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In Blade Servers--The Smart Choice for Environmentally-Conscious IT Managers? by Jared Jacobs:
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In Gartner: Build your own datacentre rather than hosting:
Reply PermalinkOn 11/30/11 ControlCircle said:
It’s startling that in today’s volatile environment Gartner is prescribing such a high risk strategy. Building your own datacentre means (cost of datacentre aside) having the skills in-house to ensure best of breed networking, security, database, and information management. This is a broad set of skills to have when companies need to focus on their core IP and R&D. Also, once these investments are committed, there is little flexibility if clouds are on the horizon.
Should we not be considering a middle way that enables the best of both worlds, and a less risky scenario?
The concept of a shared platform, or Hybrid Cloud, represents the ability for enterprises that outsource to have mobility of workload from their own datacenter to a shared Cloud-based service, to enable them to take advantage of outsourcing, but in a controlled environment. This is not a ‘one size fits all’ model, but a model that enables companies to partially outsource those infrastructures and applications it makes economic sense to put into a Cloud environment, or hosted datacentre.
Key to the Hybrid Cloud model and workload mobility is the ability for customers to have a single management and monitoring view of the full estate, no matter where or how it is deployed. So not outsourcing or outsourcing’s sake but from a Capex, Opex, resource flexibility and management point of view, this hybrid model allows for an organisation to benefit from a pragmatic outsourcing or hosting partnership. It provides a reassuring control and visibility of the estate and its assets for optimum management of business operations, both in-house and via a hosting partnership.
Surely we should not be so prescriptive in our approach and look for more pragmatic solutions.
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In Does efficiency matter when your power is renewable (and affordable)? - By Peter Judge:
Reply PermalinkOn 10/3/11 Carbon3IT Ltd said:
Peter, do you really think that this is good practice?, as you say its like turning the clock back.
PUE is, as you know the facility power divided by the IT power, in this case the total facility power is likely to be much less than a conventional data (non icelandic) centre due to the free cooling element ONLY.
Data Centre efficiency however is much much more than that, its virtualisation, its getting the servers do to their job using less power.
DC energy efficiency has a long long way to go yet and its going to be driven by code, component embodied energy, component efficiency, management and new (yet to be derived) metrics.
The EU Code of Conduct & CEEDA do NOT even recognise external power sources as being relevant, and even less for energy (heat) re-use, although they have both been raised for inclusion in the next version of the code. The energy efficiency is all about whats in the data centre, its how the server uses the energy supplied to do a compute job.
To answer your question, yes it does matter, just because the energy is "carbon free" doesn't mean you should waste it, renewable energy and other efficiency measures walk hand in hand, a more efficient data centre drives down costs, which is a competitve advantage anywhere.
One more point, if say a UK company moved their entire DC to Iceland, they would be able to reduce their energy and carbon costs, but due to the relatively undeveloped nature of the icelandic hinterland and a severe shortage of skills, (not many ITers in a population of 330,000!) plus limited fibre connectivity, unstable geology (volcanos and earthquakes), and a lack of compute manufacturers meaning high transport costs etc, means that this is a limited opportunity.Login to comment.
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In Is it time to move your data center out of the city? - by Doug Mohney:
It might just be ideal to host your data in a data center that's located out of natural disaster zones, and has natural, cool weather to cut down on costs. Michigan is an ideal place with cold weather 9 months out of the year, and a very low risk of natural disasters.
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In you can't control your power so get your users to do it for you - by Peter Judge:
Reply PermalinkOn 8/17/11 PCPowerManagement said:
Utopia Power Manager, Enterprise PC Power Management can help with corporate power policies from 50 PCs up. More info and free trial: http://www.windows-power-manager.com
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In as goes japan so goes the world - by doug mohney:
As IT technology’s importance in the Japanese infrastructure has risen, so, too, has its power consumption. It has become an urgent priority for enterprises to grasp and strategically manage their total energy consumption due to the setting of carbon emission targets required by the Kyoto Protocol and the issuance of the amended Energy Conservation Law resulting from the. In addition, the Japanese government is requiring a 15 percent decrease in power consumption as a measure to combat the domestic electricity shortage this summer caused by the Tohoku-Pacific Ocean Earthquake. There is serious concern that the stoppage of the Hamaoka nuclear power plant and postponement of restarts at other nuclear power plants will cause nation-wide power shortages.
I fully agree that enterprises like Fujitsu should be commended for taking proactive measures to seek energy efficiency. We are finding organizations can find savings opportunities of much more than 15 percent in their data centers, in some cases 50 percent, without having to raise the thermostat (http://www.joulex.net/Joulex_Press_Releases/bid/53712/JouleX-Releases-Revolutionary-Data-Center-Energy-Management-Solution). There is certainly much to be learned from how Japan is responding to their energy crisis. Thanks for a great article and for enlightening the rest of the world.
