energy efficiency as “top of mind” when thinking about green IT, while 51 percent said their organization’s approach to green was directly tied to cost savings. The bad news? 78 percent said that their organizations have no budgets in place for Green IT.

Would be interesting to know how those 68/51 numbers pan out in HPC, and how that would differ at the supercomputing end of HPC. At the high end I would guess that the 51% number would be much lower (cost isn’t the primary driver), while the 68% number would be much higher (being constrained by what a substation will support is a much bigger deal at the high end).

The Green Grid announced a free online tool and maps designed to help North American data center and facilities managers easily determine how much outside air is available for individual data centers. The tool is free, and the cooling to your servers is free too!

The answer for me (day job in a supercomputing center in Mississippi): not much.