Articles from Matthew Wheeland

1. Greenpeace Puts Google, Cisco, Fujitsu at Top of Green IT Rankings Explore GreenBiz.com (Feb 7 2012) Construction , Solar , Cloud Computing Greenpeace today released the latest version of its Cool IT Leaderboard, tracking progress among 21 IT companies in embracing green energy for their own operations as well as advocating for policies that promote clean energy use worldwide. Google came out on top of the rankings this year, scoring 53 points out of a total 100. Cisco moved from first to second with a score of 49, and Ericsson and Fujitsu tied for third place with 48 points earned. Overall, the latest rankings show a steep decline from the fourth round of scores, which werepublished in December 2010, during the Cancun climate talks. Cisco led the prior round's pack with a score of 70, while Google held down fourth place with a score of 47. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Greenpeace   Fujitsu   Google

2. Companies Shifting to Cloud Computing Save Energy & Cut Waste Explore GreenBiz.com (Dec 6 2011) Cloud Computing It's a good thing the rise of cloud computing is essentially unstoppable: New research shows just how much energy companies can save from a migration, even while the same research shows even wider business benefits from cloud computing. A study just published by CSC asked more than 3,600 IT decision makers across eight countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia about how and why their companies migrated to remote computing options. While the top-level findings, especially around green IT, were not surprising, the broad array of benefits businesses accrued from the cloud chart some new territory. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Europe   CSC

3. Cisco Enters Container Data Center Market with 1.25-PUE Offering Explore GreenBiz.com (May 4 2011) Container , Cloud Computing The CDC, which is built into a 40-foot shipping container structure, promises the usual features: Quick setup time: Cisco estimates it can set up a new compute center within 12 weeks of ordering; as many as 16 racks of space, at 25 kilowatts per rack; and a comprehensive management tool, Cisco's new Data Center Operations 360. Cisco is also touting the container's energy efficiency, with a PUE of 1.25 or lower, which Cisco compares favorably to a hypothetical 1.6 to 3.0 for other data center solutions. The CDC also uses a chilled-water cooling system, mounted in the floor of the container rather than above the racks. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Cisco   Pike Research   CA

4. Datapipe Completes Transition to 100% Green-Powered Data Centers Explore GreenBiz.com (Mar 9 2011) Cloud Computing , Servers When you're running a data center, especially one that specializes in cloud computing applications, there are some green practices that are just inevitable. Buying energy-efficient servers, for example, or virtualizing those servers as much as possible. Running that data center on renewable energy, however, is not one an example of low-hanging fruit. But cloud service provider Datapipe yesterday announced that it had completed a year-long project to get all three of its U.S. data centers powered entirely by renewables. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory   Datapipe

5. Telehouse Launches an Alternative to Container-Based Data Centers Explore GreenBiz.com (Jan 4 2011) Container , Cloud Computing , Servers Container-based data centers have taken center stage in recent years, offering customers a cheaper and faster solution for rapidly expanding IT needs. All the big names in IT have developed modular data center systems, including HP, Microsoft, IBM, Wipro and Rackable. But where containers and modular data centers tone down the complexity of building a data center, they also limit flexibility if your company has specific or extreme needs for compute power or locations. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   IBM   Microsoft Corp

6. A Look Inside Facebook's Green Announcements Explore GreenBiz.com (Nov 9 2010) Facebook, as you may have heard, is going green. Or, more accurately, they're starting to communicate their green initiatives. But it's also fair to say that they're still getting a grasp on exactly what it means to undertake a green program, and how exactly they do it. After last week's short item about Facebook.com/green, the home for all things environmental at the social network, I spoke with Kathleen Loughlin, a member of the company's communications team, about the kickoff. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Facebook

7. Energy Audit Shows How Data Center Efficiency Can Save Millions Explore GreenBiz.com (Sep 14 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers Although most IT press is focused on the ever-shrinking PUEs of leading-edge data centers (present company included, of course), the results of Digital Realty Trust's data center energy audits show just how big the results are from even "run of the mill" energy efficiency projects. DRT, which builds and manages high-tech real estate, earlier this month published the results of an energy audit of two of its data centers, one in San Francisco and one in Santa Clara, and found that its customers were achieving an average power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.6. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   CA

8. Swiss Carbon-Neutral Servers Hit the Cloud Explore GreenBiz.com (Jun 30 2010) Carbon Footprint , Emissions , Solar , Cloud Computing , Servers Call it the merger of two buzzwords, one from years past and one of-the-moment: Swiss firm CloudSigma announced this week that it has made its cloud computing service carbon neutral. Although the company used carbon offsets to reach zero-carbon (offsets were the tool du jour for early carbon-neutrality commitments), the offsetting was only the final stage of a three-stage process to reduce emissions. The first step involved siting their data center with green energy in mind; Switzerland boasts a green electric grid, with 95 percent generated from zero greenhouse gas renewable and nuclear energy sources, as well as high potential for renewables from geothermal, hydroelectric, wind and solar power. (Read Full Article)

