Power companies in areas with a growing amount of clean power are looking at new ways to store compressed air underground. The Pacific Northwest could get some of these new air technologies in the coming years.
As the Windows Azure cloud expands across central Washington, the physical building has all but disappeared. Lightweight enclosures filled with servers, known as ITPACs, sit under the barest of skeleton of a facility. They are self-contained data centers, assembled in days, housed on a concrete slabs and attached to a power “spine” supplying connections to the grid and the Internet. It’s completely open to the air, and in production.
We're all used to getting a data center tour. When someone is trying to sell you space or IT Services, they will bring you through the server space. Here is an example of a Softlayer tour. Local media was let into parts of Google's Douglas Data Center and this below video is posted. Most of you haven't seen this as there a whopping 18 views. :-) One of the rules Joe Kava explains is only those who must go into server room have access, and many who work in the data center aren't allowed in the server room. At least the folks at WPXI11News have better color matching then the Sentinel folks. Joe Kava looks much better in the video than the sentinel camera shot. I think what the folks at the sentinel did is they needed to adjust the exposure/contrast and that really messed up ...
Wired has a post on why Google will embrace cell phone chips (aka ARM). I've blogged on the concept of little green servers built on Atom and ARM, but what if ARM isn't more efficient than an x86 server? Here are some thoughts that are running through my mind.
Cloud, Cloud, Cloud. It is the way of the future. Yeh. Yeh, Yeh. It looks the Cloud may be a bit over hyped. GigaOm's Barb Darrow covered the Rackspace news. Laggard Rackspace growth sparks concern: is there enough cloud biz to go around? by Barb Darrow 1 HOUR AGO No Comments A A photo: Flickr / mnsc SUMMARY: There are lots of potential cloud workloads out there but there are also about a zillion clouds. Is there really enough paid work to support them all? tweet this Here’s the narrative that cloud vendors would like us to believe: there are infinite workloads flowing to clouds of infinite capacity. There’s enough business for all, keep moving. Rackspace did add 4% more servers quarter to quarter. So even though there may be some pricing issues, bottom line the server growth was only 4%. Total server count increased to 94,122 ...
Since Facebook kicked off the Open Compute Project by donating its overall data center design, the OCP Foundation has been chipping away at open sourcing designs for all of the critical components that go into the data center. Next up: network switches. In a keynote speech at Interop , Facebook VP of hardware design and supply chain Frank Frankovsky reviewed two years of progress at expanding ...
Both phases of the design were created by AST Modular, and use the Barcelona company's “natural free cooling” (NFC) technology, which harnesses Icelandic fresh air to cool servers for customers like Opera Software, the mobile browser pioneer. The first
Servers consume the majority of energy in a data center -- primarily in the processors and memory components. Organizations can gain significant energy efficiency by upgrading servers to more efficient models during normal technology refresh cycles where
Driven by booming demand for new data center services for mobile platforms and cloud computing, shipments of micro servers are expected to more than triple this year, according to a report.
As data centers have become larger and more centralized, data center energy use has been on the rise. Research company IDC recently determined that businesses spend almost as much on power and cooling as they do to keep servers running. In response, businesses have developed metrics to examine energy efficiency; the tools provide broad measurements that are helpful for enterprises, but often are more appropriate for huge data centers.
May 1, 2013 -- Web hosting provider 1&1 Internet announced on Wednesday it has made new enhancements to the 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server, making the solution more scalable and cost efficient in real terms.Keep on reading: 1&1 Internet Adds Scalable Options to Dynamic Cloud Server
April 30, 2013 -- Phoenix NAP announced on Tuesday that its Secured Servers offering with both firewall and storage capabilities is available out of its data center in Ashburn, Virginia, as well as its hardware-as-a-service offering.Keep on reading: Phoenix NAP Offers Updated Secured Servers, HaaS in Ashburn Data Center
Your iTunes downloads, Facebook posts and YouTube videos travel through small rural communities that are home to billion-dollar data centers from the world's largest cloud builders. Here's a look at these facilities and how they're changing these communities.
Your iTunes downloads, Facebook posts and YouTube videos travel through small rural communities that are home to billion-dollar data centers from the world's largest cloud builders. Here's a look at these facilities and how they're changing these communities.
When Hurricane Sandy decimated a large portion of the East Coast last year, companies and their data centers wound up without electricity for days or, in some cases, even weeks. The consequences of that and other recent severe storms are spurring some companies to plug into natural gas pipelines to fuel their electricity needs while others look to become completely energy independent -- even ...
It's long been known that Google builds its own web servers, enabling it to design the servers for peak performance and energy efficiency. At today's Google Data Center Energy Summit, the company put one of its custom servers on display.
The disaggregated server concept designs floated at Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit last January are designed for data centers built at frighteningly large scale, but don’t scale down to small installations very well. AMD SeaMicro’s chassis was designed as a disaggregated server and it provides disaggregation benefits for small server deployments, down to 10 rack unit (10U) increments, as well ...
Facebook is planning to build a massive data center in Altoona, Iowa, the company said on Tuesday. That's right, Altoona, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. With more than a billion users around the world to support and just three wholly owned data centers (Forest City, North Carolina; Prineville, Oregon; Luleå, Sweden, with the latter two still being built out) Facebook may have needed another ...
While Renewable Energy Tariffs programs are a step in the right direction toward a cleaner energy future, they need to be part of a set of policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency for all North Carolina residents, not just the largest
Locating data centers in close proximity with liquid natural gas terminals can improve the efficiency of both facilities, according to TeraCool. Natural gas storage plants produce excess refrigeration, and waste enough energy to potentially power data centers.
Google is expanding its North Carolina data centre, and heading off protest at the emissions caused by its electricity use by setting up a renewable energy tariff with its utility company. As part of a $600 million (£394m) expansion of the data centre, Google is making a new agreement with its electricity provider, Duke Energy, to pay extra for its power through a tariff which channels the money to specific renewable energy projects run by Duke.
When a company wants a green data center, it often has to build its own energy sources . Google knows that's sometimes not practical, even for a company its size . To that end, it's partnering with Duke Energy on a proposed business model that would let companies explicitly purchase renewable electricity: companies could demand eco-friendly power sources, whether or not they're the most cost ...
Facebook has published data centre efficiency figures on real-time dashboards for two of its data centres in Prineville Oregon and Forest City North Carolina. Its Lulea, Sweden facility will soon follow. The move is a response to criticism of Facebook’s energy usage, and a means to publicise its involvement in moves to improve data centre efficiency, such as the Open Compute Project. The two data centres have very creditable PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ratings of 1.09 and 1.10, according to the dashboards, which show data with a 2.5-hour delay. The dashboards also display another environmental measure – the centres’ water usage.
Stanford researchers conceive of panel that ejects building heat into space. Stanford researchers are developing rooftop panels that cool buildings by sending heat back into space, a technique that could be more efficient than running an air conditioner from solar panels.