I had the pleasure of spending 1 1/2 hrs chatting with Brian Fry VP of Sales and Marketing from RackForce and Kash Shaikh sr marketing manager of Cisco's Data Center Switch. There is no way I can capture all we talked about in one blog entry, so let's start with an overall approach that was refreshing and logical to see.

I asked Brian Fry what led him to pick the Cisco UCS solution. The simple thing that Brian explained is he wanted the least amount of people to support using the least amount of power. Now if that isn't a path to a Green Data Center, I don't know what is. Yet, few take this approach.

If you want the least amount of people and power to provide compute where do you start? At the beginning of the conversation, Brian explained RackForce is on its 4th generation of data centers since 2001. And, over this time Rackforce has hired their own power and cooling expert to design and run its data centers.

So, a funny part I can't skip is Cisco UCS.

Connected with Cisco Nexus switches.

Running in an IBM rack.

With a modular data center design that can partially roll out Power and Cooling infrastructure up to 10MW to fill the 30,000 sq feet of data center space.

All of this together creates a Green Data Center stack, starting from the hydro-electric power, power and cooling systems, racks, network, servers, to virtualization ready for an OS install.

I am going to write more about RackForce, and need to digest what they are doing to integrate it into other ideas.

Selling the Green Data Center to the CFO is one area I've been thinking about and Brian provide some other good data points.