The green IT track at Interop Las Vegas kicked off with a session from yours truly on “The Evolution Of Green IT: Projects That Cut Cost, Avoid Risk And Grow Revenues” to help IT professionals plan for green IT’s current and future state backed up with a number of real-life examples. Here are they key takeaways that I&O professionals should pay attention to: IT is cornerstone to planning and executing organizational-wide green strategies. While C-level business execs in conjunction with the “environmental, health and safety” and “corporate social responsibility” departments might initiate organization-wide green thinking, IT plays a critical role in planning and execution. Forrester finds that in 43% of organizations globally, “IT has a central role in both planning...

One of the offhand comments I’ve often made about green IT is that everybody talks about it but nobody wants to pay for it, especially when it comes to upgrading existing datacenters. Well it looks like New York State has been quietly going about their business and paying existing datacenters to go green. I’m not talking about offering future tax incentives, or other esoteric forms of encouraging business growth; I’m talking cold hard cash. Up to $5,000,000 per facility, with the catch that their payments not exceed 50% of the project costs. Granted, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s not just taking your word for it that you’ve improved the energy efficiency of your datacenter, they are requiring an audit process that can take up to 2 years, but they will pay 60% of the funds up front for an ...

Greenpeace is telling us that cloud computing will lead to a big jump in greenhouse emissions. Your Apple iPad and late nights on Facebook (and Google and Yahoo) will destroy the planet. The logic here is that these fancy shmancy data centers are all run by a coal powered grid. I was going to stay out of this mix on Smart Planet, ZDNet and elsewhere, but there’s such a need for a screaming reality check that I can’t resist. Let’s look at some of the key points of the Greenpeace cloud report: 1. The cloud—and all of those servers—will cause climate change. What we really need is computing gear that doesn’t use electric. Any ideas people? Are those crickets I hear. Here’s Greenpeace’s money—er CO2 graphic:

In a blog post yesterday, Heather Clancy talked about her conversation with HP’s Ed Kettler and discussed a couple of points that he made which are important to consider in any datacenter decision matrix. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything Ed said, I do feel that his statements merit further discussion. Mr. Kettler makes the point that for HP’s new datacenter to achieve a high degree of energy efficiency, it is necessary that very specific and tightly controlled equipment and environmental controls need to be in place. Unsurprisingly, this means that in HP’s datacenters, this will require the use of HP equipment, since that is what their rack designs call for.

Here's something that I haven't thought about all the much, but is bound to become a more important consideration over time: If you want to outsource your data center to a third party to save some power, especially if that somebody is a services company that has both a product and services arm, be prepared to be told what equipment you can use. I started thinking about this during a recent chat with Ed Kettler, a Hewlett-Packard fellow and green IT strategist with HP Enterprise Services, about their ongoing data center power optimization work -- especially the recent work the company's team has done in Wynyard in the United Kingdom, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Here's my original post on that work,...

Fujitsu’s latest Primergy server product, called the Primergy CX1000, was designed to appeal to the economics of cloud service providers — especially those that are focused on ultra energy efficiency. By divesting the servers of individual fans and cramming them into its new Cool-Central cabinet architecture, Fujitsu believes it can deliver a 20 percent reduction in power consumption and cooling considerations compared with similarly configured racks, says Richard McCormack, senior vice president of the Fujitsu America server and solutions business. In addition, the upfront cost is about 30 percent less, McCormack claims.

I received a bunch of emails last week regarding a blog entry I made that indirectly referred to the PUE metric. Most of the negative comments boiled down to either “We know that PUE is flawed” or “Got a better idea?” The Green Grid, the entity that unleashed PUE as a metric, is aware of its shortcomings and is planning on releasing a bunch of refinements by the end of this month. Technology changes, such as datacenters that generate power on-site, have skewed the metric, since it then becomes possible to have a PUE of less than 1.0, which would indicate more than 100% of the inbound power is being utilized by IT loads.

Hewlett-Packard's newest green data center in northeast England is the company's most energy-efficient plant to date, cooled entirely by cold wind blowing off the North Sea.

