For instance, recently former President Bill Clinton suggested that one of the fastest ways you can save on cooling costs for your data center starts by looking up: What color is your roof? If it’s like most buildings in the U.S., chances are the roof is covered in some kind of dark material, maybe even old-fashioned black tar paper. Cheap black roofs were fine half a century ago, when a muggy, hot day was just a nuisance for the employees, but today, our network servers are not as heat-tolerant as our co-workers and require stringent data center cooling. While the way we’ve thought about what’s in our office has changed, chances are that your roof is still much as it was half a century ago.

Clinton suggests that it’s time for a change from the top down — literally. An easy, carbon-friendly change on your facility can significantly reduce cooling costs.

It’s a lesson in the scientific term albedo. In nature, fresh snow has the highest ability to reflect sunlight, while dark soil absorbs the most, so you simply make your roof look less like soil and more like snow. Simple, right? Well, one would think. The western approach into San Jose’s Mineta and Las Vegas’ McCarran airports has demonstrated that a fair number of arid-based companies already practice this method of greener cooling management, but the approaches into Chicago O’Hare and Los Angeles LAX airports show a sea of black tar paper.

This isn’t breaking news. During the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu claimed that making all of the country’s roofs and pavement white would offset 44 billion tons of CO2. That’s as carbon-friendly as taking all of the planet’s cars off the road for 11 years.

Being kind to the earth is a lofty and admirable goal, but building a green data center is sometimes difficult to sell back to the business. While many carbon-friendly green IT initiatives cost more than traditional “gas hog” technologies, Secretary Chu predicted that a white roof would save 10% to 15% on cooling a single building, while Clinton suggests that it’s actually closer to 20%.

Given that IT tends to be the single largest consumer of energy in an organization, this is an excellent opportunity for you to lead positive change for your organization that affects the entire business as well as the cooling of your data center.

Besides, a bucket of white paint is cheap and if these estimates are correct, it would pay for itself over Labor Day weekend alone. It seems silly not to grab a roller and get painting.

• Your gut instinct in business might be misleading, suggests Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project. He suggests that our inherent flight-or-fight response is causing us to make poor decisions, similar to those that led to the recession. Entirely interesting points to consider the next time your CFO asks you to justify a huge purchase.

• Your data center is cold enough to keep ice cream from melting, but data center airflow issues can mean the premature death of your pricey racks and lead to wasted energy, Rajesh Nair, CTO of Degree Controls, writes.

• Your employees like to take matters into their own hands, so a breach in Dropbox security can mean disaster on your network. A new suit to the FTC alleges that Dropbox security might not be all that is promised.  Ouch.

• Speaking of data security, it turns out that 99% of Android phones have a huge data vulnerability that can give hackers access to your passwords but never fear! Google was extremely quick to issue a credentials patch, and here’s how to encrypt your Android data with just a rooted Android phone, an SSH server and an SSH tunnel. We promise that it’s not as difficult as it sounds.

• A recent study found that when an Apple devotee is shown the Apple logo, the same part of the brain lights up as when religious people are shown religious imagery. Every CIO admits that Steve Jobs is something of a mastermind, and his recent advice to Nike CEO Mike Parker is brilliant in its simplicity. The key to Apple’s success, according to Jobs, is “get rid of the crappy stuff.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Experts suggest the optimal server room temperature should not go below 50 degrees Fahrenheit or above 82 degrees. But in general, it’s best to keep your servers in a room with temperatures between 68-71 degrees.

The consequences for failing to notice rising mercury in your server room are severe. For instance, at Duke University, the one time its server room overheated (reaching 86-95 degrees Celsius for a number of hours), the school faced both short- and long-term consequences. Of the university’s 15 nodes, three blew immediately and six more failed over the next few months.

And the price for not following proper cooling requirements could cost your companies thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars. When the server room overheated at St. James Hospital in Leeds, England, the hospital lost all the equipment and servers for its new computer system that stored patient X-rays. The system cost more than $1.4 million.

So as Labor Day approaches and summer heat hangs on, remember to watch your server room temperature. You and your team aren’t the only ones that need to stay cool.