Views and Opinions on Green IT

1. Straining green by Doug Mohney

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Dec 12 2012

   

   Green power, green energy, and green-ness have all been heavily touted over the past couple of years as being Good and Right. But the high price tag of green projects and public sector failures of green investments does not bode well on the PR front, with the allure of green starting to fade. The green-ness of green data centers and green centers started to fade a while ago, as firms and hyperactive marketing people started green-washing anything they could just to get a press release out there.

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   Mentions: Department of Energy Doug Mohney

2. Learning about energy - in a primary school by Peter Judge

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Dec 9 2012

   

   There’s plenty of energy news this week from governments and giant corporation - but the story that most interested me was from a little school in Wales. This week’s energy news includes the possibility of a green tax from Washington, a budget statement in the UK in which our green tax clings to life, all of which affects the cost of power. There have also been huge orders for solar and fuel cells by Apple, which could help build the market that will re-shape the energy used by data centers.

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   Mentions: Apple Peter Judge

3. How much will green energy cost California? by Doug Mohney

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Dec 5 2012

   

   California may pay a substantial price for its push to clean energy, according to a report by the Little Hoover Commission. State renewable portfolio standards, support for expansion of rooftop solar and large-scale solar thermal power plants, and a new cap-and-trade scheme are all adding to the bottom line. "Rewiring California: Integrating Agendas for Energy Reform," discusses the state's plan to procure more than a third of its' electrical production to come from renewable energy resources by 2020, but multiple policy initiatives have been implemented without an overarching plan. 

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   Mentions: Doug Mohney

4. Google keeps quiet on data center cooling patent by Peter Judge

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Dec 2 2012

   

   This week, Google patented a low-cost, modular, way to manage hot aisle containment in data centers. And hasn’t said another word about it. David O’Hara’s Green (Low Carbon) Data Center Blog spotted it, and I saw a link here on Green Data Center News. At that stage, the pictures weren’t available, so it was a bit tricky to see what it was all about. 

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   Mentions: Google Facebook Peter Judge

5. Cheap oil and gas to slow U.S. green-ness by Doug Mohney

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 28 2012

   

   After decades of angst importing oil, the "American energy revolution" in oil and natural gas production is upending traditional thinking about the U.S. energy mix. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts the United States will be the world's largest producer of crude oil as early as the end of this decade and has the potential to become a net exporter by 2035.  Plentiful natural gas is leading to a return of some manufacturing, leading into an interesting shift of jobs and carbon generation.

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   Mentions: Europe International Energy Agency Doug Mohney

6. What difference will an ISO membership for PUE make? by Peter Judge

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 26 2012

   

   The Green Grid is pretty pleased that its PUE (power usage effectiveness) measure is on the way to becoming a formal standard. But what difference will that make in practice? PUE is a simple ratio, one number divided by another. It might seem odd that it will take the UN-sanctioned standards body ISO a couple of years to turn this into an official standard, but the data center industry has already seen how far people can bend that ratio to get the answers that they want.

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   Mentions: The Green Grid Peter Judge

7. Hope and fear in California's first carbon auction by Doug Mohney

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 20 2012

   

   California announced the results of its first carbon auction under a new cap-and-trade system.  The good news is that the state had three bids per permit and sold out all 23.1 million of them.  The bad news is a pair of lawsuits threaten the new regulatory scheme and that companies paid roughly $2 less per permit than many analysts predicted.

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   Mentions: Europe Doug Mohney

8. The big question on new data center metrics: how do you fiddle them? by Peter Judge

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 19 2012

   

   New ways to measure data center efficiency are getting more attention in a couple of European events. It begins to seem as if there may be a new way to figure out how green your servers are. But what is the biggest question? Are people asking how good these new metrics are?

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   Mentions: The Green Grid Datacenter Dynamics Peter Judge

9. Virtual Desktops in Small Business by Chad Calimpong

   Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 15 2012

   

   Virtualization is becoming common in nearly all aspects of life (think music and photo saving on the cloud,) but many people do not understand what virtualization is and how it benefits them. Virtualization is the ability to use the cloud for storage, software and datacenters in substitution for actual physical computers, hard drives and mile long data centers. While virtualization has impacted daily life for people across the world, it has also begun to gain ground in the industries of business. Large corporations are utilizing the benefits of virtualization and now small businesses are beginning to jump on board as well.

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   Mentions: Microsoft Corp Chad Calimpong

10. U.S. carbon tax looks more likely by Doug Mohney

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 13 2012

    

    A returning Obama Administration may put a national U.S. carbon tax on the table, according to buzz out of Washington D.C.  It won't happen overnight, but data center managers should be mindful that it is likely and will impact the price of electricity down the road.

