1. What business and social problems does data center power consumption cause?
2. What solutions are available for these problems? Are they management, organizational, or technology solutions? Explain your answer.
3. What are the business benefits and costs of these solutions?
4. Should all firms move toward green computing? Why or why not?

What’s too hot to handle? It might very well be your company’s data center, which can easily consume more than 100 times more power than a standard office building. Data- hungry tasks such as video on demand, maintaining Web sites, or analyzing large pools of transactions or social media data require more and more power- hungry machines. Power and cooling costs for data centers have skyrocketed, with cooling a server requiring roughly the same number of kilowatts of energy as running one. All this additional power consumption has a negative impact on the environment and as well as corporate operating costs. Companies are now looking to green computing for solutions. The standard for measuring data center energy efficiency is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). This metric is a ratio of the total annual power consumed by a data center divided by how much is used annually by IT equipment.