Articles from TechWeekEurope UK

Greenpeace is a diverse organisation that campaigns across a wide range of issues. It’s recently been weighing in on IT issues, which I initially thought was a good idea. Instead, its actions have undermined my confidence in the whole organisation.

The basic idea of holding organisations to account is good. But it needs to be fair, and Greenpeace seems to be out of its depth, applying standards inconsistently, protesting in the wrong places, and sometimes just missing the point.

Clouds that aren’t clear

Last week, Apple announced that its data centre in Maiden North Carolina would be using 100 percent renewable energy.

The news came just two days after Greenpeace blitzed Apple’s Cupertino headquarters with protesters dressed as iPhones, and critical tweets broadcast from a survival “pod” in front of the building. The protest was the culmination of a series of actions complaining that Apple’s data ...

(Read Full Article)

EMC is talking up its flash storage game claiming it is pushing it into all the right areas, announcing a number of products including a VNX product that it claims cuts the entry cost of flash by 38 percent.

The VNXe3150 model, part of EMC’s unified storage lineup aimed at “IT generalists” managing virtual environments, delivers 50 percent more performance and capacity per rack unit, according to vendor, which was making the announcement at EMC World 2012.

In addition, EMC is going to work with its subsidiary VMware to integrate VNX with the analytics of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. The VNX Storage Analytics Suite and VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite will be available in the second half of 2012, according to EMC.

Every little helps

Talking about the kit, Rich Napolitano, president of EMC’s unified storage division, talked of how “a little bit ...

(Read Full Article)

EMC has been teasing delegates at its EMC World conference today about what it is going to do with its XtremIO acquisition, but it is being reticent about the details of ‘Project X’.

From the details thus far, it appears Project X will deliver a fully-flash array sitting on the storage side of a data centre.

EMC president and chief operating officer Pat Gelsinger revealed a Project X offering will be going into beta in the fourth quarter of this year, with a general release set for 2013.

Thunder rolling away?

There have been questions over what would happen to Project Thunder, another EMC initiative that would do a very similar job to the XtremIO technology, but Gelsinger said the technologies would be complementary. That’s because one sits on the server side, whilst the other is on storage. One could assume having both would give IT teams some super ...

(Read Full Article)

EMC has hinted it won’t be putting its name to the Facebook Open Compute Project in an official capacity anytime soon, as the storage giant told TechWeekEurope businesses were not using the project’s storage designs for mission critical loads. The Open Compute Project was launched by Facebook in April 2011, releasing low-energy data centre and server specifications used in its Oregon data centre, effectively open sourcing the custom hardware it was using in the facility. A number of big name storage players have pledged to take part in the initiative, with HP and Dell recently pledging to create server and storage boxes to fit with the new, spacier, greener Open Rack design.

(Read Full Article)

Leadership is the main issue with both companies. Yahoo is searching for its seventh CEO since 2007 and already has told 2,000 of its 14,100 employees, or about 14 percent, they’ll need to move on. HP is on its third CEO in two years and is now looking at laying off between 25,000 and 30,000 of its 349,600 employees, a reduction of about 8 percent of its workforce.

If HP does this, it will be one of the top 10 largest rounds of layoffs in the history of the IT business, according to outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

 

Both companies are defending themselves against previously unheard-of global competition on all flanks. HP is being challenged in all the markets in which it see its future: servers, enterprise software, storage, networking, cloud computing goods and services,  personal devices–even printers and ink, two of the ...

(Read Full Article)

The Alpharetta NGDC is one of six that HP originally planned to consolidate and replace 85 internal data centres. The installation of an EcoPOD at another Georgia-based data centre is almost complete. Construction of another two at data centres in Texas is also underway.

The 40 foot EcoPOD will host 2,000 ProLiant and Integrity servers, expanding compute space at the facility by the equivalent of 20,000 square feet of its existing NGDC space.

HP, which was named in November as the top ranked company in theGreenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics, claims that the EcoPODs are the “world’s most energy efficient data centres”. It says that they are more efficient than most similarly tiered data centres and are significantly more energy efficient. According to the company, the EcoPODs have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of just 1.05 compared to a traditional data centre’s 2 ...

(Read Full Article)

The Apple iPhone 5 isn’t likely to put in an appearance at the 2012 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), planned for 11 June. What Apple instead plans to show off is an update to iCloud, the Wall Street Journal reported on 14 May. iCloud users can today store sets of images in the cloud, which can be synchronised to photos on various Apple devices. The next version of iCloud, reports the Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, will allow users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users, who will be able to comment on them – Apple with a touch of Facebook, it would seem.

