Featured Articles

1. Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun

   Explore Article The New York Times (23 hours, 3 min ago) Solar

   Armed with generous incentives from the Spanish government to jump-start a national solar energy industry, the city set out to replace its failing coal economy by attracting solar companies, with a campaign slogan: “The Sun Moves Us.” Soon, Puertollano, home to the Museum of the Mining Industry, had two enormous solar power plants, factories making solar panels and silicon wafers, and clean energy research institutes. Half the solar power installed globally in 2008 was installed in Spain. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   The New York Times   New York Times

2. Amazon S3 Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects

   Explore Article Data Center Knowledge (Mar 9 2010) Storage

   Amazon Web Services has quietly passed an interesting benchmark: the company’s S3 storage service now hosts more than 100 billion objects. This factoid was noted this morning at Data Center World, when keynote speaker Brian Lillie of Equinix said that Amazon now is hosting 102 billion objects in S3 (Simple Storage Service). Over the past year, the number of objects stored on S3 has grown from 54 billion to 100 billion, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who mentioned this startling growth curve in his recent presentation at the Cebit computer trade show in Germany. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Amazon.com

3. NASA Shifts Data Center Strategy

   Explore Article InformationWeek (Mar 9 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers

   NASA, which had been planning to build a new enterprise data center estimated to cost $1.5 billion, has done an abrupt about-face, announcing late last month that it was planning major changes to its data center strategy. In an announcement posted on the site of NASA's long-term, multi-billion dollar IT transformation project, the Information Technology Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P), NASA said that it was postponing the release of a long-awaited request for proposal for the new data center in light of new White House policies and leadership changes at NASA. "NASA intends to create a data center consolidation plan to ... (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   NASA Ames Research Center   Vivek Kundra

4. Companies Rush For Automatic Metering Before CRC

   Explore Article Home - eWeekEurope.co.uk (Mar 9 2010) Monitoring , Carbon Reduction Commitment

   Some of the UK’s 5,000 largest energy users - required to take part in the government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme - may not find sufficient capacity available to meet automatic meter reading (AMR) requirements. That’s according to energy procurement and carbon strategy consultancy, Power Efficiency, which has today warned that companies may not get the measures to improve their CRC league table performance in place before the close of the first year’s reporting on 31 March 2011. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Europe   Carbon Trust   CRC

5. Data Centre Management Costs Continue To Grow

   Explore Article Home - eWeekEurope.co.uk (Mar 9 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers

   A new report out today says IT departments still aren’t implementing optimum data centre practices, as a lack of automation, coupled with the proliferation of virtualisation technologies is leading to management sprawl. IDC’s European Data Centre Management Survey 2010 has found that, despite continued economic pressures, large European organisations still expect their spending on staff working in data centre management to grow by 10 percent over the next year - approximately nine times the expected growth in IT spending in 2010. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Interactive Data Corporation

6. Will Politics Slow the Wind?

   Explore Article Science News, Articles and Information (Mar 9 2010) Wind

   Not many years ago, there wasn't enough wind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying. A group of mostly East Coast utility companies calling itself the Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that the prime conditions in the Great Plains will make the region's wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Energy Department   National Renewable Energy Laboratory   American Electric Power

7. Greenpeace Loses Round Two in Tiff with Facebook

   Explore Article greenercomputing.com (Mar 9 2010) Wind , Servers

   Glass houses, stones, etc. That's the sort of lesson coming out from the latest round in the Greenpeace vs. Facebook skirmish currently afoot on the internet. To recap, briefly: In January, Facebook told the world it was opening a green data center, one that set a target of a highly energy efficient 1.15 power usage effectiveness ratio. In mid-February, advocacy groups including Change.org as well as Greenpeace called Facebook out for not using renewable energy to power its planned data center. As I wrote back then: (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Greenpeace

8. OpenGate Targets Hot Spots for Switches

   Explore Article Data Center Knowledge (Mar 9 2010) Networking

   Data center cooling specialist Opengate Data Systems today introduced a new cooling product focused on addressing “hot spots” associated with networking equipment. SwitchAir Network Switch Cooling Solutions was developed to provide in-rack cooling support for high-density network switches, which can present cooling challenges as data center operators run their facilities at warmer temperatures to improve energy efficiency. High switch port density has led many data center operators to position network switches facing the rear of rack to simplify network cabling. Due to the high switch port density, intake air typically enters at the sides of the switch chassis and heat ... (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Cisco   Oracle

