Cooling is a piping-hot topic among datacenter operators who are struggling to control costs and reduce energy waste. Plenty of vendors are, which certainly have their place in the big chill picture. However, in addition to some of there's an abundance of best practices companies can adopt to quickly realize greater efficiency and lower bills. Cooling is a piping-hot topic among datacenter operators who are struggling to control costs and reduce energy waste. Plenty of vendors are touting state-of-the-art cooling technologies, which certainly have their place in the big chill picture. However, in addition to some relatively simple tips, there’s an abundance of best practices companies can adopt to quickly realize greater efficiency and lower bills.Those best practices will be the focus of a series of free, two-day seminars hosted by Digital Realty Trust, an owner and manager of corporate datacenters and Internet gateways. At the seminars, dubbed “Everything You Need to Know About Datacenter Cooling,” three industry experts will dispense their knowledge. The experts include: — Robert “Dr. Bob” F. Sullivan, Ph.D., the Uptime Institute’s datacenter cooling expert, who originated the concept of hot-aisle-cold-aisle datacenter design— Dr. Amir Radmehr, an extensively published datacenter cooling expert from Innovative Research— Jim Smith, vice president of engineering at Digital Realty Trust, a recognized authority on efficient datacenter operations and green datacenter design I can certainly attest to Jim’s wealth of knowledge on the subject; I had a chance to interview him last year. He’ll be giving a talk on the green datacenter at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco next month. As for the datacenter cooling seminars, the schedule is as follows: — San Francisco Bay Area, February 26-27 — Dublin, April 16-17 — New York City, May 21-22 — Chicago, June 18-19 Further information about the seminars is available at the Digital Realty Trust Web site. Related articles: The cool new look in datacenter design APC instruments mark the rebirth of cool Beat the datacenter heat, cheap Video: Digital Realty’s hidden savings of green datacenter InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco Chillin’ at the HP datacenter Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter. Technology Industry