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In PAR4 - another data center metric? By peter judge:
Nice article,Thank you for your comment.
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<a href="http://www.gov-auctions.org" rel="dofollow">auto auctions</a>Login to comment.
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In PAR4 - another data center metric? By peter judge:
Thanks for your comment.
I think we could improve our production here and I'm sorry for any typos.
As to the other comments, firstly, I think in some cases you are objecting to some ideas which I'm reporting from the Par4 people, and I agree with your reservations there.
Secondly, I may not have expressed some points clearly enough. For instance, it's clear that at least on some level it is "greener" to keep a server going longer as your new server will have a lot of embodied energy in its manufacture. That is all I meant by saying older servers are greener,.
Anyway, I want to return to this subject here and in other fora, so let's make contact. If you are the Ken Baker at HP, I'll track you down, otherwise, I'm easy to find as judgecorp on most social/networking sites.
Peter Judge
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In PAR4 - another data center metric? By peter judge:
wow, so many errors in this article, I don't know where to start. So, I guess from the start.
"The harder issue is to look downstream, at what the electricity is used for within the IT equipment in the data centre. How much actual work do you get for each Joule of energy? This is a very significant thing to do, as it’s been argued that PUE is a blunt instrument, in danger of creating “false negatives” and unintended consequences."
The fact is that practically all IT manufacturers have telemetry in their products to serve up temperature, wattage, and other data. Fact also is, not many people use them.
"For instance, turning down the air conditioning will make servers run hotter and decrease PUE, which is good. But can also result in the servers’ built in fans working harder to cool the servers. The server fans are included in the IT power, so this makes PUE go down even further artificually - even though server fans are less efficiency than data center cooling systems."
Again, less than true. Variable speed fans, and allowing servers to run hotter is the norm, not the exception.
"Virtualising and consolidating servers can increase the utilisation of hardware - the proportion of time it is active. This might decrease the amount of energy going to the hardware, and actually put PUE up."
Again, wrong. It increases the amount of energy to a single device, but if you virtualise well, you have fewer devices, so PUE goes down.
"As such, it compares with SPECpower, which measures server performance in operations per Watt, and has been part of the EMA Energy Star program for some time."
C'mon, do you proof your articles? There is no EMA.
And further, Energy Star is not an efficiency metric, but an absolute energy metric.
"Of course, it is true that older servers are greener than newer ones in one sense. Replacing them increases your carbon footprint when you take into account the embodied energy, but I’m not sure that is what Power Assure is getting at here."
Did you really say that? Older servers cannot be greener than newer ones if for no reason that large IT supply chains are getting greener. Old stuff is old stuff.
"However, this adoption should not blind us to the fact that PAR4 is proprietary. According to Hirschmugl, it is “directly related to the the data center management scheme that Power Assure provides to its customers. The PAR4 rating and associated data specifically supports the parameters used by the Power Assure scheme.”"
Only useful statement in the article.
Not to mention the grammatical errors.
Want to really understand the way power management works in the enterprise? Happy to have a conversation.
Ken BakerLogin to comment.
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In Public Input Sought on LEED Changes, Data Center Standards and More:
Reply PermalinkOn 1/6/11 roberto sanchez,RCDD said:
I am not quite sure if this organization has reliazed all the issues that the actual DCs have to take in consideration, more than a bycicle booth for storage (by the way I like biking).
At least six different systems are included in the DCs
* Architecture (well described in the draft)
* Cooling (not only natural -free cooling- but liquid and of course electromechanical -HVAC- have to be considered)
* Energy ( I think renewable and electric load have to be better appointed)
* Safety (here in my opinion- is not the same to use FM 200, Hypoxia or water mist -HiFog- solutions)
* Security (here maybe the impact is not so important, but should be addrese)
* IT Transport (not only cabling -cooper meters & meters) but cabinets, spaces, IT grounding.....should be take in consideration)
And of course all the IT equipment (computing, storage and connectivity) that spend energy and cooling in a manner that all world (DC industry of course) intend to reduce and be efficient.
After reading the D+C & O+M draft for LEED rating see http://www.usgbc.org/LEED/LEEDDrafts/RatingSystemVersions.aspx?CMSPageID=1458
At this point I think to possibilities can arise
A) USGBC do not hear the industry AND the end user
B) USGBC asks for advise and consulting: EU Code of conduct, ASRHAE, NFPA, EPA, GreenGrid, UPTime Institute, TIA, ASIS, BICSI and all the PROFESSIONALS involved in this industry.
In my position , I can not do so much -I am in México,- however this -at least in our industry- can lead to LEED to be ignore by us or ...