Riddle me this: What’s the easiest thing you can do to improve energy efficiency in your data center? Answer: Turn up the heat. That’s the opinion of John Bennett, worldwide lead for data center transformation solutions with IT giant Hewlett-Packard. That comes through actions such as rationalizing hot and cold aisle placement, optimizing airflow, investing in thermal zone mapping and simply letting the thermostat run a little higher. “Anyone walking into a data center should break a sweat, not have to wear a jacket,” Bennett says.

Together, enterprise computing giant Hewlett-Packard and power efficiency specialist Eaton have snagged a $7.4 million grant from the Department of Energy to help fund research focused on improving energy efficiency in IT products. The pair’s joint proposal actually received the third-largest grant out of the $47 million in total being focused on companies in the IT and communications sectors. The projects are focused on three areas: Equipment and Software - Changing core components of a data or telecommunications center in order to optimize energy use Power Supply Chain - Developing technologies to minimize energy waste as power moves from one system to another Cooling - More effective methods for reducing heat

As I’ve said many times here in this blog, green IT activities can really be looked at from two perspectives: the actions your company or team takes to reduce the environmental impact of your information technology AND the way that IT can actually help your business get a better handle on green business practices. How good a job are you doing? Forrester Research has pulled together a comprehensive report providing step-by-step suggestions for assessing your organization’s internal green IT standing. For Forrester, there are five key areas that CIOs should examine:

Not to be outdone by coverage of Helsinki’s “greenest” data center, IBM has seen fit to update the blog-o-sphere about its own energy-efficiency breakthroughs at a new green data center it has constructed at Syracuse University. Constructed in slightly more than six months, the 12,000-square-foot facility (which is split roughly in half in terms of data center space vs. infrastructure space) is expected to use roughly half of the power that a traditional data center of its size would use when it becomes fully operational in January 2010. IBM’s $5 million contribution to the effort includes IBM BladeCenter, Power 575 and z10 servers, as well as a DS8300 storage device.

Here’s a prediction for 2010: You’re going to hear more and more about how green your business can make its cloud computing infrastructure strategy by choosing one data center over another. Consider the example of Verne Global, which is building what it calls the first carbon-neutral data center campus, which is located on the former Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland. Verne Global CEO Jeff Monroe says advances made in virtualization, remote management and high-speed bandwidth around the global — all of which are critical for the adoption of cloud computing infrastructure — have made his company’s new Iceland facility possible. Cloud computing infrastructure in turn makes it possible for businesses to escape the “server-hugging mentality” that once required facilities be within a close drive of a company’s headquarters.

Wondering exactly how switching to solid state drives (SSDs) could affect power usage or energy efficiency in the data center? Samsung, which of course has a vested interest in all this, has assembled a site full of specific information that will help organizations assess whether investing in SSDs makes sense for them. For example, the company claims that some SSDs can operate 48 times faster than hard drives and YET they do so while using 75 percent less power. Switching to DDR3 memory can also have an impact, Samsung says: Just one server using DDR3 can handle the work of nine older servers, saving up to 82 percent of the power. Taken together, DDR3 and SSDs could help businesses meet the new EPA Energy Star specification for servers, which promised a 30 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

As part of its new HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, Hewlett-Packard is touting a real-time energy-efficiency policy that it calls the HP Data Center Smart Grid. Essentially, the philosophy combines the features of several different HP energy management products, including HP Environmental Edge, which I wrote about separately just yesterday, as well as HP Insight Control. Taken together, these and other products in the company’s data center portfolio will let you collect, monitor and communicate power and cooling metrics across your infrastructure in real time.

I don’t have to design data centers, but I do have to play a knowledgeable wonk on the Web from time to time. With that in mind, I attended two data center presentations at the Gartner IT Symposium to see what I could learn. My knowledge about the data center essentially boils down to one word: Money. Companies are building new data centers to save money on power and better utilize their computing power. Sure, cloud computing is a factor, but a small one for enterprises at this juncture. These people are building data centers in a big way. The other money point: Vendors are killing each other to be the data center king. Cisco takes on HP. IBM is in there. Oracle too (via Sun). And unfortunately for IT buyers each vendor has a different twist on data center architecture.

