At its annual Technical Forum last week, IT industry sustainability group The Green Grid continued to expand its number of metrics to track data center sustainability efforts.

Building on its widely adopted Power Usage Effectiveness ratio (PUE), which measures how much of the energy entering a data center goes toward computing instead of lighting, HVAC and other facility functions, the Green Grid added a number of metrics that give a more complete and holistic view of data center sustainability.

When you think of the phrase “industrial ecology,” the latest in information technology is probably not a synonym that comes to mind. But a recent issue of Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology (JIE) puts that misconception to the test.

Stemming from the widespread applications of ICT in everything from farming to government, JIE set aside an entire issue to looking at how technology and industrial systems can interact. The entire issue, as well as subsequent related articles, is free to the public; below is a short overview of some of the most noteworthy articles from the issue.

As the world shifts to cloud computing, IT providers are feeling the pinch of data center expenses. With more and more people outsourcing more and more of their tech needs to remote servers, the demand for compute power is skyrocketing.

While companies in every industry are building green data centers to run more servers more efficiently, at the CeBIT show in Germany last week, Samsung unveiled a new type of memory that uses half the energy of other devices.

ASHRAE, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, will soon release the third edition of its Thermal Guidelines specifications, which since 2004 has created the de facto global standard for allowable temperatures within data centers, as well as how to measure those temperatures.

The second edition of the standard set as the optimal temperature 27 degrees Celsius, or 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, for data center operations. The third edition is expected to further raise that thermostat, although ASHRAE has not yet announced what the new recommended temperature will be.

Senior IT decision makers, no matter what industry they are in, are well aware of the role technology has to play in enabling sustainability within their firms.

I’m not talking about ‘Green IT’ — that superficial fad was quickly buried under the more pressing concerns of the global recession — but about a demand for genuine sustainability solutions that IT can provide now.

The federal General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded a $6.7 million, five-year contract to Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp. to provide secure cloud-based e-mail and IT collaboration tools. Unisys will provide transition, data migration, training and cloud-based software as a service for the new environment. As a result of the deal, GSA employees will be able to collaborate and work remotely from any location at any time.

New York City wants its software and application programmers to serve the public with great Web sites and applications, not be slaves to keeping up the city’s technology and data center infrastructure. Plus, it supports a major metropolitan sustainability agenda in the form of PlaNYC2030, one that supports a goal of cutting carbon emissions for the city by 2030.

In an effort to create a clean energy economy, recent U.S. presidents and congress have issued a series of legislation and executive orders requiring federal agencies to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions in government facilities. Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer, is supporting that effort by establishing a federal data center consolidation initiative to help reduce energy consumption in over 1,100 federal data centers. U.S. federal data center managers are on a timeline to respond with their final consolidation plan. This paper analyzes the implication of these mandates and offers recommendations for how to improve energy efficiency in federal data centers.

Companies undertaking a sustainability initiative of any kind follow a well trodden path, steadily expanding how broad and deep their measurements and improvements go.

It’s a pattern that we’ve seen in the greenhouse gas reporting that the Carbon Disclosure Project regularly highlights, but the same holds true for green projects from supply chain greening to packaging redesign.

Now, the Green Grid, a consortium of technology companies dedicated to boosting data center energy efficiency around the world, has followed the same path: Last week, the group published a paper that expands its efficiency metrics to include the carbon output of a data center, as well as the water use of a data center.

Ever since cloud computing really took off in prominence, there has been a discussion in certain circles as to whether the cloud is actually greener. Some argue that it is by default, since economies of scale and the generally highly virtualized environments that cloud systems run are by nature more efficient.