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    Mentions: Doug Mohney

11. Cooling isn't always the first consideration by Peter Judge

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 11 2012

    

    This week we heard from supercomputer rivals, and also saw the final appearance of Intel’s “Poulson” Itanium silicon. From the point of view of this blog, the interesting thing is these announcements made very little mention of cooling or energy efficiency. At more than 20 Petaflops, the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge is the world’s fastest. It’s an AMD-based machine, with NVidia Tesla GPUs that do the donkey work - and it’s air-cooled. An upgrade of the previous Jaguar machine, Titan simply re-uses the power

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    Mentions: Intel Oracle Peter Judge

12. AMD to ARM - Whatever by Doug Mohney

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 7 2012

    

    Last week, AMD announced it is adding the ARM-64 silicon architecture to its x86 (c'mon, can we say "Industry standard" or use a politically incorrect "Intel clone") line of chips.  AMD first plans to crank out a 64-bit multicore processor optimized for energy-efficient servers with an AMD ARM (A2?) Opteron processor targeted for production in 2014. I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

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    Mentions: Intel Doug Mohney

13. Green lessons from Hurricane Sandy by Peter Judge

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 4 2012

    

    New Yorkers have a stiff upper lip that any Brit would envy. They also give lip. They mouth off way better than we could dream of. So when a disaster hit the City, killing 41 people, heroes came out in force to save lives and keep things going. And the arguments kicked off. Mayor Bloomberg had to cancel the New York marathon for the first time ever. Not because it couldn’t be done - this is New York, remember, they can do anything - but because the arguments were set to drown out everything else. Bloomberg also threw his weight behind the Obama presidential campaign. This wasn’t just because the President’s response to the disaster was so much better than Bush’s post-Katrina performance, but because of global warming.

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    Mentions: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Doug Mohney Peter Judge

14. For backup power, I am now a fuel cell bigot by Doug Mohney

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Nov 1 2012

    

    As Hurricane Sandy dissipates across the northeastern United States, thousands of backup generators along its path are noisily burning diesel, putting particulate matter into the storm-cleaned air.  If you want to be green and keep the servers on come heck or high water, the only solution that makes sense to me is a natural gas fuel cell. 

    I've been an advocate of on-site/co- generated power for a while, but various renewable options have drawbacks.  Solar cells sound great, but unless there's a lot of land, roof space, or parking lot, most data centers will not be able to generate sufficient power from solar to run the whole facility.  A hurricane with several days of rain will only serve to damp power generation -- in desert states such as Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, this isn't a problem -- just when the rest of the grid is unable to provide ...

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    Mentions: Doug Mohney Bloom Energy

15. CIO Europe 2012 by Tate Cantrell

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 31 2012

    

    Frankfurt Germany was established with a mind for independence and a stage for innovation. As one of the most important cities of the Holy Roman Empire, it was declared in 1372 as an independent city-state, a Reichsstadt, respected by the monarchy and left on the banks of the Main River to blossom. And just to the north of Frankfurt at the resort town of Bad Nauheim, another King brought a different style of flair and independence. And on the street named for Mr. Elvis Presley himself, we found a perfect setting for a European CIO conference to challenge convention.

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    Mentions: Iceland Europe Verne Global

16. Climate change - shifting the effort from generation to efficiency by Peter Judge

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 29 2012

    

    Last week I went to a very interesting meeting of solar industry people. Data centers didn’t get a specific look-in: the issue was how to get solar projects funded as the UK government changes its policies around energy generation.

    Solar power will get cheaper as the panels get mass produced, but in the early stages, it is not affordable enough to produce the kind of mass market that will really bring prices down. The UK’s solar business has been doing reasonably well - but it seems that the Chinese government has decided that China should own the industry and is pricing and marketing accordingly.

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    Mentions: IBM Peter Judge

17. Blade Servers--The Smart Choice for Environmentally-Conscious IT Managers? by Jared Jacobs

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 25 2012

    

    There are several reasons why blade servers can clearly be a smarter choice for the environmentally-conscious IT manager than conventional servers. Blade Servers Are Designed for Simplicity First, blade servers have a smaller footprint than that of full-sized servers. Full-sized servers often have all of the “bells and whistles” that a stand-alone server may require. However, in many cases, when multiple servers host one application or database, these extras, such as DVD drives or multiple USB ports, are not necessary and may even pose security risks. These unnecessary components are rarely utilized and take up valuable space.

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    Mentions: Jared Jacobs

18. Getting greener from the U.S. military by Doug Mohney

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 24 2012

    

    While you don't usually associate the U.S. military with traditional tree-hugging activity, the services have embraced renewable energy sources and lowering fuel and power consumption for a number of reasons. Some advances hold the promise of wider civilian usage. Fuel has always been a concern of the U.S. armed forces to move vehicles, but as wartronics -- forgive me for coining a phrase here -- have grown as personal computers, servers, laptops, tablets and cell phone-like devices have appeared on the battlefield to complement mil-spec GPSes, lasers, radios and night-vision goggles, so has the need for more stored and generated power. A twenty-first century infantryman needs batteries for his wartronics as well as a way to recharge them -- plus his personal electronic devices. In the future, more power will be needed to drive radars capable of "frying" incoming unmanned flying vehicles and solid state lasers to shoot down incoming ...