CA next week will unveil an integrated sustainability suite designed to track carbon emissions, environmental assessments, metering and compliance to policies in one dashboard. CA calls the suite ecoSoftware and will launch it Oct. 26, according to Christopher Thomas, vice president of energy and sustainability. I ran into Thomas at the Gartner IT Symposium where the carbon monitoring software caught my eye. There are other efforts designed to track carbon emissions. For instance, Hara and SAP have various applications and others use metering to measure sustainability efforts. CA’s effort links the various tracking efforts in one dashboard. If successful, dashboard like these could put some hard return numbers behind sustainability efforts. Tesco, Europe’s retailing giant, is a customer of CA’s ecoSoftware.

artner unveiled its top 10 strategic technology list for 2010. Unified communications, servers and specialized systems are out. Client computing, data center do-overs, flash memory and mobile applications are in. The items that were bumped from the top 10 list (statement) aren’t necessarily less important, but are moving slowly. Unified communications is strategic, but not critical. Specialized systems and servers are notable for converged systems, but they aren’t as important as new data center technologies that can consolidate data centers (think flash memory).

CNET News' Martin LaMonica gets a tour of IBM's lab for green IT where the data center uses networked sensors and liquid cooling to lower energy use. [video=344048]

There’s a new book out this month from Cisco IT architect Douglas Alger called “Grow a Green Data Center.” (The book is published by Cisco Press, which is a technology imprint of Pearson Education.) The author says the book is a compilation of best practices and techniques for optimizing the energy efficiency of servers, network equipment, storage and physical infrastructure - tips and processes that he wishes he had at his own fingertips when faced with some of his own projects. “I pretty much wrote the book I wanted on my own bookshelf,” Alger says.

The efforts of Cisco and IBM to extend the energy efficiency debate out of the data center and out into the network have been highly publicized, but I’ve made a pledge to myself to actively explore what other networking equipemnt providers are doing in this area. (Note to any networking vendor reading this post: you are more than welcome to reach out with a legitimate energy-efficiency measure but spare me the greenwashing, please.) I was poking around on the Juniper Networks site for potential topics, when I stumbled upon this white paper, “Energy Efficiency for the Network Equipment: Two Steps Beyond Greenwashing.” This rather scientific discussion of the topic suggests methods by which businesses can test the relative energy performance of comparable systems.

Colocation data center Power Loft began dreaming about greener data centers several years ago, long before it became vogue to do so. Now, in partnership with Hewlett-Packard’s EYP Mission Critical Facilities, the company has designed a 200,000-square-foot facility in Prince William County, Va., that can deliver between 120 watts and 300 watts per square foot with a PUE ranging from a low of 1.20 to a high of 1.48. The two-story design accommodates approximately 33 percent more racks than facilities of a similar real estate footprint, and the first tenant was signed for the new facility in mid-July, says Jim Coakley, president and CEO of Power Loft: “HP wasn’t afraid of pushing me to try something different.”

For every action there is an equally potent reaction, and that is certainly the case in IT developments we’ve been seeing as of late. Call them paradoxes if you will, and I just published some of them in an article for Database Trends & Applications on the shifting currents reshaping today’s data centers as we know them. Here are five of the top 10 paradoxical trends, based on the views of some leading experts and practitioners. (PDF link to the article here.) Paradox 1: More Centralization Increases Decentralization of Computing Resources. For large systems sites, there will be a continuing evolution away from single, large general-purpose processors toward more distributed workloads on more cost-effective platforms. Paradox 2: Tight Economy Drives Eco-Friendly IT. In times gone by, an economic slump meant companies would hunker down and focus on survival, while shelving “do-good” projects such as environmental awareness and protection. Mark ...

I spoke last week with Ed Kettler, a fellow for Hewlett-Packard who comes to the company via HP's acquisition of systems integrator EDS. Kettler has been involved with two major data center overhauls that EDS undertook before it became part of HP, including the retrofit of a facility in Wynyard, United Kingdom, that sucks up 40 percent less energy than a typical data center of comparable size. According to an EDS positioning paper about green IT, about 70 percent of potential energy being sent to a data center is lost during the transmission. THEN, about half of the remaining 30 percent is devoted to items such as lighting, uninterruptible power supplies and cooling systems. That means a whole lot of...