This week, it's all about the standby - by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Mar 3 2010)

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   A couple of announcements this week seem designed to help data center people think about backup power - and reducing its environmental demands. 

   Backup power is a significant chunk of the energy used by any data center. It's obviously a minor part compared with the 24x7 load of active servers, but there should be great scope for reducing it - simply because it is backup power. If your backup power is not actually required, you should be able to cut the amount of electricity it draws, and when it does, you should be able to make use of better generation. 

   So firstly, there's the Bloom Energy Server, which got quite a lot of press - and kudos with big backing from eBay. It's a fuel-cell system, which basically means it's an electrical generator, but one which runs on natural gas not diesel, and uses "an electrochemical process, rather than dirty combustion". It could distribute power in smaller localised chunks, reducing the energy loss in distribution... and it could also be a good thing to have on hand to power your data center if the power lines go down. 

   Slightly further back from the leading edge, power system maker AEG is keen to take advantage of the world's ever increasing variety of power solutions, by combining all sorts of options in its new Combination Architecture for standby power. It sounds like AEG is going to provide its own implementations of several technologies, starting with supercapacitors, and following up with fuel cells, but eventually moving on to include other things. eWEEK's report suggests these could include solar cells or wind power, though I'm not sure how good they would be - supposing you lose primary power at night, or because the grid power lines are taken down by a storm which also puts your turbine out of action? 

   Whether or not they are useful for standby power, IBM seems to have pushed solar cell technology forward with a technology that cuts the price by doing away with some of the more expensive chemicals in the devices - and also scored a big press win, with Al Gore speaking at an event dedicated to green buildings . 

   The AEG announcement could be the one that makes a big practical difference, being as it puts a big brand name on greener energy sources, which must be reassuring to data center people who might hesitate to hand responsibility for their standby power to a start-up players like Bloom, and might encourage people to move now instead of waiting for ever-elusive improvements in the technology. I have to say, though, to eBay, Bloom, IBM, AEG, and anyone else in this field: more power to you all!   

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