New York-based financial services firm Citigroup began a strategic data center transformation in 2005, with the goal of reducing its data centers from 68 to 24 by the end of 2010. Citi not only met that goal, but exceeded it by cutting down to 22 data centers. All of the Citi data centers are designed with energy efficiency as a priority. For example, Citi's newly constructed data center in Georgetown, Texas, uses 800 kilowatts less power than conventional data centers with the same footprint, for a 30% reduction in energy costs. The facility also emits less carbon and consumes less water.

eBay has installed a 100 KW solar array on its data center in Denver. That's not enough power to run a data center, but Tom Price, eBay's Global Data Center Services manager, said the system, which was completed last November, is delivering benefits. The solar array is taking up approximately 18,000 square feet of the 21,000-square-foot data center roof. In an interview, Price outlined the project.

About a third to half of all data centers will be physically expanding or leasing new space in the next two years, according to recent surveys. These surveys are providing a picture of strains facing the facilities that cradle the digital economy, as well as the pressure data center and IT managers are under to keep up with demand. The Uptime Institute, for the first time, recently surveyed 525 data center operators and owners, 71% of whom are in North America. Of respondents, 36% said they will run out of power, cooling and space through 2012. To meet the need, 40% of the respondents plan to build a new a new data center, and 29% said they would lease additional space in a colocation center. Another 20% said they would move IT workloads to cloud providers.

China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data center, one of the projects fueling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending. The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million square feet, with the initial data center space accounting for approximately 646,000 square feet, according to IBM, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to build it.

Citigroup is one of the granddaddies in the young world of green IT. In 2005, it launched its global data center strategy, with the goal of using only the most energy-efficient materials and technologies in its new data centers. Today, the financial giant is on track to reach its 2011 target to reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 10%, through a combination of energy-efficiency improvements, green building design, IT best practices and education. And in 2009, Citi saw its first-ever net reduction in data center power consumption -- a drop of 2%.

When it comes to green initiatives, 2009 was a banner year for Allstate Insurance, with the opening of a $55 million LEED Gold-certified data center and plans to consolidate four data center facilities into two. It's a hard act to follow, but since then, according to Anthony Abbattista, vice president of technology solutions, the company has become even more dedicated to environmental responsibility. Now it's a matter of taking what it learned from the new facility and applying it to the rest of the company. "We're seeing the business case come alive," Abbattista says.

After dismantling the city's data center and moving it three times to avoid hurricanes, the IT team for the city of Altamonte Springs, Fla., decided to try a different approach. Instead of spending millions of dollars to build a facility that would keep water out, they relocated the data center to an existing structure that was originally designed to keep water in -- a 770,000-gallon water tank. The city's water tank data center: Wings were added to each side, one for networking equipment, the other for administrative offices. Larry DiGioia, director of information services for the central Florida city of 45,000, says the move made perfect sense. The dome-shaped tank offered 8-inch-thick walls of reinforced concrete and was situated only 100 feet from City Hall, where a single server room housed the city's previous data center.

The keynote speaker at the recent Network World IT Roadmap conference in Dallas emphasized the importance of going green by highlighting this fact: IT accounted for 4% of electricity consumption in 2008 and will account for 40% by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. What's worse, says keynoter Frederic Chanfrau, a senior VP of IT at Schneider Electric (the company that bought APC), electricity demands will double by 2030, making IT a prime culprit in the global warming problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we have to cut CO2 emissions in half by 2050 to avoid dramatic climate changes.

I/o Data Centers hopes to leapfrog the competition by developing what it claims will be a new, more integrated type of containerized data center, the company said on Friday. I/o is best known for building and managing traditional brick-and-mortar data centers, but the company has been developing a containerized product for the past year and will make a formal announcement in two weeks, said Kindra Martone, i/o senior vice president and general manager, at the Datacenter Dynamics conference in San Francisco on Friday.

Professor, scientist and energy efficiency expert Jonathan Koomey, who recently finished a term at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, got the full attention of the IT community in 2007 when a research paper he wrote revealed that power consumption by data centers worldwide had doubled in just five years. Here, he discusses how the industry has responded to those runaway costs, why cloud computing is better for the environment, and why you should think twice about where you locate your next data center. Has the growth curve in data center power consumption moderated since your paper came out three years ago? We don't really know. We have some inkling that things have slowed down in part because of efforts to improve the efficiency of IT equipment and because of the economic slowdown.

Want to really cut energy use in data centers? Give the CIO responsibility for paying IT's power bills. That would create a big incentive to invest in energy efficiency, according to Dean Nelson, senior director of global data center services at eBay Inc. "When the CIO is paying the power bill, [he] really understands the impact of the decisions being made," Nelson told an audience of data center managers at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2010 in New York last month. Most CIOs don't see utility bills, but eBay lumps its power bills in with its IT budget, and as a result the company has been very aggressive in cutting power consumption. Nelson said that eBay's newest data center, a $287 million facility in Salt Lake City, was "paid for by the cost savings we've achieved [elsewhere] within the last two years."

IT Jobs: Data Center Hiring Turns a CornerComputerworldIn 2009, experts predicted that candidates with experience in improving IT energy efficiency, or green IT, and in managing virtual servers to do well. ...and more »

A new industry group plans to apply open-source principles to the design and construction of data centers in order to accelerate the use of new, greener approaches. The Open Source Data Center Initiative, announced this month, will act as a repository and testbed for mechanical and engineering advances in data center design, which it hopes will be submitted by small engineering firms, graduate students doing research with federal grant money and others.

