Of these green trends, I see Cisco Press has covered all three by having Safari Books Online host a free webcast on greening data centers. This Thursday, September 24 at 9:00 a.m. PDT / 12:00 p.m. EDT, you can join Douglas Alger, author of the recently released book from Cisco Press Grow a Greener Data Center, for a discussion on how to build and operate energy-efficient, ecologically sensitive IT and facilities infrastructure. He’ll cover topics like virtualization, equipment consolidation, greening physical construction, power, cooling, and servers — and much more.

The first 10 to sign up for the webcast will receive a signed copy of Grow a Greener Data Center: A guide to building and operating energy-efficient, ecologically sensitive IT and Facilities infrastructure. If you miss out on that opportunity, all subscribed attendees can download, print, or view the content online for 45 days.

If you can’t make any part of the one-hour webcast or view the book’s content, you can still learn more about making eco-friendly choices for your IT environment in our green networking special report — or by reading this quick tip on greening data center networks through device consolidation. Any move toward making technology greener is a step in the right direction. My only hope is that these trends become standard.

The program, developed in conjunction with Metropolitan Community College of Omaha, teaches skills in virtualization and server consolidation, energy efficiency, security and compliance and business issues that arise in the data center. It’s unclear whether those issues include IT in-fighting between networking, systems and storage teams.

What the program does promise is problem-solving in a real-world setting — if your real world is built on IBM hardware and software. The school’s data center lab includes IBM Power Systems servers running AIX, IBM I and Linux.

Until now, there haven’t been viable options for vendor-neutral virtualization certifications, but companies like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat all offer specialization courses. There are generalized data center certifications and degrees, though those are typically on the graduate level.

But at a time when the data center is diversifying in vendor offerings and equipment, it’s questionable whether students should invest their money and time in such a vendor-focused program. That said Cisco made its equipment the holy grail of networking in large part by partnering with community colleges to build network certification programs — and it’s clear CCNAs and CCIEs the world over have gotten their foot in the door and then learned diverse technologies on their feet.

What makes this degree attractive despite its vendor affiliation is its focus on virtualization as a central part of the data center. Along with the rise in virtualization has come a plethora of management issues and in-fighting about who controls virtual machines – networking, systems or storage. Forrester analyst Rob Whiteley has suggested the answer is the emergence of a new “virtualization administrator.” If that’s the case, this degree – and others like it that will soon pop up – may be the first step toward that role.

Metropolitan will offer the IBM green data center course (virtually of course) to students at other participating universities.