A cloud-enabled world uses more networking. So, since we’re all moving to the cloud, now would be a very good time to look closely at communications. But the greening of networks is generating a lot of confusion right now. How much energy do cloud access networks need? If you listen to some people (Australia’s CEET institute, say) it’s about ten times as much as the data centres that power them. If you listen to others (green experts connected to Britain’s Intellect group), it’s only about ten percent.Some say networks dominate IT energy, while others have different ideas, says Peter Judge

The European Commission undertaking officially known as the CoolEmAll project, which is designed to tackle energy efficiency in data centres, has released its first set of prototype tools. The CoolEmAll project involves universities and vendors as well as specialists such as analyst firm the 451 Group. It aims to develop and deliver monitoring software as part of a wider goal to reduce data centre energy consumption.

Hitachi offers business-grade Dropbox features, but doesn't yet have local data centres

Microsoft has announced universities on the Janet network will be able to connect directly into its Azure cloud data centre in Dublin, thanks to a peering project. Janet is a private network used by UK universities. At its heart it provides its own network connections, rather than relying on the public Internet, so Janet users can enjoy better speed and security. 

Three SME suppliers board the G-Cloud 3, promising to cut government IT costs

There were red faces at Mimecast this week, after the software as a service company admitted that a network infrastructure problem had caused email outages. The company specialises in offering cloud-based email management services to businesses, and the embarrassing failure has left its business continuity pledge looking decidedly tarnished.

Despite all the hype around software-defined networking (SDN), it won’t really provide any cost savings, according to Juniper Networks. There has been much debate over the potential for SDN, especially surrounding cost savings. As SDN puts a virtualised layer across networking infrastructure, giving control over switches and routers to IT in a single console, it should bring greater efficiency.

Oracle is launching a new UK data centre entirely for government contracts in the G-Cloud, hosting applications delivered by both Oracle and its partners. The data centre will be in the Thames Valley and will comply with the IL3 security specification, a government requirement for this type of work. It joins Oracle’s general purpose data centre in Linlithgow, and follows an announcement of a UK data centre from rival Salesforce . Although Oracle would not say where it is, or how big it is, chief operating officer Mark Hurd promised the facility would open in June.

Green tech expert Kate Craig-Wood takes issue with a suggestions that wireless networks use too much energy

Seagate, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of hard disk drives, has announced four new Solid State Drives (SSDs) that will spearhead its new flash strategy. The new drives include consumer-friendly 600 SSD and 600 SSD Pro models, enterprise-grade 1200 SSD, and even a superfast flash PCIe appliance for the data centre developed jointly with its partner Virident, the X8 Accelerator, which Seagate claims is “twice as fast as the nearest competitor”. By launching several new product lines, the company hopes to own the broadest storage device portfolio in the industry.

There is no competition between VMware and OpenStack – the leading open source cloud implementation - despite recent reports that customers are moving away from the vCloud to OpenStack, according to VMware’s chief technologies in EMEA, Joe Baguley. While OpenStack provides an open source cloud stack, it works perfectly well with VMware’s vSphere, and VMware is an OpenStack supporter.

On May 1, 2013 by Jeffrey Burt eWEEK USA 2013. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved. 0 Hewlett-Packard has expanded its product offerings that will make up its new data centre network fabric and bolster the company’s software-defined networking (SDN) efforts. The products announced 30 April include new data centre switches that offer greater automation and scalability, enhanced virtualisation performance and a less complex networking architecture, technologies that more tightly integrate virtualised networking with physical infrastructures, and software that automates application and service delivery in SDNs and traditional network devices and configures and the applications.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of Yin and Yang is used to describe opposite forces which are interconnected to create balance in the world. Life is full of these natural balances; dark and light, water and fire, life and death.

Brocade delivers software-only network appliances to push SDN forward

Facebook is to invest $299.5 million (£196m) in the first phase of an efficient data centre on a site in Iowa where a new facility has been rumoured for some time. The data centre at Altoona, Iowa, will make use of Iowa’s extensive wind-powered electricity, and was announced on a blog post by Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. It will use Facebook’s own implementation of the Open Compute design of stripped down, low-energy servers.

Google is expanding its North Carolina data centre, and heading off protest at the emissions caused by its electricity use by setting up a renewable energy tariff with its utility company. As part of a $600 million (£394m) expansion of the data centre, Google is making a new agreement with its electricity provider, Duke Energy, to pay extra for its power through a tariff which channels the money to specific renewable energy projects run by Duke. 

Facebook has published data centre efficiency figures on real-time dashboards for two of its data centres in Prineville Oregon and Forest City North Carolina. Its Lulea, Sweden facility will soon follow. The move is a response to criticism of Facebook’s energy usage, and a means to publicise its involvement in moves to improve data centre efficiency, such as the Open Compute Project. The two data centres have very creditable PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ratings of 1.09 and 1.10, according to the dashboards, which show data with a 2.5-hour delay. The dashboards also display another environmental measure – the centres’ water usage.

Intel wants your sofware defined switches on its x86 processors

IBM is betting big on flash storage for the data centre, announcing a $1 billion initiative to research the technology and releasing  a line up of all-Flash storage appliances.

Big Blue said flash could unlock plenty of Big Data potential, due to its ability to speed up read and write processes, compared to standard disk drive technologies still widely used by businesses today.

Peer 1 Hosting is a web hosting company, which TechWeekEurope readers will remember for its use of environmentally friendly technologies. Mike Duncan is Peer 1′s data centre operations manager in the UK (UK). We asked him about his IT Life – but he’d rather talk about his passion to ride motor bikes…

Cisco Systems and Microsoft are working together to offer new products designed to make it easier for businesses to virtualise their data centres. The two companies are also aiming to reduce complexity and leverage cloud computing technologies.

Natural gas plants could power data centres for nothing

HP Moonshot uses less energy, says Paul Santeler. But will apps port across to it?