Jeff Liedel is as much a car guy as he is a computer guy. That much becomes clear when he's discussing his 20-year career track and the businesses he's served: Ford, Covisint, GM and now OnStar, the in-vehicle communications company and GM subsidiary, where he is CIO. Liedel deftly moves the conversation among a range of topics: embedded telematics and mobile application capabilities in a Chevy Volt electric vehicle, the energy efficiency of internal-combustion engines, and how BI tools can help OnStar. He seems to be equally at home in a data center or on the floor of the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show,

The futuristic world and blue creatures in the hit movie Avatar have their roots in an unusual data center situated in Miramar, a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand. The stunning images in the James Cameron movie were created by Weta Digital Ltd., a visual effects company co-founded by filmmaker Peter Jackson that was also responsible for the computer-rendered scenes in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The company's digital artists transformed the director's vision into screen reality using 3-D imaging software, fine-tuning every frame multiple times. Each minute of Avatar represents 17.28GB of data, according to Weta Digital.

early two years after unveiling its experimental 80-core chip, Intel Corp. is getting ready to show off its next incarnation of a high-powered, energy-efficient many-core research chip. Intel is developing a many-core chip designed to dramatically improve energy efficiency in the data center and for the cloud, according to Justin Rattner, CTO and senior Intel fellow. Intel plans to unveil the research chip before the end of the year, he said. Rattner told Computerworld the company plans to unveil the new chip before the end of the year. The chip, which is experimental and not commercially ready, has a "completely new design" and a high core count.

Jim Carney, executive vice president of data center planning for Citigroup, likes to describe the company's newest compute facilities as "24/7 by forever." Inside a green data center In data center life, that "forever" translates to a good 20 to 30 years -- at least for this New York-based global financial giant. "We've succeeded in developing a very flexible platform that can adapt easily and seamlessly to changes in customer technologies and allow for differences in heat densities, power consumption and physical layout without causing severe interruptions to their service requirements," Carney says.

Steve Hassell, CIO at global technology and engineering giant Emerson, is only half joking when he suggests that before his career is over the data center will comprise one rack sitting in the middle of a white room. The new green: Data centers go au naturale Who knows what the future will bring for the data center, given how amazingly fast the speeds and feeds are changing, he says. As an example, Hassell points to Emerson's experience planning, building and populating the 35,000-square-foot data center the company opened two months ago on its St. Louis headquarters campus. This facility, which will host all Emerson business applications when fully operational, will be one of four global data centers the company has planned in a massive consolidation from 135 data centers of varying sizes.

When PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. CIO Stuart Fulton walks through the company's spankin' new data center, opened this month, he finds "cool things around just about every corner." "Particularly when compared to the existing data center, the contrast is quite amazing," Fulton says. One immediately noticeable feature is the white thermoplastic olefin (TPO) roof topping the building and reducing heat entering the facility, he says. Made of ethylene propylene rubber, TPO single-ply roof "membranes" combine the durability of rubber with the proven performance of hot-air weldable seams. Also visually impressive -- not to mention efficiency smart -- are six fan wall units, each with 24 fans, that will keep cool air circulating about IT gear, he adds.

If you think of "green IT" as nothing more than a vendor-generated buzzword, you might want to take a look at Citizens Bank. The financial institution reports $500,000 in annual savings from a project to optimize its power and cooling practices, and its IT executives believe they have just scratched the surface of potential savings. (Chill out: Five ways to cut back on data-center power consumption) "We did absolutely save a half a million dollars last year and there is far more to save," Lars Linden, senior vice president and director of data center services and operations at Citizens Bank, told an audience at the Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix Tuesday.

Most data centers have the ambience of bomb shelters, but not one built by retailer L.L. Bean. The Freeport, Maine-based company made sure its new 18,000 square-foot data center had plenty of natural light and views of trees. It wanted something comfortable, conducive to work and environmentally sensitive. Natural light accomplishes all that. "You don't mind being cooped up in a three-hour planning meeting; when your mind wanders you can look outside and see the clouds flow by," said Rocko Graziano, who managers the retailer's infrastructure operations and services.

Microsoft Corp. next week plans to flip the switch to open a 700,000-square-foot data center in Northlake, Ill., less than three weeks after opening a 300,000-square-foot facility in Dublin. Together, the data centers will house hundreds of thousands of servers that will help support the company's new Bing search engine and other online services, Microsoft said. The data center in Northlake, which is a suburb of Chicago, is slated to open on July 20. It will house containers that can hold 1,800 to 2,500 servers each, said Arne Josefsberg, Microsoft's general manager of infrastructure services, in a blog post. The Illinois facility will include more than 50 parking stalls for the shipping containers, which Microsoft said can be wheeled in as needed and installed in hours. The facility's second floor will have server racks. The Dublin facility, which isn't using containers, opened ...

Computerworld - Servers can now earn the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star label in recognition of their green qualities, but most observers aren't expecting this program to cause substantial changes in how enterprises buy servers anytime soon. The Energy Star server certification went into effect on May 15 and has earned the EPA kudos from manufacturers and users for promoting energy efficiency in an area that's notorious for its high electricity needs. "This is a great first step. It's been important for some time, given the power issues of the data center, to give transparency on the energy use of servers," says Subodh Bapat, vice president and distinguished engineer in the sustainability office at Sun Microsystems Inc.