Articles from Triple Pundit

Why the Internet Might Save More Energy Than It Uses

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 2 2011) Servers

Microsoft talked about delayed replacement as one of several ways to make the Internet more efficient in their series on data center efficiency that we ran earlier this year. And Facebook recently described some energy efficiency measures it has taken at a ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Facebook   Microsoft Corp

Google Releases Details on its Carbon Footprint

Explore Triple Pundit (Sep 13 2011) Carbon Footprint

When it comes to increasing the energy efficiency of its data centers, Google use concepts such as keeping the data centers warm so they can spend less on cooling, designing each data center element to operate at optimal efficiency, and cooling data center ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Greenpeace   Google

Seizing the Opportunity for Data Center Efficiency

Explore Triple Pundit (Sep 6 2011) Servers

Seizing the Opportunity for Data Center EfficiencyTriple PunditBy Microsoft | September 6th, 2011 0 Comments The importance of embracing IT energy efficiency has never been more urgent than it is today. The integration of IT into almost every facet of business and society is driving exponential demand that will ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Corp

The Efficiency Opportunity Roadmap

Explore Triple Pundit (Aug 23 2011) Emissions , Cloud Computing , Servers , Storage

Triple PunditThe Efficiency Opportunity RoadmapTriple PunditBy Microsoft | August 23rd, 2011 1 Comment If we zoom out to the 50000 foot view, we can clearly see that there are opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of computer servers at every level, micro to macro, from the silicon within a server's ...and more » (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Corp

Applications: the Missing Link in Data Center Efficiency

Explore Triple Pundit (Aug 2 2011) Cloud Computing , Servers

Most IT energy efficiency efforts have traditionally focused on physical ... This practice naturally results in poor hardware utilization across the data center. While virtualization can help improve hardware utilization to a certain degree, many ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Research   Microsoft Corp

Data Storage and the Environmental Benefits of the Cloud

Explore Triple Pundit (Jul 19 2011) Emissions , Cloud Computing , Servers

The team at Microsoft has outlined their latest analysis of data center energy usage and opportunities for efficiencies in a recent white paper entitled The IT Energy Efficiency Imperative . We have partnered with Microsoft to run key findings from the ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Accenture   The Green Grid   Carbon Reduction Commitment

AT&T Exceeds Aggressive Energy Reduction Goal

Explore Triple Pundit (Jun 13 2011) Solar , Cloud Computing

AT&T recently released their 2010 sustainability report entitled “Meet the Possibility Economy.” The 82-page report is upbeat and forward-looking and as the title suggests, it focuses more on possibilities than on accomplishments. AT&T, which took in $124 billion last year, (up $1.5 billion from 2009) reported greenhouse gas emissions that, at 8.97 million metric tons, were essentially flat from the year before. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   At&T

HP Shows Companies How to Integrate Energy Management and Carbon Reduction

Explore Triple Pundit (Apr 5 2011) Monitoring

Triple PunditHP Shows Companies How to Integrate Energy Management and Carbon ReductionTriple PunditHP Critical Facility Sustainability Tradeoff Analysis A comprehensive analysis of data center design “upgrade” approaches can improve energy efficiency and help optimize business goals. HP Critical Facilities Energy Certification Service – Achieves ...and more » (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Hewlett Packard   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory   LEED

Microsoft Suggests IT Industry Look to Energy Efficiency, Is EE Enough?

Explore Triple Pundit (Mar 2 2011) Servers

Triple PunditMicrosoft Suggests IT Industry Look to Energy Efficiency, Is EE Enough?Triple PunditEnergy efficiency is about using no more energy than what is needed. Through the use of technological innovations, we can lower our energy consumption thus increasing efficiency. This includes IT data center and building design and energy-efficient ...and more » (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Corp

Top Five Trends for Green Data Centers in 2011

Explore Triple Pundit (Jan 18 2011)

Last year, Triple Pundit took an in-depth look at how companies are greening their data centers. Now, it’s time for us to revisit that issue and ask, “What’s new?” Recently, I spoke with Tate Cantrell, CTO of Verne Global, and he filled me in on how he sees the data center industry progressing towards greater sustainability. Looking ahead to the new year, Cantrell identified a few key developments, including these: Top Five Trends for Green Data Centers in 2011: (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Verne Global   The Green Grid   Tate Cantrell

