Fuel cells and solar energy have been hallmarks of the most high tech datacenter deployments in recent years, starting with Google adding Bloom Energy equipment as power source in their California headquarters. Verizon has previously installed fuel-cell
Datacentre provider Verne Global has announced that it is expanding its Icelandic datacentre from 500 square metres to 1,000 sqare metres to meet increasing demand. The expansion will see the Keflavik facility double in capacity as a second datahall is brought online at the ex-NATO military base.
We've all read the various statistics about the "power-hungry" internet, which uses an estimated 1.5 percent of all the electricity generated globally. How much power is that? According to one estimate, it's about 30 billion watts, which represents the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Or, to put it another way, it's an annual utility bill of about $8.5 billion. Realistically, it's the prospect of mushrooming power bills that have most companies with big datacenter operations scrambling to introduce energy efficiency measures or to supplement their operations with on-site renewable energy installations.
Can free-cooling systems work in less than ideal climate conditions? The social networking giant says "yes," with some adjustments.
Based on the amount of public relations pitches launched at me this week by some of the bigger data center technology and cloud services players, it is clear that The New York Times article critical of the sector's energy consumption has touched some very sensitive nerves. I actually wrote about the potential for green data center projects mere days before The New York Times piece, so I won't spend all that much time rehashing the fact that the market is expected to double between now and 2016.
The simple fact is that if we want to live in an information society, we need the plumbing to support it. That is perhaps the most salient observation that the New York Times has made — there really is no cloud, just more and more really big data centers.
Energy costs, environmental concerns and the cloud computing transformation are inspiring more businesses -- including Microsoft -- to overhaul their hosting infrastructures.
As it pushes more of its software into the cloud for customer delivery, Microsoft has a vested interest in ensuring that the data center infrastruture behind those servcies are as energy-efficient and sustainable as possible from an operational standpoint. Naturally, it is trying creative strategies to achieve this, and the company just decided to share some of them in a new white paper, "Microsoft's Top 10 Business Practices for Environmentally Sustainable Data Centers."
Having a datacentre in clean, green places like Finland and Sweden already makes sense to tech heavyweights like Google and Facebook - but don't expect a mass migration to the north.
While there have been calls recently for Microsoft, Apple and Amazon to move all their data centres to Iceland, often touted by Greenpeace as a low carbon output location compared to the US, seemingly addicted to using dirty energy sources.
The main problem with the theory that companies like Amazon can reduce carbon emissions by simply migrating datacentres to, say, Iceland is the "cruel realities of the speed of light" or latency, according to James Hamilton, Amazon Web Service's distinguished engineer.
I first became interested in what eBay was doing with its data centers during an Uptime Institute conference two years ago. I was struck by the company's data center guru, Dean Nelson, concise argument tying his company's data center efficiency to eBay's long term business survival. More recently, I interviewed Nelson (who is eBay’s Vice President of Global Foundation Services, notice the word data center isn't even in his title) about a massive modular data center project on top of a building in the Arizona desert. The resulting post, "5 green data center tips from Project Mercury," convinced me that Nelson would be a great guest for a ZDNet "Hot Topics" webcast. The resulting conversation "Is Modular Design the Secret to Data Center Efficiency?" explores the potential of data centers that deployed in a modular or container format.
The Apple green data center saga continues. Greenpeace is acknowledging the company's growing commitments to renewable energy with an updated analysis to its "How Clean Is Your Cloud?" report, rating the energy sourcing plans of various big cloud service providers. Other companies ranked in that report include Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Back in April, Greenpeace slammed Apple, Amazon and Microsoft for the sin of sourcing too much data center energy with electricity generated by coal-fired plants. Since then, Apple has disclosed that it plans to power its data center in Maiden, N.C., entirely from renewable energy sources by the end of 2012. That amounts to 20 megawatts of electricity draw at full capacity.
Even though it already saved close to $400 million in electricity costs between 1990 and 2010, IBM was able to squeeze out another $43 million in energy savings during 2011. In fact, the company conserved about 378,000 megawatt hours of electricity during the year, which is about 7.4 percent of its annual consumption -- and double its goal for annual savings of 3.5 percent. From 1990 to 2011, IBM saved 5.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and it avoided about 3.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions (or 55 percent of its global carbon dioxide emissions for all of 1990). IBM attributes the savings to more than 2,300 conservation efforts supported at more than 364 IBM facilities globally. Those efforts combine efficiency measures, new data center design principles, renewable energy investments and a slew of other efforts, according to the company's 2011 Corporate Responsibility ...