(Read Full Article)

Communications firm Daisy Group has completed a £1 million upgrade of its Manchester data centre, which sits behind a bomb proof door.

The 12-tonne bomb-proof door sits where a former Bank of England vault was in Manchester’s city centre, according to the Manchester Evening News, which revealed the extra investment in the data centre has increased capacity by 50 percent.

Daisy Group has upped the number of servers in the centre from 2000 to 3000, whilst extra cooling equipment has been brought in, which should allow for another 1000 servers to be introduced at some point in the future. There are two-metre thick granite walls protecting the site as well, whilst 70 CCTV cameras monitor the centre.

Going deeper underground

The data centre is located 25 feet below the ground, and also features a 60cm bomb blast corridor around the facility for an extra layer of protection, according to ...

(Read Full Article)

Huawei claims it is years ahead of the competition with its new switch (Read Full Article)

Texas-based Compass Datacenters, a start-up that came out of stealth mode in April, has given details of itsmodular data centre offering, which promises customers an energy-efficient facility that can be installed wherever needed, while offering greater stability and security than existing modular designs.

The Truly Modular product is aimed at a vast untapped market of customers located away from the major cities served by most data centre providers, according to Compass founder and chief executive Chris Crosby.

(Read Full Article)

As Dell unveiled its twelfth generation PowerEdge servers earlier this year, officials were already talking with their customers about features needed for the thirteenth-generation systems, due out in 2014.

And as Dell customers now bring the new twelfth-generation tower, rack and blade PowerEdges into their data centre environments, Dell engineers will soon be working on prototypes of the next generations, which will go out to some users next year for testing.

(Read Full Article)

Facebook is cracking on with its Open Compute Project, introducing the Open Rack, which is designed to bring cheaper hardware to IT teams, whilst freeing them from vendor lock-in and giving them some more efficient kit.

By 2013, Facebook is planning to merge the standard with Project Scorpio, a similar spec being developed by Chinese search giant Baidu and web portal Tencent, whilst HP and Dell have pledged to create server and storage boxes to fit with the new rack design.

(Read Full Article)

Methane production seems to be gathering pace in the data centre world. No sooner had Microsoft suggested that data centres should be co-located with methane production sources, we met up with a company that is already doing just that. Infinity doesn’t actually have a working data centre yet, but it has the power on hand, and the sheds in which to put the data centre. As we learnt on a visit to Iceland, all you need for a sustainable data centre is a source of energy and a good shed and Cold War air bases have the finest sheds and hangars money could buy in the 1970s and 1980s.

(Read Full Article)

Apple is using Bloom's fuel cells in North Carolina, and says a new plant in Oregon will use 100 percent renewable power (Read Full Article)

Cabinet Minister Francis Maude has confirmed that the estimated cost for the G-Cloud programme is around £4.93 million. The information was revealed when Michael Dugher, Labour MP for Barnsley East asked Maude how much the project cost. “The estimated cost for the G-Cloud programme (including the CloudStore) is £4.93 million,” replied Maude. “This is being met from the Cabinet Office SR10 settlement and is subject to the ERG spend and controls process. The savings it is expected the programme will deliver are estimated at £340 million.” “The G-Cloud programme is making good progress,” he added.

(Read Full Article)

Information management company EMC is holding talks to buy XtremIO, an Israeli manufacturer of all-flash enterprise data storage systems, reports local business news site Globes. It is thought that the price of acquisition lies in the range of $400-450 million (£248 – £279 million). Last week, XtremIO won the Uptime Institute’s 2012 Green Enterprise IT Award in the IT Product Deployment category, which recognised that its all-flash arrays can improve energy and resource efficiency. According to Globes, EMC’s rival NetApp is also interested in XtremIO.

(Read Full Article)

The UK has risen to second place in a table of the best locations to build a data centre in the world, while Nordic countries have also rissn in the rankings. The Data Centre Risk Index 2012 showed that companies are looking towards the Nordic countries and nations with a cool climate that have good networks and abundant renewable energy supplies. The Index, which helps companies identify where to build their data centres, ranked 30 countries according to a set of criteria, including energy costs, connectivity, likelihood of natural disasters, political stability, energy security and energy. The US retained its status as the best place – the lowest risk location – with a score of 100, but the UK moved up from fifth to second, owing to its high international bandwidth capacity and ease of doing businesses.

