Jeff Lowenberg, VP of facilities at Web-hosting company The Planet, can attest to the sweetness of low-hanging green fruit. By spending around $50,000 and three months' time implementing relatively simple best practices for datacenter cooling, he's found a way to save his company an estimated $1 million in power costs this year alone. "It's like found money," says Lowenberg, expressing surprise at the success of Jeff Lowenberg, VP of facilities at Web-hosting company The Planet, can attest to the sweetness of low-hanging green fruit. By spending around $50,000 and three months’ time implementing relatively simple best practices for datacenter cooling, he’s found a way to save his company an estimated $1 million in power costs this year alone.“It’s like found money,” says Lowenberg, expressing surprise at the success of the company’s green initiative in its Houston, Texas, facility. “The results have been phenomenal, much more than I expected.”This story of sustainability doesn’t begin with aspirations of a cleaner, greener plant; rather, it’s firmly rooted in a practical business conundrum that many a datacenter admin no doubt faces: “We had some areas in a couple of datacenters that were warmer than we wanted them to be. All of the CRAC units were running at 100 percent, but there were some areas that weren’t getting cool enough,” Lowenberg says. Based on his calculations, though, the amount of cooling in place should have done the job. Seeking guidance, he headed to some Uptime Institute seminars and came away with potent new tricks for beating the datacenter heat.Rather than cutting energy consumption and cooling costs by grappling with complex virtualization implementations or ripping and replacing old servers and CRAC units, The Planet’s facilities took simpler, lower-tech measures. Those steps included rearranging floor tiles to better manage cold airflow; installing seals and grommets in the ceilings, walls, and floors to reduce bypass airflow; installing blanking plates in server cabinets to direct airflow more efficiently; and sealing power distribution units to reduce bypass airflow.The aforementioned tactics ensured that cool air was going to only where it was needed: the server intakes. “Most datacenters are too cold. Ours were certainly that way. [On the high end], it shouldn’t be more than 77 degrees with 45 percent relative humidity. Most datacenters are much cooler than that, but being cooler than that doesn’t help your equipment,” Lowenberg says. Six months later, the company finds that its efforts have paid off substantially. Even though critical server loads increased by 5 percent, the facility’s overall cooling power needs dropped by 31 percent. When The Planet has finished implementing these changes company-wide at its five other datacenters, it expects to lower its energy use by 13.5 percent, and will save at least $1 million in 2008 alone.Contributing to those savings, Lowenberg was able to shut off four CRAC units in the Houston facility, but more recently, he found he could power down five more. “I think when we look at these measurements over the next few months, we’ll have an even bigger increase in savings,” he says.Through the effort, The Planet also improved its “coefficient of efficiency,” an EPA- and Uptime Institute-recognized measurement of the total power necessary to operate a datacenter divided by critical power. The company’s previous score was 2.0, considered “good”; now it’s 1.7, which is nearly ideal. In addition to padding the company’s bottom line, the new energy savings means more growth potential for The Planet. “What this will allow us to do with our future expansion is go to a larger footprint with the same amount of power and cooling,” he says. 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