Carbon Reduction Beyond Cap and Trade or the Carbon Tax

Explore Triple Pundit (Oct 21 2010) Monitoring , Cap and Trade , Carbon Tax , Emissions , Fossil Fuel

With all the commotion over the up coming November mid-term elections, the recent death of cap-and-trade has been quietly dismissed. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), more commonly known as the Waxman-Markey Bill, was intended to set a price for carbon. Since the threat of pricing carbon through legislation has disappeared, the current market for carbon offsets at the Chicago Climate Exchange has plummeted next to zero. This begs the question, is passing carbon legislation hopeless? What other alternatives to carbon legislation is out there? (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act.

CIO's Get Plugged in to Energy

Explore Triple Pundit (Sep 15 2010) Monitoring , Servers

It is likely that Chief Information Officers (CIO) will be increasingly tasked with finding ways to reduce energy consumption in their corporations, if they haven’t become engaged already. According to a report released earlier this year by the Society for Information Management (SIM), CIO’s are being urged to become familiar with energy informatics, a new subfield whereby information systems are applied in order to optimize energy supply and demand. Energy informatics uses sensor networks to gather information about the use of energy consumption and distribution systems and can then optimize operations. The push to get CIO’s more involved in a company’s energy portfolio, whether through informatics or otherwise, is a necessary one. According to an article in Forbes.com, the majority of CIO’s have never even seen a power bill. In most organizations, the power bill is handled by the facilities department, although the technology ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Forbes   Dell

Seven Ways to Flog the Data Center Energy Hog

Explore Triple Pundit (Sep 10 2010)

When I was charged with the task of looking at the energy use of two data centers in the Boston metro area for Staples as an EDF Climate Corps fellow, two things came to mind immediately. The first was that I knew that data centers were unruly hogs of energy use and IT organizations had only just put together the standards of how to control them. The second was that I hadn’t ever stepped foot within a data center facility, and I needed to get my homework done well in advance to effectively tackle the project. Being an old efficiency consultant on projects ranging from financial services to the automotive manufacturing sector, I wasn’t too worried with applying the methodology I had learned in the past. The challenge this time was to tame the data center beast that had started to really plague the operations of Staples, and ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Google

IT Giants: The Greenest Data Center is the One That Isn’t Built

Explore Triple Pundit (May 11 2010)

Last month, Dell made the somewhat shocking announcement that it may never build another data center. The company was referring to the fact that it’s doubled its workload using no extra power and building no new data centers, simply by squeezing more capacity out of its existing servers. With an industry standard for data server utilization at about 12 to18 percent, there is ample room for improvement. What Dell realized was that by getting rid of its underutilized assets and swapping out the oldest and most outdated 25 percent of servers each year for the newest virtualization models, it would easily recoup its capital expenditures through reduced energy costs. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   LEED   Dell

eBay Builds State-of-the-art Green Data Center in Utah

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 13 2009) Construction , Carbon Footprint , Cloud Computing , Servers

Online auction site eBay is building a $334 million state-of-the-art, environmentally responsible data center in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah. eBay says this data center will showcase the best and most innovative thinking in green data center design, technology, construction and operation, and Triple Pundit asked Mazen Rawashdeh, VP Technology Operations, eBay Inc., to fill us in on all the details. Triple Pundit: Does this new data center represent new capacity, or will it consolidate other eBay data centers? Mazen Rawashdeh: The new center is being opened as part of a corporate-level, four-year data center consolidation strategy that is moving us from a handful of co-located data center facilities – largely space that we rent from data center providers – to space that we own and can manage to the highest standards in both cost and environmental efficiency. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   LEED   eBay

Relationships: The Key Ingredient to a Green Data Center

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 13 2009) Carbon Footprint , Cloud Computing , Servers

Green data centers have been getting more attention in the media in the last six months. Although much of that coverage has been on how green data centers are reducing carbon footprint, they also serve another importance purpose: reducing data center operating costs. Given that energy costs can account for up to 30 percent of a company’s IT budget, there is substantial economic incentive to improve energy efficiency in the data center. Whether it is an existing data center or a new center in the process of being built, decisions need to be made not only on the type of technologies that will be utilized within a center, but also the facility’s design. Vendor relationships as well as one with the local power company are key to creating an energy efficient data center. (Read Full Article)