9. Intel's single chip cloud computer

   Explore Article GigaOM (Mar 9 2010) Cloud Computing

   Tilera, a startup building chips that contain anywhere from 16 to 100 cores, said today it’s raised $25 million in a third round of funding from investors including Broadcom. Chips made by Tilera, which we named as one of five multicore statups to watch two years ago, are aimed at boosting performance and energy efficiency for networking and cloud computing, which is likely why Broadcom invested. But as Tilera spends more time emphasizing the cloud and big players like Intel do the same, we have to ask: Do cloud computing and web-scale computing need their own chips? (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Intel

10. Tuning the energy innovation engine at MIT

    Explore Article Technology News (Mar 8 2010) Emissions , Fossil Fuel , Nuclear , Solar , Wind

    "China speed," climate change, financing gaps, government policy, nuclear and natural gas, and, of course, science experiments. The MIT Energy Conference on Saturday had a little bit of everything, as entrepreneurs, business people, and academics tried to get their arms around big-picture energy challenges. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has become a hotbed for clean-energy innovation over the past four years, attracting students and faculty to the energy field, some of whom have spun out promising companies. At a showcase, local companies and researchers working in wind, solar, biofuels, storage, and efficiency displayed some of their ongoing work. But at ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   InfoWorld   MIT

11. Generators Installed at Yahoo NY Site

    Explore Article Data Center Knowledge (Mar 8 2010) Construction

    There’s just something about generators. They’re the huge engines providing the last line of defense for the data center and the thousands of web sites inside. They’re big, loud and powerful, and attract lots of attention during tours and installations. And sometimes, they serve as a sign of bigger things to come. Last Friday the backup generators arrived at the new Yahoo data center in Lockport, New York. Three 2-megawatt gensets were installed, generating coverage in The Buffalo News. (Read Full Article)
    

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12. Europe 'supergrid' hopefuls cast fate to wind

    Explore Article Technology News (Mar 8 2010) Emissions , Fossil Fuel , Wind

    Ten companies pushing to build a pan-European offshore power network that could help cut carbon emissions and cost customers over 20 billion euros got together in London on Monday. The Friends of the Supergrid (FOSG) brings together companies that want to build the High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) infrastructure together with those that hope to develop, install, own, and operate it. Building interconnectors to link offshore wind farms across the North Sea from Sweden and Denmark to Britain could cost 15 billion to 20 billion euros, according to a report commissioned by Greenpeace, in addition to the tens of billions ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Europe   Norway   Greenpeace

13. Washington Tax Break Proposal Nears Decision

    Explore Article Data Center Knowledge (Mar 8 2010) Cloud Computing

    The push to restore a key tax break for data center projects in some areas of eastern Washington state is coming down to the wire, and the measure is encountering some challenges as it nears the finish line. The sales tax exemption for data centers is included in a house revenue bill being debated in Olympia, and has gained support from key lawmakers and editorial boards. But the nature of the tax break, which only includes rural counties, has raised late objections from data center projects in other parts of Washington State. Seattle developer Benaroya Companies is building a $100 ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Microsoft   Yahoo

14. When The Power Goes Out at Google

    Explore Article Data Center Knowledge (Mar 8 2010) Cloud Computing

    What happens when the power goes out at a Google data center? We found out on Feb. 24, when a power outage at a Google facility caused more than two hours of downtime for Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform for developers. Last week the company released a detailed incident report on the outage, which underscored the critical importance of good documentation, even in huge data center networks with failover capacity. Most of Google’s recent high-profile outages have been caused by routing or network capacity problems, including outages in May and September of last year (see How Google ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Google

15. Computing's Swinging Pendulum

    Explore Article Forbes.com (Mar 8 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers

    The stampede to outsource computing into the cloud has some interesting consequences. Rather than further distributing computing, it's actually centralizing much of the data, and more importantly, the control of that data. It took almost four decades to fully distribute computing from mainframe computers to PCs and then to a slew of portable devices such as smart phones. The whole argument for the client/server era of computing was that it moved computing closer to the user, distributed the processing and provided universal access to corporate data that used to be regulated by IT departments. (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Ed Sperling

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