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9. States Use Tax Incentives to Lure In Data Centers Explore GreenBiz.com (May 5 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers In the drive to create new, highly paid jobs, a number of states are putting considerable effort and money into getting companies to site their data centers within their borders. The battle is perhaps best typified by Washington's new tax incentives for companies that build data centers in rural parts of the state. As Tax-News.com reports: Last year, the state rejected a proposed tax break, which prompted Microsoft to move its cloud computing platform Azure out of Washington State to another data center in the US. The news was distressing to the town of Quincy, where Yahoo, Microsoft and Intuit have built large server farms, drawn to Grant County's cheap and green hydropower. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Greenpeace   Amazon.com   Yahoo

10. Uncovering the Shortcuts to Data Center Energy Efficiency Explore GreenBiz.com (Apr 28 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers Data centers have been around for a long time, but only lately have they started to appear on the radars of small- to medium-sized companies. This is due in large part to the increased reliance on computing for companies that are now seeing big opportunities from internet-facing sales, and also to the simultaneous awareness of the high costs of and limited power available to rapidly expanding data centers or server rooms. Read more: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/04/28/uncovering-shortcuts-data-center-energy-efficiency?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+greenercomputing%2Fdata-centers+%28Data+Centers+%7C+GreenerComputing.com%29#ixzz0mPif0C6B (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Data Center Efficiency

11. What Data Centers Can Teach the World about Earth Day Explore GreenBiz.com (Apr 21 2010) Fossil Fuel , Servers Tomorrow is Earth Day, and the 250+ Earth Day-themed emails in my inbox attest to the fact that companies of all types, in all industries, and of all sizes are trying to cash in on the heightened awareness of April 22, 2010 -- which marks the 40th anniversary of environmentalism's Big Day. But I just came across a post on Data Center Journal that maps interesting new territory for Earth Day coverage. In "Earth Day: A Day for Data Centers to Celebrate," Jeff Clark writes: (Read Full Article)

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12. Dell: We May Never Build Another Data Center Explore GreenBiz.com (Apr 14 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers Data centers are a booming business, of course, as we report on all the time at GreenerComputing. With the rise of online shopping, telecommuting, virtual meetings, and the general spread of technology through everyday business activities, more and more companies are building or expanding their computing facilities. But at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference happening this week, Dell made the amazing revelation that, by waffling on their data center expansion plans, the company realized they might never need to build another new data center. Robin Johnson, Dell's CIO, and Dane Parker, its Global Facilities Lead, took part in the virtual conference (you can attend it online through WebEx) yesterday to talk about how the greenest data center is the one you never build. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Dell

13. Inside the World's Greenest Data Center Explore GreenBiz.com (Apr 7 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers t's 360,000 square feet, large enough to hold eight 747 jumbo jets, and with its PUE of 1.2, Hewlett Packard's just-opened Wynyard data center is possibly the world's greenest large-scale facility. We've reported on the facility before, both when it was first announced and when it opened this year. But I spoke today with Ed Kettler, a Fellow and Green IT Strategist at HP Enterprise Services, to get some further insight into the project. Kettler talked about the challenge of turning a former shipping distribution center into a high-powered, highly efficient computing facility. "We were approaching it as a way of building a standard box, like we used to do," Kettler said. "But with rising energy costs, we got together and organized a design team to determine the problem we were trying to solve and find out if there's a more efficient way ... (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Hewlett Packard

14. How UPS Brings Green IT to the World Explore greenercomputing.com (Mar 24 2010) If you thought UPS was just trucks and planes and boxes, you'd be way off base (although the company does manage the world's ninth-largest airline). At an event convened by the company in New York yesterday, UPS highlighted just how deeply IT is incorporated into its daily operations, and how UPS uses that information to move itself and its customers toward greener pastures. Unsurprisingly, UPS works on a massive scale, and Dave Barnes, UPS's Senior Vice President and CIO, told attendees at its event yesterday that it spends $1 billion a year on technology. Green tech figures into UPS's practices in a number of ways, primarily in waste reduction and improved efficiency. (Read Full Article)

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15. Cisco's EnergyWise Additions Make Green a No-Brainer Explore greenercomputing.com (Mar 17 2010) Cloud Computing , Networking , Servers Green business practices often make sense from a cost savings perspective, from a social responsibility perspective, and from a stakeholder engagement perspective. But there often remains the obstacle of actually implementing a new solution, and that obstacle can be insurmountable without the proper incentives. Cisco today is announcing a slew of hardware and software additions to its year-old "Borderless Networks" platform, focused on energy management, network security, and video streaming capabilities across a company. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Cisco   CA

16. Greenpeace Loses Round Two in Tiff with Facebook Explore 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 Mentions:   Greenpeace

17. Can Facebook's Data Center be Green if it Runs on Coal? Explore greenercomputing.com (Feb 18 2010) Fossil Fuel , Cloud Computing , Servers I may have to de-friend Facebook's green data center. The Prineville, Ore., facility the company announced at the end of last month, received kudos and accolades for its innovative and dedicatedly green features, including a low-energy evaporative cooling system, an airside economizer for using outside air to cool the facility, a system to re-use of server heat, and a target of hitting a PUE of 1.15. But at least some of the power going in to the data center will be from a notoriously non-green energy source: Coal. Not even "clean coal," just coal. (Read Full Article)