Datacenter operator Verne Global has announced the signing of major client for their Icelandic datacenter operation. Citing the datacenters 100% renewable power sources, their new client Colt’s Executive Vice President stated that they selected this facility for, among other reasons, “As the market continues to evolve, finding innovative methods to reduce the cost and environmental impact of the data center industry is of tremendous importance and we believe that Verne Global offers a compelling value proposition to Colt and our customers.”
Things have not been all that good for Iceland since the turn of the century. Economic upheaval, seismic upheaval, the shuttering of NATO cold war-era military bases and some odd choices by the government in terms of tax laws have caused lots of problems for a country whose entire population would barely make it into the top fifty largest cities in the US. Some light was shined on long-term solutions to some of the economic problems when investors began to look to Iceland as a datacenter haven when plans where developed and executed to improve the islands connectivity to the rest of the world. Ambitious statements were made and customers the likes of IBM acknowledged that they were planning on making use of the natural green resources (geo-thermal power and free air cooling) to deploy large datacenters to the island, making use of the location that had formerly been a ...
There are some battles that are not worth fighting. Blades vs. standard architecture servers is one of those battles, yet it rages on.
There are some battles that are not worth fighting. Blades vs. standard architecture servers is one of those battles, yet it rages on.
I’ve seen some debate about blade servers versus standard architecture server systems for virtualization but there are no definitive answers from any of the so-called experts. I can see the arguments on both sides of this one but for someone who works with both architectures, there are significant pros and cons to each technology. I think that the question deserves a unbiased analysis of the two technologies. And, before you decide or believe that I’m going to try to sway your opinion, I don’t think that one has clear superiority over the other. They’re different.
Everyone has his preferences when ...
Even if the motive isn’t actually green in the environmental sense, efforts to improve data center energy efficiency will help drive a greenhouse gas emissions reduction of approximately 13 percent compared with a “business as usual” approach. The reductions are being driven by heightened attention to electricity costs and enabled by investments in virtualization, cloud computing, advanced cooling technologies and more sophisticated management tools, according to a new report from Pike Research, focused on Green Data Centers. “The drive toward green data centrers is a response to business requirements to reduct costs across the company as well as a response to environmental concerns,” said Pike Research director Eric Woods, in a press release about the data. “Within the data center environment, that translates to a mandate to reduce energy consumption, which in turn is driving innovation. Data center operators are exploring new ideas related to business models, facility construction ...
Facebook today opened its new data center in Forest City, North Carolina. The company’s second U.S. data center is already online and serving live user traffic. The data center comprises of two buildings: Building 1 broke ground in November 2010 and opened today, while Building 2 is expected to open later this year. In the last 16 months, more than 1.2 million hours from nearly 2,000 people went into making the site what it is today. Back in October 2011, Facebook formed a foundation for the Open Compute Project (OCP) to drive more innovation and a greater focus on energy efficiency in the data center industry.
New research from CDW Government (CDW-G) suggests that a growing number of data center consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing initiatives are linked to concerns over electricity consumption. The survey, part of the IT services company’s fourth annual Energy Efficient IT Report, found that 43 percent of IT professionals consider green IT initiatives to be a major motivator for consolidation projects. That was up from 34 percent in 2010. More than half of the respondents (54 percent) have developed an explicit program for managing data center power consumption, according to the CDW-G report. More than 75 percent of those organizations that have developed a formal power-reduction program have managed to cut energy costs as a result, the data show.
There’s toilet water (the old-fangled word for some perfumes) and then there’s toilet water (the stuff that circles the bowl when you flush). According to a Wired magazine report, the latter sort is finding a second life at a Google data center in Georgia, where it is being used to keep things cool. The company is working with the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority to pump recycled water through the cooling pipes used in the facility. Wired reports that Google’s interest is trying to decrease its dependence on fresh water that could be used for drinking purposes. Approximately 30 percent of the water from residents’ showers and toilet flushes is now being diverted to a treatment plant that serves the Google facility, the magazine reports. (That plant was apparently paid for and built by Google.)