What is your opinion?
roberto sanchez, RCDD
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In Can PC Power Management Really Go To The Cloud?:
In addition to PC Power Management (http://tinyurl.com/5fhkg3) efficiency in the datacenter needs to be observed (http://tinyurl.com/29owrez)
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In Skimming niches for greener power - by Doug Mohney:
Good that Canada is leading the field with renewable power. Personally, my site http://www.lookrichforless.com is hosted at a webhost that says they get all their electricity from wind energy. Not sure if that is true or not but the extra cost of electricity is quite small. Another thing to consider is that a desktop CPU today uses 80 watt of power. Compare that with the 2-3 watt that an atom CPU uses. Yes, an atom cpu has 4 less power thna a desktop cpu but that is still only 8 watt instead of 80 watt - 10 times less. And for those saved 70 watt you save an additional 2 time amount in aircondition =210 watt saved per computer. if you then have 30.000 computers in one datacenter x 210 watt - then that is quite a lot to save.
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In Looking Towards the Post Green Era - by Doug Moheny:
efit of any given digital solution. This being said, our position is that industry should remain focused at optimising their existing infrastructure and re-designing their technology roadmaps for future build out. Failure to do this will only compound the problem of emissions from ICT as we see exponential growth of data volumes and mass adoption of existing digital technologies in emerging non OECD markets. Most importantly it will detract from the value of realising a low carbon future through a digital approach. The biggest challenge we have
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In Looking Towards the Post Green Era - by Doug Moheny:
I couldn't agree more with your views around 'green wash' and the negative impact this is having - although its not all doom and gloom ! Here at the Carbon Trust in the UK we have been looking at Data Centre optimisation for some time and have recently launched a new service which covers all aspects of the data centre life cycle from design and build ( location, passive design, building fabric, on-site renewable energy generation - waste heat re-use etc) through to best practice operation which covers aspects such as consolidation, rationalisation and virtualisation, modular design and operation etc. Our approach is holistic in that we consider both the IT 'layer' and supporting mechanical and electrical 'layer' bringing together for the first time a full range a specialist skill sets in one intervention. The approach also references the EU Code of Conduct for data centres as a good benchmark for data centre optimisation. Due to the fact we are an independent and well respected brand in the carbon space we can cut through the greenwash and provide objective business cases for optimising new and existing facilities. This often involves more sophisticated approaches to calculating the cost of carbon to a business and indeed the future costs not just in terms of overhead but to future business continuity and market share.
We also recognise, validate and certificate empirical based evidence of carbon reduction through the Carbon Trust Standard - indeed Telecity a large co-location data centre provider here in the UK recently attained the Carbon Trust Standard - not so amazing you may think - but actually this is quite an achievement given they are in a growth market and a very high proportion of their carbon footprint is electricty consumption to deliver their platforms - hence any reduction has to be in their core area of business rather than at the periphery. Telecity actually sets a clear precedent in the co-location market as it is the first to achieve the Carbon Trust Standard – most significantly it also demonstrates that the supposed ‘disconnect’ with the customer in terms of how they configure and operate their IT infrastructure on a co-lo’s platform can actually be overcome in relation to carbon reduction - in this case it appears this was as simple as engaging their customers and getting agreement to make simple changes to the facility like blanking plates and operating temperature threshold.
I also agree about carbon footprint as the future challenge or what we would term as full life cycle carbon assessment - this is a topic we are addressing through our ICT Forum with industry and our Carbon Footprinting Company - our aspiration is to provide the ICT industry with the ‘golden key’ to unlocking the 'enabling' impact of ICT in terms of displacing more carbon intensive legacy or manual based systems and processes – in essence the key is a much simplified framework and methodology to enable full LCA carbon footprinting of products and services and hence transparencies in relation to the net carbon benefit of any given digital solution. This being said, our position is that industry should remain focused at optimising their existing infrastructure and re-designing their technology roadmaps for future build out. Failure to do this will only compound the problem of emissions from ICT as we see exponential growth of data volumes and mass adoption of existing digital technologies in emerging non OECD markets. Most importantly it will detract from the value of realising a low carbon future through a digital approach. The biggest challenge we have beyond LCA measurement is how we then go on to reduce emissions from ICT at a macro level – my opinion is we should go back to first principles in relation to design and start thinking about truly dynamic, load - linear devices, networks and hence ICT infrastructure in general i.e. its on or its off !
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In Tweaking the near term - by Doug Mohney:
Reply PermalinkOn 7/22/10 Storagepipe Solutions said:
One good thing that is pushing companies to be more efficient is the fact that their data is growing exponentially in size, while their datacenters physically remain the same size... witht the same power infrastructure.
This will certainly make companies think more intelligently about resource management, and push more aggressive archiving policies. This is also one of the reasons that virtualization has become so pupular. It allows companies to do more, with less.Login to comment.
