FACTOID

DC Energy Consumption -- Did you know? For every dollar spent worldwide on new servers in 2006, another 50 cents was spent on energy to power and cool them, IBM's Systems and Technology Group says. In 2007, the EPA reported that data centers in the United States consumed more than 61 billion kilowatt hours of electricity -- equivalent to the amount used by approximately 5.8 million U.S. households -- for a total cost of about $4.5 billion. That's 1.5 percent of all electricity used in the country and it's predicted to rise to 2.9 percent by 2011.

A state-of-the-art data center has got to be energy efficient. If you're building one, you've probably found the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers "Data Center Design and Operation-ASHRAE Datacom Series."

The ASHRAE Datacom Series provides a comprehensive treatment of data center cooling, energy efficiency and related subjects. Now that series is available on CD -- so you can search across all previous published books in the Datacom Series simultaneously. You can also print information directly from the CD or copy or paste it into another document.

Eight titles make up the new CD, and they will be updated as more books are released in the series. The individual books are also available online as downloadable PDFs for purchase. Updates to the CD will likely be web-based, as the original contents probably should have been.

The Datacom CD costs $235 ($199 for ASHRAE members), and can be purchased through ASHRAE's online bookstore.