(Read Full Article)

Dell continues to build up its networking arsenal with the news that it is using its acquisition last year of networking vendor Force10 Networks, to add new hardware and software to its open networking platform.

This includes a 40 Gigabit Ethernet-enabled switch for its PowerEdge M1000e blade system.

Network Enhancements

Dell also is unveiling enhancements to its networking operating system and new management capabilities that offer greater automation and a single console for all management needs on new and existing Dell networking infrastructures.

The new and enhanced offerings were announced 24 April, and many will be on display at the Interop 2012 show in Las Vegas 7-10 May. Dell also will demonstrate its capabilities in the burgeoning area of software-defined networking (SDN), including interoperability with Big Switch Networks’ Open SDN architecture.

(Read Full Article)

On April 24, 2012 by Chris Preimesberger eWEEK USA 2012. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved. 0 Oracle on 23 April released several new products involving the data centre equipment and application sides of its business. In hardware, Orace updated to the third generation its Sun-developed ZFS Storage 7420 network attached storage (NAS) appliance. In software, the company upgraded its JD Edwards’ Enterprise One application for midrange enterprises with some industry-specific improvements. Support for more virtual machines The 7420 NAS system for data centres now has options that include a two-node, high-availability controller with up to 2TB of memory, up to 11TB of flash-based read/write cache, and 80 processing cores, allowing the system to handle more concurrent enterprise applications and support more virtual machines. Sun ZFS storage appliances also offer larger 3TB, capacity-optimized SAS-2 hard disk drives within its fully automated Hybrid Storage Pool environment. These new drives ...

(Read Full Article)

Apple has decided not to remain silent after Greenpeace criticised it, along with Amazon and Microsoft, in a mid-April “How Clean Is Your Cloud?” report, which claimed all three heavily relied on “dirty utilities” like coal to power their cloud-running data centres. Apple, normally tight-lipped in the face of media hype and public criticism, issued an uncharacteristically quick riposte to Greenpeace’s PR offensive, with a statement about the energy sources for the data centres – facilities often referred to as “server farms” – it is building in Maiden, North Carolina and Oregon. Renewable energy sources “Our data centre in North Carolina will draw about 20 megawatts at full capacity, and we are on track to supply more than 60 percent of that power on-site from renewable sources including a solar farm and fuel cell installation, which will each be the largest of their kind in the country,” Kristin Huguet, an Apple ...

(Read Full Article)

Yesterday evening, Microsoft Global Foundation Services’ blog laid out plans for “Data Plants” – data centres with integrated power plants – which had been hinted at on Tuesday. In future, data centres must become independent of the electricity grid, and move to renewable energy, fuel cells and biogas for the power needs, according to Microsoft’s Christian Belady. Against the grid “Without a bold shift in strategy, our entire industry will become more dependent on a costly, antiquated, and constricted power grid,” says Belady. The animosity doesn’t stop there. He goes on to call the electrical grid dirty, expensive and unreliable.

(Read Full Article)

Specialist data centre developer Volta has today announced its first project in Central London– a flexible data centre space located in the old Reuters headquarters in Great Sutton Street. Situated in close proximity to the City, the West End, and a stone’s throw from the Silicon Roundabout in Shoreditch, the facility will provide sub-millisecond latency connections for surrounding financial and media industries. Volta is a combined real estate, infrastructure and IT business. Once the renovation of the building is complete, it will offer co-location services – resilient power and cooling for single or multiple server racks, and private caged data suites for especially security-conscious clients. The company doesn’t sell the servers – but it does pretty much everything else.

(Read Full Article)

Apple made public information about its data centre energy consumption today after a damning report by Greenpeace. The report rated Apple among the worst cloud computing companies, judging by their energy consumption. Greenpeace accused Apple of contributing to the carbon pollution by using coal energy to power its North Carolina data centre, which supports the iCloud service.

(Read Full Article)

Microsoft wants to change how the industry powers data centres by integrating them with full-scale power plants, two company executives wrote in a blog post yesterday. According to Christian Belady, general manager of data centre services, and Vijay Gill, senior director of network engineering, data centres of the future will feature renewable power generation on the premises, completely eliminating transmission losses. Data into energy Today, Microsoft’s cloud supports more than one billion customers and 20 million businesses in 76 countries. Its data centres are powered by one of the world’s largest fibre optic backbones, providing more than 3.5 terabits per second of capacity to more than 1200 networks.

(Read Full Article)