Demo versus Retro by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jun 15 2009) Carbon Footprint , Servers

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   Building a showcase energy-efficient data center from the ground up is all the rage these days.  Fewer companies want to talk about retrofitting existing data center facilities to be more green. 

    For instance, Holyoke, Massachusetts is the latest city to join the from-the-ground-up energy-efficient showcase list.  The University of Massachusetts, MIT, EMC and Cisco are getting together to building a "world-class green research high-performance computing center."  Western Mass would seem to be an unlikely place to put a data center, but Holyoke – 90 miles from Boston and 10 miles way from Springfield - has cheap and clean hydroelectric power available from the Connecticut River, a good start for building a green data center.  

    The UMass/MIT-EMC/Cisco project looks like a "me too" showcase like the IBM, Syracuse University and New York state partnership a couple of weeks ago.  The new $12.4 million data center, to incorporate advanced monitoring and IBM's "Rear Door Heat eXchanger "cooling doors" that use chilled water to remove heat from each rack more efficiently than conventional methods.

    It's all nice PR when you can build a green-optimized data center from scratch, especially hand-in-hand with local universities, but there are thousands of data centers around the world that need an "Extreme Makeover" to lower energy costs and carbon footprint. 

   Showcases are nice, but it would be nice to see a couple of practical "Retro" green data center makeovers demonstrating lower energy consumption, minimum disruption to ongoing operations, and some materials recycling thrown in for good measure.

   
   

   
   

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