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    Mentions: Pentagon Doug Mohney

19. Google uses glamour to push the green agenda by Peter Judge

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 21 2012

    

    This week, everyone’s been looking at the images of Google’s data centers, but what have we learned? In a nutshell, we now know that if you put a top-rank professional photographer inside eight data centers, she can make a great data-center photo story - and great PR for Google. Connie Zhou got the job - and can now be called “the Annie Liebowitz of data centers”. Journalists who trudge round data centers can only look on jealously. We do our best with our pix, but we snatch them on lightning tours, while juggling notebooks and recorders to take note of the facts.

     

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    Mentions: The New York Times Google Peter Judge

20. Storage: The real big green challenge by Doug Mohney

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 18 2012

    

    For all the fussing about making servers more energy efficient, storage is destined to be the big green headache over the next five years.   More individuals and businesses alike are using mobile solutions, sharing and saving more stuff in "the cloud."  All that stuff is going to end up being spread around for back up in a gazillion different schemes.  Adding on all the new ways to collect and process audio and visual data is going to end up with storage outweighing compute at some point in the future.

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    Mentions: Intel Oracle Facebook

21. How national should data centers be? by Peter Judge

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 15 2012

    

    I am very used to the idea that the cloud means data can be held, carried and processed anywhere. I’ve stopped using word processing packages on my own machines except in very desperate situations. I know I can’t access the cloud on a plane, but I rarely fly anywhere, and when I do, I sleep most of the flight. . The fact that my data is somewhere else may have some small downsides - occasionally slow responses, and very occasional data loss. But, the upside is, it allows me to be disorganised. Get interrupted and put down a piece of work on one system, and I can pick it up on another one. Bigger organisations seem to be understanding this more slowly. BMW, for instance apparently had to do extensive testing before it decided it was OK to ship its high-performance computing (HPC) jobs off to Iceland.

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    Mentions: Iceland Peter Judge BMW

22. Local batteries only illustrate the bigger problem of server industry by Doug Mohney

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 10 2012

    

    Researchers say putting batteries in at the rack or server level could significantly reduce both power costs and power supplies needed to run a CDN network, according to a GigaOm article.  The bigger issue is the long-overdue refresh of the data center server and the sloth of hardware designers. Batteries applied to content delivery network servers could provide power savings of up to 14 percent over networks without batteries at the rack or server level. Google has had a lead acid battery per server for a while, sparing the cost and expense of a centralized UPS setup.  Since the battery is local to the server, the efficiency of battery storage is pretty close to 100 percent as compared to the 92 to 95 percent you get from a big UPS setup.

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    Mentions: Intel Google Facebook

23. Data center figures point to more power politics by Peter Judge

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 8 2012

    

    Good research doesn’t always turn up surprises. This week sees the release of DCD Intelligence’s annual census of the data center industry. It’s an impressive piece of work that mostly tells us stuff we would have expected - but also confirms things that some people would maybe not like to hear. . The global data center market grew at 22 percent this year, and is expected to grow at 14 percent till next year. There’s $105 billion being spent this year on data centers. The downside - not a surprise really, so not exactly bad news - is that, despite efforts at efficiency, the power demands are soaring. Worldwide the power demands of data centers went up by 63.3 percent this year, to a total of 38GW. And next year, the power used is expected to go up again by 17 percent. The growth in investment and power varies ...

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    Mentions: Europe Peter Judge

24. Ignore the drama – do what’s right for your data center by Doug Mohney

    Explore Views and Opinions on Green IT Oct 2 2012

    

    Hot on the heels of the New York Times expose’ of data center evils last week comes a Pike Research $45 billion prediction by 2016 for green data centers.  If you want to pick a side, be my guest, but don’t use either to plot your own fate in the data center world. “The Cloud Factories” by James Glanz ran down data centers for being wasteful due to a variety of factors, including conservative estimates on compute needs, UPS backup, and inefficient power distribution and servers – issues that are being dealt with by leveraging virtualization (less servers) and better new-build facility designs combining better electrical design, utilizing climate-based (i.e. “Free”) cooling, and pushing server manufacturers to make efficient CPU-per-watt hardware. Diesel generators are dirty and noisy, but we’re stuck with them as a near term solution for emergency power generation. Longer term, biodiesel offers a drop-in partial ...

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    Mentions: New York Times The New York Times Doug Mohney