Just last month on April 22, I was happy to hit 200 Feedburner Readers. Well, my 50% increase readership #'s per month continues and on May 14, I hit 301 readers.

Thanks for adding GreenM3 to your RSS feeds.

Part of my best content has come from good friends who have contributed great ideas. They all have a high interest in Green Data Centers. And fortunately when I offered the opportunity to be guest authors to three friends, they all accepted.

Part of what is helping as well is Google Search accounts for 45% of my traffic, and according to Google Analytics I have traffic from 66 countries. Top 10 traffic comes from US, UK, Canada, India, Australia, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, and France.

Some companies like Google and Yahoo are proud of their Green programs, but watch out for what what comes from trying to position yourself as an advocate for the environment. Here is an MSNBC.com article pointing out Paul McCartney's receiving a Lexus Hybrid that was shipped by air instead of ship to save 2 weeks.

Paul McCartney chided for carbon footprint

Lexus had luxury hybrid sent to him in Britain by plane instead of ship

The 2008 Lexus LS600h, one of which was given by the company to Paul McCartney, is a hybrid that delivers more efficient performance while still proving fast at a top speed of 155 mph.

Best of all, it was to be a gift from the Lexus car company, which sponsored McCartney's 2005 tour of the United States.

But environmentalists quickly pointed out that the use of a cargo plane to deliver the car to England completely offset any environmental gains resulting from the car's use.

"It's like driving the car 300 times around the world," says Gary Rumbold, the director of the British branch of co2balance, which helps businesses and individuals gauge their carbon emissions footprint. "It seems like somebody at Lexus made an error in judgment. They wanted to get something to McCartney promptly, but it backfired. They should have waited a few weeks and sent it by ship."

The article points out that the action was an innocent victim, but you need to manage your supply chain to be green as well.

It was not clear if McCartney knew the vehicle would be sent to him via air freight rather than by ship. Rumbold said it seems likely the singer was an innocent victim of a mistake made by Lexus executives.

As much as this calls attention to Paul McCartney, the negative PR will hit Lexus harder.

HP's purchase of EDS is all over the news with a bunch of an analysis on how it better prepares HP Services to compete against IBM services.  IBM is the top go to market services company in Green Data Centers initiatives.

I even found a blog post at IT Business Edge on Green Data Centrers, HP hopes interest in green services will help it take on big blue.

It sure sounded ambitious when in March HP unveiled a bundle of hardware, software and services that it said would help transform the data center into a more efficient and flexible entity.

Turns out that was only the tip of the ambition iceberg for HP. Perhaps spurred by recent news of Google’s and IBM’s intent to partner on a cloud computing initiative, HP announced that it is purchasing EDS, a company that can help it advance even further into the growing data center outsourcing business, for $13.9 billion.

Companies’ interest in offloading their data centers to third parties is increasing, driven at least partly by their desire to run “greener” businesses. Data centers are notorious energy hogs. Companies can shave up to 40 percent off their energy costs by outsourcing IT and data center functions, according to IDC.

But, then I found this post on an EDS blog, Green Data Centres - It's Easy, Follow the Sun

If you are an advocate of solar energy, then one of the biggest debates that you are likely to get into is around the question of Grid Parity. If you carry out some simple sums, then in terms of the cost to build a new power plant, we are already there.  The supporting evidence is the number of new base load solar plants that are springing up, like this one in Arizona. But the phrase that has captured my interest is that of a Solar Continent. Australia is, like much of the US, very well positioned to capture a great deal of energy from the sun. With the falling prices of PhotoVoltaic (PV) panels, it is very likely that in the next ten to twenty years much of the western world will be powered with some form of distributed energy (DE). So how does this affect our data centres?

The problem our data centres have is that they are unable to tap this energy early enough to shed the large running costs now being experienced. Many of the world's data centres are not on a path to long term reliability or sustainability. With the complex business interactions now necessary to complete transactions, the availability of reliable energy is paramount. Consequently, the state of data centres is now seen by industry observers as being parlous; however, as outlined in this Synnovation article, The Future Looks Green, the path to sustainability is not insurmountable.

The blog continues, and supports the idea of following the sun to use solar energy.

Hopefully this is not representative of other thinking in EDS, because this will increase the costs of a data center dramatically vs. a following the moon strategy when you could use off peak power.

I've been told Green Data Centers are not a priority in India, but I found this article, on Express Computer, an India IT business weekly.

Powering the data center

Chris McPherson, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, APAC, Raritan, and Sanjay Motwani, Country Manager, India, Raritan share their views with Neeraj Gandhi on handling the power and cooling issues in a data center, and why a power management strategy is so important.

Chris McPherson

Sanjay Motwani

Data centers today are stuck in a heat loop. They actually end up creating new heat (by powering cooling solutions) while trying to dissipate heat generated by servers. How can enterprises get out of this vicious circle?

Why is it so important to have a power management strategy in place?

Motwani: A power management strategy is important for the following reasons:

a) Firstly, power, especially within countries like India is scarce and its optimal utilization is imperative, not a desirable feature.
b) Secondly, the IT infrastructure devices today are both growing in number and consuming more and more power. Hence the power costs for running a data center are increasing exponentially. In some cases the cost of power (for both IT infrastructure & cooling) account for nearly 60% of the costs.
c) Thirdly, at a global scale we are facing the threat of global warming, hence it is the duty of all to ensure that we contribute in whatever way to minimize the negative impact on the environment.

Raritan, which has been providing basic level power tools, is now providing tools for power optimization. These tools allow for measurement and analysis thereby giving the necessary inputs to the IT team to take corrective action.

And, they do admit Green Data Center awareness is low.

There is a lot of discussion on green data centers. Of what importance is this concept in India?

McPherson: The level of awareness with regards to greening of data centers in comparatively low in India. Although I must add that it is increasing and enterprises here are getting serious about making their data centers green. Power is extremely expensive in this part of the world, and data centers are suffering as a result. Consumers are not aware of what an impact this has on the TCO of a data center. Therefore, essentially the awareness around this whole concept of going green needs to be increased.

Motwani: Greening of the data centers largely depends on the corporate philosophy of the enterprise. India today houses data centers of the US. And since the concept of green is being pursued there in a big way, we are witnessing a trickle down effect here in India too. Indian data centers in India are also making an effort in this direction. In addition, compliance is expected to play a big role to help achieve this.