Category: Carbon Footprint

Leafing through the latest environmental news, we ran across six predictions for green IT in 2012. We like that sort of thing, predictions. What we really like is running across "Predictions for 2010" online, and having a good chuckle. Anyway, there it was, Prediction #1 for green IT in 2012: "Greenwashing is dead." Really. Do tell. Nobody invited us to the ecofuneral.

Will an idea to build a data center park powered by onsite clean energy and paired with a microgrid in Colorado, represent the future of data centers? Created by developer Craig Harrison, the Niobrara Data Center Energy Park is a proposal for a company or even the government to build one or more data centers on a one-square mile plot of land in Colorado’s Weld County.

Harrison says the site is unique in that a natural gas power plant could be built on it (a gas hub is a few miles away), and has a sunny climate that would enable an onsite solar panel farm. These local clean energy sources could be connected in a microgrid that could add uptime security for a data center, as well as reduce efficiency losses from transmission.

GalaxyVisions and its subsidiary ColoGuard have reduced usage of mechanical air conditioning at their shared Brooklyn data center by 75% since implementation of airside economization at the facility two years ago.

GalaxyVisions VP of operations Ruben Magurdumov said deployment of an airside economizer at the company’s facility in the New York City borough gave the company substantial efficiency advantages, even with this winter’s unusually warm weather.

Energy costs are the fastest-rising cost element in the data center. Based on current trends, the EPA estimates that energy consumed by data centers will continue to grow by 12 percent per year. Power and thermal energy consumption balanced with energy savings is one of the major responsibilities of facility and IT managers. Intel Data Center Manager group has observed how the data center is now a source for CIOs and their technical teams to add to the bottom line through increased power and cooling efficiency.

 

Leading data centers are ramping up to real-time power and thermal management. There is a growing recognition of the ROI benefit through monitoring usage by device. This provides real-time energy consumption data in relation to the actual workload for individual servers and groups of servers. Collecting data of the actual power and thermal trends over days, weeks and years provides ROI benefit through the ...

Chances are the Internet has changed something about your life. How you shop. How you stay in touch with school buddies or look for a job.

But has it made you greener? And will using the Internet more change your wear and tear on the planet?

The short answer is that the Internet could save energy, if not necessarily Mother Earth.

The more interesting answer comes in a longer conversation short on absolutes and peppered with unintended consequences.

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups - its service will make its debut in some neighborhoods this year - the change could be transformational.

We'll have access at home to Internet fast enough to download the city library's entire collection every minute. Speeds like that, Google hopes ...

There has always been a strong case for making data centers more efficient. Not only are these buildings energy guzzlers but they also end up consuming a lot of space and other resources. Today’s data centers account for 1.5% of the world's power consumption. That is equivalent to the power produced by about 50 power stations. The energy costs of these data centers is estimated at nothing less than a staggering $20 billion.

Data centers are environmental monsters as well. In the last year, they spat out close to 210 million metric tons of CO2 into the environment. Little wonder then that the need for efficiency within data centers is being felt stronger than ever. Couple that with a concern for the environment and amalgamate it with the strong undercurrent of the green phenomenon that the IT industry globally has awakened to and you have a win-win ...

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion of the how using the Internet will change your wear and tear the planet could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups the change could be transformational.

APC by Schneider Electric, a global specialist in integrated critical power and cooling services, announced the successful installation of a data center for their elite partner, Future Systems, Saudi Arabia, the leading provider of IT solutions and systems, broadband internet solution, data communications and integrated network services for the GCC market. The installation of the Riyadh based data center commenced in 2011. Equipped with APC's InfraStruXure architecture, the data center represents a comprehensive integrated power, cooling and management solution. It comprises Racks, Netshelter 42U 750mm wide hosting Cisco UCS servers and Nexus switches cooled by APC's In-Row Cooling.

Not many years ago, server power consumption wasn’t a big concern for IT administrators. The supply of power was plentiful, and in many cases power costs were bundled with facility costs. For the most part, no one thought too hard about the amount of power going into servers. What a difference a few years can make. In today’s ever-growing data centers, no one takes power for granted. For starters, we’ve had too many reminders of the threats to the power supply, including widely publicized accoun

Most data centres in the UK will not be cutting their energy use in 2012. In fact, three-quarters will be using more electricity, despite pressure from energy costs and green taxes. Rising energy costs are supposed to be making data centres more energy-conscious, and energy taxes such as the CRC energy efficiency scheme are designed have the same effect, but still 76 percent of the UK’s data centres expect to use more energy this year, according to a survey by Data Centre World. The cloud is an energy hog It is not just a small increase either. More than one fifth (21 percent) expect to expand their energy use by more than 25 percent this year, according to the survey. While some of the increase may be down to growth and increased levels of business, it is also being produced by inefficient use of energy, despite the existence of ...

Central to the design and management of data centers is the issue of energy efficiency. In the past, data centers were known for their excessive energy consumption and need for space. In fact, data centers produce about 2 percent of the global carbon emissions on an average, similar to that in the airline industry. This has led businesses to look for ways to reduce the level of energy consumed in data centers and adopt a smarter approach, while taking into account the detrimental impact data cen

Computing giant, IBM has been recognised by the European Commission for the energy efficiency of its European data centres. Twenty-seven of IBM’s European data centres have been recognised by the EU, as comlpying with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, a voluntary best-practice guide to making data centres which use energy efficiently and have a reduced carbon footprint. IBM Greens Europe “The awarded 27 IBM Green Data Centres represent over 70 percent of IBM’s strategic outsourcing data centres in 15 European countries. The energy improvements implemented in these data centres helped IBM meet a goal to double their IT capacity within three years without increasing their power consumption,” said a statement by IBM. The European Commission, which sets the benchmark for the assessment, is working to inform and encourage data centre operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner without decreasing mission critical ...

NTT America’s Technology and Infrastructure Assets Drive Global Business Growth January 3, 2012 1 Comment » NTT America, a global infrastructure services provider and wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation, today announced the company’s continued progress in keeping customers ahead of the curve and supporting customer investments during 2011. Throughout the year, company efforts focused on critical business trends including cloud computing, energy efficiency, and customers’ g

It doesn't take much of a genius to realize that the data center will become more energy efficient in the coming year and beyond. Financial incentives aside, the mere fact that nearly all enterprise systems are touting low-power operation right down to the processor level indicate that enterprises will see lower electric bills whether they plan to or not. But within the overall trend toward a greener data center, there are numerous twists and turns that could have a dramatic effect on data operations and overall productivity of the knowledge work force. One of the key questions going forward will be how to define data center efficiency. While many metrics are kicking around, there is wide discrepancy as to how best to measure usage in relation to IT productivity. The widely touted Power Usage Effectiveness metric, for example, merely measures the ratio of energy consumption by data equipment to ...

What’s up with Google and biomass power? By Katie Fehrenbacher Dec. 27, 2011, 12:46pm PT 4 Comments * Tweet * * * Out of all of Google’s close to $1 billion in clean power projects, turning biomass into energy seems like the least relevant technology to Google’s core business. But Google has made a few small investments into biofuels and biomass to energy projects including a venture investment into CoolPlanetBiofuels earlier this year, and one I learned about this week: a project that turns was