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In Google Boosts Peering To Save on Bandwidth:
We have plenty bandwidth at the peer level. We have plenty to the headend and the coloc. We even have plenty to the neighborhood – the operators are just holding out at the very edge until they can figure out how to exploit the service levels. When it comes to getting profit no one thinks of the users. I remember the piece of news I listened to found by http://www.mp3hunting.com SE about how during the 2008 peering dispute between Cogent and Telia, gamers whose ISPs relied solely on Cogent for connectivity were unable to access World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular online game. Peering disputes are really loud business negotiations, with angry customers used as leverage by either side. They usually end with one side agreeing to pay up or manage their traffic differently.
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In The Trade off between reliability and efficiency - by Peter Judge:
I've seen interesting videos about data centers (I found some at torrent SE http://www.torrentbasket.com ). They get more and more popular. As for me, I also think that they become more and more efficiant each year.
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In Doing The Math (or "HUE, PUE, Barney McGrew...") - by Peter Judge:
I love your reference to the fireman's roll call . . . adds some levity to fairly heavy math. You've just won yourself a reader!
Thanks very much for the mention of our News@Cisco article http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/ts_051710.html.Login to comment.
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In when random events aren't random - by Peter Judge:
It's all about balancing risk and cost, isn't it? I just wrote a blog post about putting datacenters in Iceland where the cooling costs are low but it's a live volcanic area. How do you balance the two? The short answer is, I suppose, very carefully. http://blog.racktivity.com/do-you-really-want-a-datacenter-in-iceland
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In Gartner: Data Centres Set For Fresh Headaches:
Red Vista have found that companies are now keen to look at outsourcing and hosting where they can secure a fixed contract for a period of time which will guarantee power, cooling and space requirements.
As this article rightly suggests, this will ultimately result in issues around contractual obligations for resources.
We are seeing a keen interest in our bespoke modular built data centres, which allow the customer to install a portable and scalable data centre solution.
http://www.redvista.co.uk/services/modular-data-centre/Login to comment.
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In Gartner: Data Centres Set For Fresh Headaches:
Companies spend a lot of time thinking about power supply in and server power consumption, but less time thinking about the way the power is used, monitored and distributed within the data center itself. The infrastructure is like the ignorosphere of data center design. At Racktivity, we're trying to build some intelligence into that layer. See my recent blog post: The green, the bad and the ugly for my on this: http://blog.racktivity.com/green-bad-ugly.
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In Two thirds of firms 'unprepared' for carbon legislation:
An Alternative Approach to Bricks & Mortar
In today's climate, companies are looking for a more cost effective, flexible and future proof alternative to a typical data centre build.
We are seeing a rise in interest around Green IT and how we can help organisations become more efficient with how they operate and deliver IT resources from the data centre.
We have seen a rise in demand for our bespoke modular data centres, which tick all of the above boxes.
See here - http://www.redvista.co.uk/services/modular-data-centre/Login to comment.
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In google offers tips on lowering your pue - by Paula Bernier:
Google presentation did not mention any new modes of design or operation. These topics are yesterday's news. However, GE Digital Energy presented thier eBoost technology for UPS systems that can save the end user power bill more than $6 million dollars in 10-years. They also can ensure the eBoost high efficiency operating mode is ITI (CBMEA) curve compliant. This was new new news for the green data center industry.
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In reading the tea leaves of bloom energy - by Doug Mohney:
Or, is it possible that the whole thing simply doesn't work as well as they claim?
Rupert Goodwins at ZDNet thinks this all smells.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/mixed-signals-10000051/bloom-energy-more-noise-than-sense-10015230/
What Bloom does is not a revolutionary technology, but a drastic reduction in the price of something well-understood, using top-secret methods.
In Rupert's experience (and mine) when someone promises orders of magnitude improvements, provided by means that are "too secret to reveal", and offered in prototypes that are carefully protected from actual investigation, what you very often have is a level of "optimism" close to fraud.
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The Trade off between reliability and efficiency - by Peter Judge 3 Comments Looking Towards the Post Green Era - by Doug Moheny 3 Comments PAR4 - another data center metric? By peter judge 3 Comments Gartner: Data Centres Set For Fresh Headaches 2 Comments Dummies for Green IT --By Doug Mohney 2 Comments Building a new utility - By Tate Cantrell 2 Comments How Low Can you go with your CO2? By Tate Cantrell 1 Comments Two thirds of firms 'unprepared' for carbon legislation 1 Comments Blade Servers--The Smart Choice for Environmentally-Conscious IT Managers? by Jared Jacobs 1 Comments A new energy currency- by tate cantrell 1 Comments -
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On 10/26/12 peteinfiniti said: