If you thought IT acronyms were hard to remember, wait until you sit down with your facilities team to discuss your data center's electric bill. You need to learn a whole new vocabulary when you start talking about lowering the building's energy use.

Here's a crib sheet of a dozen of the most commonly used energy terms and acronyms so you can learn the jargon for going green.

1. AC/DC

Yes, this is the name of Australia's greatest rock band, but it's also a key trend in data-center design. AC stands for alternating current, and DC stands for direct current. Leading-edge data-center designers are looking at power supplies based on DC power -- rather than today's AC power -- because DC power promises to be more energy efficient.

2. Carbon footprint

No relation to Sasquatch, although to corporate executives it can be an equally large and scary beast. A company's carbon footprint is the amount of CO₂ emissions its operations produce. In setting goals to reduce their carbon footprint, many companies target their data centers because they consume 25% or more of the electric bill.

3. CFD

It sounds like the acronym for the Chicago Fire Department, but this version stands for computational fluid dynamics. CFD high-performance-computing modeling has been used for a long time in the design of airplanes and weapon systems. Now it's being applied to air flow in data centers for optimal air-conditioning design.

4. Chiller

This isn't what you drink at the beach on a hot day. Rather, it's a machine that uses chilled water to cool and dehumidify air in a data center. Of all the components of a data center's air conditioning system, this is the one that consumes the most amount of electricity -- as much as 33% of a data center's power.

5. Close-coupled cooling

This sounds like a technique that would come in handy on Valentine's Day. In fact, it's a type of data-center air-conditioning system that brings the cooling source as close as possible to the high-density computing systems that generate the most heat. Instead of cooling down the entire room, close-coupled cooling systems located in a rack cool the hot air generated by the servers in just that rack.

6. CRAC

This is not what you sometimes see when a plumber bends over, although it's pronounced the same way. We're talking about a computer-room air-conditioning system. CRAC units monitor a data center's temperature, humidity and air flow. They consume around 10% of a data center's power.

Whitepapers

• Symantec State of the Data Center Report
• Monitoring and Managing App Performance
• Monitoring and Managing VoIP
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• Best Practices for HP Servers and HP Enterprise Virtual Array in a Microsoft Exchange

View more DATA CENTER whitepapers

Webcasts

• Managing the End User Experience-A Real World Example of Success
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape
• Oracle Database 11g: Advances in Compression, Real Application Testing and Data Guard
• Solutions to the Toughest IT Challenges in Remote Offices

View more DATA CENTER webcasts

Special Reports

• Data Centers: At the center of the action
• Executive Guide: Data Center Decisions
• Get More From Your WAN
• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more DATA CENTER special reports