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18. Facebook Status Update: We're Opening a Green Data Center Explore greenercomputing.com (Jan 26 2010) Construction , Cloud Computing , Servers If "Facebook's Green Data Center" were a group, I'd become a fan of it.* The social networking giant and cause of huge losses of productivity around the globe announced last week that it had made plans to open its first company-owned data center, and would take steps to make it among the greenest in the industry. In a post on Facebook (where else?), Jonathan Heiliger, the company's director of technical operations, laid out the 147,000-square-foot facility's claims to green, saying in part, "Along with making sure Facebook operates quickly for you, we wanted to minimize the environmental impact of our new facility and its energy costs. To best achieve those goals, we will use several energy-efficiency technologies, including: (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   LEED

19. Will Government Have to Step In to Make IT Green? Explore greenercomputing.com (Nov 25 2009) Carbon Footprint , Emissions Sometimes it feels like I'm sitting in a bubble here, one where leading companies are taking audacious steps -- and earning big rewards -- in making their IT departments more energy efficient, and applying those technologies to the rest of their operations to boot. While that is certainly true of leading and forward-thinking companies, as with all the green business practices we cover here and on GreenBiz.com, they're common but far from mainstream. And therein lies the challenge: How do you get traditional, run-of-the-mill, and/or mom and pop shops to adopt green practices? (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Europe   United Kingdom

20. Simple Data Center Best Practices Can Cut Energy Use by 20 Percent Explore greenercomputing.com (Oct 29 2009) Power and Cooling , Servers As part of a partnership with The Green Grid, the U.S. EPA made a number of small tweaks to how it managed one of its data centers, and ended up saving $15,000 per year in energy costs as a result. That was one of the examples on offer today in a free webcast hosted by GreenBiz.com, and bringing together some of the industry leaders behind The Green Grid, an industry consortium dedicated to improving energy efficiency in data centers. "The data center itself has always been a capital asset, but it's becoming a fundamental business differentiator for almost any industry," explained John Tuccillo, a vice president at APC by Schneider Electric and the president of the Green Grid. "Essentially, the data center has become the epicenter of business value: It provides tremendous opportunities to improve your business and the flexibility of your business, and our focus ... (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   The Green Grid   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

21. What's the Greenest Country for Your Next Data Center? Explore greenercomputing.com (Oct 12 2009) Power and Cooling , Carbon Footprint , Cloud Computing As we've covered fairly often lately, more and more businesses are adopting virtualization and cloud computing as a way to cut costs, boost their computing power, and/or cut their carbon footprint. Whether they're using third-party cloud services or setting up their own off-site data centers, we expect to see much more outsourcing, and even offshoring of computing facilities as the idea of remote computing becomes more normalized. So it caught my eye last week when Ronald Bowman, the executive vice president of Tishman Technologies, sent around a list of the 10 best countries in which to build your next data center. (Read Full Article)

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22. Inside Microsoft's New 'Purpose-Built' Data Lab Explore greenercomputing.com (Sep 10 2009) Power and Cooling , Carbon Footprint , Cloud Computing , Servers What happens when you remove engineers from their test servers? For starters, you get some nervous engineers. But eventually, you can also greatly expand your computing capability and speed up the research process. That, at least, is the hope that lies behind Microsoft's new 57,000 square foot Redmond Ridge 1 computing facility, which opened in July and which I toured yesterday with a small group of reporters and Microsoft executives. (Full disclosure: Microsoft paid for my plane ticket to attend a daylong tour of the corporate campus and meet with other teams at the company.) (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   LEED   Microsoft Corp

23. Why An Online MS Office Will Be Good for Green IT Explore greenercomputing.com (Jul 15 2009) Cloud Computing Microsoft yesterday announced that its suite of Office 2010 software programs, as well as SharePoint Server, Visio and Project 2010, were all ready for testing and were thus one step closer to release. What grabbed more headlines, though, was Microsoft's announcement that a stripped-down version of the Office suite will be available for free online to members of the Windows Live network -- in other words, to anyone who's had a Hotmail account in the last 13 years. Beyond being another attempt to edge in on Google's turf, this is good news for green IT, for a handful of reasons. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Google   Microsoft Corp

24. The State of Green IT Explore greenercomputing.com (Jul 7 2009) Fossil Fuel , Servers , Storage John Lamb, an IT architect with IBM, is the author of the new book, The Greening of IT, a guidebook for optimizing IT infrastructure from top to bottom. Aimed at any level of the organization, from CEOs or CIOs to data center managers and sysadmins, the book digs in deep to some of the best existing ways for making IT systems as energy efficient as possible. At the end of our wide-ranging talk, I asked John to walk me through a thought exercise that lays out the green IT projects that make the most sense for three kinds of companies: those just starting out, companies with some experience and upper-level buy-in, and companies that have gathered all the low-hanging fruit. That thought exercise has been posted as a podcast, and the audio and full transcript are online at GreenBiz.com. Matthew Wheeland: You're currently in South Africa working on ... (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   IBM

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