While technological progress and the environment often seem to be at odds, many tech companies are working hard to lessen the impact their businesses have on the planet. Over the last several years, Apple has released an annual progress report about its environmental status, and this year is no different.
If you feel chilly walking round a data centre, it is probably wasting energy. The data centre has to provide cold air to keep the servers cool, but if it is also cooling the space were people are walking around to an uncomfortably low temperature, then it is wasting energy. Now, it seems Google has a patent on a “hot aisle” containment system which should cut that waste.
TechWeekEurope has announced the shortlist for its first Tech Success awards – with front runners including giant data centres,a water utility and a Primary School in Wales.
The Tech Success awards are designed to celebrate the achievements of IT managers and CIOs in end-user companies. The arrival of cloud and mobile technologies is ushering in a new era, where IT departments can become more responsive to user needs, and TechWeekEurope is recognising this with a user -focused set of awards for companies that are capitalising on this change.
International web hosting provider Peer 1 has saved 85 percent of the data centre cooling bill for its Portsmouth facility by using an evaporative system from the UK’s ExCool. The units use water evaporation to keep the new data centre cool even when the outside air temperature is as high as 34C, so Peer 1 does not need to use more wasteful mechanical chillers. The data centre has been open since February, and results so far suggest the company could get down to a record PUE efficiency score of 1.035. It’s ExCool’s first data centre installation in Europe.
The European Commission is calling for faster and more decisive action from the IT industry on the issue of raising the temperature in the data centre to enable more free air cooling.
You have to hand it to Schneider Electric’s marketing department. The power supply company has started an initiative to gather information about data centre energy use. Now that doesn’t sound all that exciting – so they’ve called it the Data Centre Genome Project.
The Green Grid – which promotes IT efficiency – has urged data centres to operate their servers at higher temperatures and greater humidity, to save energy. Data centres are still operating on old-fashioned principles that waste energy by cooling servers and equipment down to temperatures far inside their operating limits, when IT kit is now resilient enough to run at higher temperatures and humidities, says the Green Grid, in a new report, Data Centre Efficiency & IT Equipment Reliability.
Reddit, foursquare and Pinterest ware among the large sites hit yesterday thanks to escalating issues at Amazon Web Service’s data centre in northern Virginia. It marks the third time major outages have occurred as a result of Amazon problems in that region in the last five months. The biggest cloud provider in the world saw storms hit its northern Virginia data centre in July this year, disrupting power and taking out major services, including Netflix. In June, the same data centre lost power, thanks to multiple backup failures.
Last week, Apple started construction of its latest data centre in Prineville, Oregon – a centre which apple promises will be carbon neutral. This is the first phase of the project that will eventually see two 338,000 square-foot buildings erected in the Oregon High Desert, to host Apple’s iCloud services. In April, following vocal criticism by Greenpeace, Apple announced that its new facilities will run on “100 percent renewable energy” – wind, hydro, and geothermal power from local sources.
The government’s promise to be the “greenest government ever” is in tatters, but those tatters still include a green energy tax, the CRC - which is on life support but still exists. CRC, in its final form, amounts to an extra charge on energy use by organisations above a certain size. The idea is to encourage businesses to operate more efficiently and cut their energy use – thereby cutting the country’s emissions. But data centres are fighting the idea, saying it will make them less competitive than other countries.
Flash German car maker BMW has moved its high performance computing (HPC) to a data centre in Iceland powered by renewable energy, to save around 3600 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. The firm is moving ten of its HPC clusters, consuming 6.31 GWh of energy each year annually, from Germany over to Verne Global’s data centre in Keflavik, Iceland which uses electricity from 100 percent renewable sources – Iceland’s geothermal and hydroelectric generators.
VMware now offers a unified control panel for cloud software management and cloud infrastructure
ScaleOut Software claims its Analytics Server speeds up data analysis through the use of in-memory data grid technology
Oracle took some big steps forward on its corporate journey into cloud systems and services on 30 September, the opening night of its annual OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco. Chief executive and co-founder Larry Ellison introduced two new products and two new cloud services before about 6,000 mostly quiet attendees at Moscone Centre on the first night of the five-day conference. About 50,000 people in all will be visiting the conference for at least one day this week.
Google has signed a deal to power a data centre in Oklahoma with wind energy, and Greenpeace has hailed the announcement.
Grand River Dam Authority may sound like a hydro-electric provider, but it is moving into wind power for the first time, to sell Google 48MW of wind-generated renewable electricity to run the tech giant’s data centre in Pryor, Oklahoma. Greenpeace, which has criticised cloud providers who use dirty electricity, said the agreement is a model of how tech firms can influence the market and stimulate utilities to offer renewable power.
A New York Times article has highlighted the real-world impact of the data centres powering Microsoft's cloud services
A Facebook data centre engineer has built a monitoring tool called Claspin that uses heat maps to troubleshoot potential problems in data centres. The engineer, Sean Lynch, described in a blog posting how he and his fellow engineers need to ensure the health of the social networking giant’s cache systems by quickly identifying and fixing any potential problems with server, racks or clusters.
Salesforce.com tells TechWeekEurope no date has been set and it is unsure whether the data centre will materialise this year
HP and Intel are using Xeon processors and ProLiant servers to build an energy-efficient supercomputer system
Well done Intel for getting a PUE of 1.02, says Peter Judge. Now let's look beyond the PUE measurement for efficiency