Comment

EPA Data Center Cuts Waste, Finds Savings

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 12 2009) Cloud Computing , Servers

The Green Grid, an IT industry consortium that is studying and seeking to standardize metrics, processes, methods and new technologies to make data centers more energy efficient, partnered last year with the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to assess the energy consumption at typical small to mid-sized data centers, set in motion energy-saving measures, and then develop a set of recommendations for energy efficiency improvements. In the study, the EPA acted as the guinea pig—the study centered on its data center located at One Potomac Yard near Washington, DC. By making a number of changes—many of them simple and requiring little capital, the center was able to increase its energy efficiency by 20 percent. The steps will also save the center $15,000 per year in energy costs. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   The Green Grid   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Tips From UPS: Why and How to Start Greening Your Data Center

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 12 2009) Construction , Power and Cooling , Servers

We’ve all heard the good news: Improving efficiencies at your data center is a sure-fire way to cut energy costs and reduce GHG emissions. But, let’s face it. The prospect of greening a data center can seem overwhelming. After all, data centers are complicated, unwieldy and high-tech. Even the most intrepid sustainability manager may take a look around, and be left scratching his head, wondering, “Where do we start?” “That’s a very good question,” says Joe Parrino, Facilities Engineer of UPS’s Windward Data Center near Atlanta. “You start by getting educated and fully understanding the problem.” (Read Full Article)

Comment

Opening Up Fort Knox: Looking for Transparency to Foster Data Center ...

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 10 2009) Cloud Computing , Servers

While researching the sustainability of data centers, I became frustrated with the lack of corporate transparency around the environmental impacts associated with their data centers. Many companies talk about how efficient their data centers are, but stop short at providing hard facts, data, and relevant numbers to authenticate their story. Data centers have become the new Fort Knox, housing everything from Facebook photos to medical records, and data driven companies are unwilling, or so it appears, to share any environmental impact information about their data center. There is a belief that disclosing this information, competitors will reverse engineer the environmental impact data to shed light on the capacity of a data center to gain a competitive advantage. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Amazon.com   Google   Yahoo

3p’s Data Center Week: Creating a Context for Green IT

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 9 2009) Cloud Computing , Servers

For many of us, the data center is something we all know exists; and as we have been reading more and more, it is something that needs “greening” to improve large corporations’ environmental footprints. Yet, aside from the select few that work and think about data centers on a day-to-day basis, the majority of the public, business leaders, and even sustainability experts couldn’t explain how data centers work, let alone what it takes to make them more efficient and environmentally friendly. Over the course of the week, 3p will be showcasing the perspectives of experts and thought leaders in the data center industry, as well trend analysis, in an attempt to create a context for how they fit within the larger (Read Full Article)

Comment

Enterprise Sustainability and Greening Data Centers

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 9 2009) Power and Cooling , Emissions

Some years ago, energy was cheap. Few people in corporations paid attention to how much energy was consumed company wide, much less in data centers. More recently, however, several factors have changed this scene completely. These factors included much higher demands for computing and storage due to the rapid increase in online processing in both business and consumer sectors and, consequently, denser server concentration to maximize the use of space in data centers. According to a 2007 EPA report, power consumption by U.S. data centers doubled between 2001 and 2006. In 2006, data centers used 1.5 percent of all the power consumed in the United Sates. Without any remedy, consumption will double again by 2011. As a testimony to this study, many operators have recently begun feeling pain at several points in their data centers, which are experiencing power shortages, high costs, and extensive needs for cooling. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Europe   United Kingdom

Data Centers as Information Factories

Explore Triple Pundit (Nov 9 2009) Cloud Computing , Servers

I have been writing on the Green Data Center topic for more than two years. After more than 1,000 blog posts, one of the things that I have found is the name “data center” doesn’t mean what most people who don’t work on them think they are. In the past, there was one corporate building that was the place where data was housed for the corporation. But now, that no longer is the case. A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. New technologies and practices were designed to handle the scale and the operational requirements that came with the dot com boom. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Apple   Amazon.com   Google