Peer 1 remained online, thanks to a bucket brigade carrying fuel up 18 floors

When Hurricane Sandy hit New York this week, a lot of big-name sites were taken down, after their ISPs were flooded or lost power. But some smaller sites remained online, despite using an ISP located in the evacuation zone, thanks to luck, planning, and sometimes a bucket brigade that carried fuel.

Huffington Post and Gawker were among the high profile casualties, after the superstorm took out power, communications and 25 percent of the mobile towers in 10 states.  Peer 1 Hosting rents co-location space to a variety of smaller sites within 75 Broad Street, a high rise building in Lower Manhattan. The building had been surrounded by water, debris and wrecked cars, but the provider stayed online.

Data centres need a climate change agreement which will cut energy costs, says Intellect

IT industry body Intellect wants input for its campaign for energy tax breaks for the data centre industry.

If data centres are exempt from some energy taxes, the overall economy will benefit, and energy use will go down in the long term, according to Intellect, adding that if heavy energy taxes are applied, the data centre business may go elsewhere and Britain’s economy would suffer.

IT kit has toughened up, so data centres can turn off the coolers

The Green Grid – which promotes IT efficiency – has urged data centres to operate their servers at higher temperatures and greater humidity, to save energy.

Data centres are still operating on old-fashioned principles that waste energy by cooling servers and equipment down to temperatures far inside their operating limits, when IT kit is now resilient enough to run at higher temperatures and humidities, says the Green Grid, in a new report, Data Centre Efficiency & IT Equipment Reliability. 

It’s not cool to cool

Last week, Apple started construction of its latest data centre in Prineville, Oregon – a centre which apple promises will be carbon neutral. This is the first phase of the project that will eventually see two 338,000 square-foot buildings erected in the Oregon High Desert, to host Apple’s iCloud services. In April, following vocal criticism by Greenpeace, Apple announced that its new facilities will run on “100 percent renewable energy” – wind, hydro, and geothermal power from local sources.

Cambridge-based ARM Holdings has announced CoreLink – a network technology package designed to boost the performance of chips based on its design, when used in corporate data centres. ARM’s “CoreLink CCN-504 Cache Coherent Network” intellectual property packages – to give it its full name – is designed to be used by chipmakers and system designers using ARM cores in their systems.

Flash German car maker BMW has moved its high performance computing (HPC) to a data centre in Iceland powered by renewable energy, to save around 3600 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. The firm is moving ten of its HPC clusters, consuming 6.31 GWh of energy each year annually, from Germany over to Verne Global’s data centre in Keflavik, Iceland which uses electricity from 100 percent renewable sources – Iceland’s geothermal and hydroelectric generators.

We like the Raspberry Pi because it is a do-it-yourself device that will encourage people to have a go. We like it because it is British. We like it because it uses open source. But we just found a new reason to like the £22 computing device. We like it because it is green. We don’t mean that the thing itself will save electricity – although there are projects you could do with a Raspberry Pi that might cut your electricity bills by automating your house. No, the Pi is green because it could be the vanguard for the next wave of higher efficiency in our data centres.

Microsoft has responded to criticism that it deliberately wasted energy at a data centre that was supposed to be highly efficient – saying the issue was overstated in the New York Times. The data centre industry has criticised a series of articles in the NY Times that portrayed it as wasteful. Microsoft has responded to a particular incident in which the paper claimed Microsoft deliberately wasted electricity to avoid paying a $210,000 penalty to its utility provider in Quincy, Washington – for failing to use the energy in an agreed contract. 

A week ago, a blog post from Microsoft emerged in which it preened about how green the company’s data centres are, and got quite a bit of news traction. Now, I wonder if it was a smokescreen intended to distract us from truly shocking revelations that were about to appear in the New York Times. While proclaiming to run a very green ship, with energy waste at a minimum, in a town called Quincy in Washington State, Microsoft was actually burning off energy for no benefit at all – except to reduce a fine imposed on it by the local energy provider, according to the NYT.

Next on the agenda - getting rid of diesel generators and producing energy on the spot

AMD has launched a new low power server thanks to its SeaMicro acquisition, as it looks to ramp up its data centre offerings

Well done Intel for getting a PUE of 1.02, says Peter Judge. Now let's look beyond the PUE measurement for efficiency

Dunking servers in oil doesn't hurt them, Intel says

Even though there wasn’t what anyone could describe as blockbuster news at VMworld 2012, there were a large number of smaller news items – mostly involving new products – introduced at the show. In addition, several key industry partnerships were announced that will result in other new products in the future.

One lasting impression for many people, however, is that VMworld clearly has confirmed itself as being among the top dozen or so most important IT conferences in the world, taking its place alongside such various events as the International Computer Electronics Show, SxSW, CTIA, CeBIT, Oracle OpenWorld, DreamForce, Web 2.0, Structure and a handful of others.

Cylinders of liquid air could back-up your data centre and make the grid smarter, says Peter Judge.

Energy is a big issue, and the problem is not just using it, but storing it too. I’ve recently been looking at an approach to energy storage that could double up to provide backup power to data centres.

The big difficulty with running an electric grid is in storing the energy. It’s costly and not usually very efficient to store electricity, and the demand from consumers varies very rapidly, so the grid has to respond, more or less immediately to any peaks and troughs.

In the midst of wide open spaces of farm and grazing land, the central Oregon town of Prineville (population  9,253) has  a new type of farm:  farms producing Web services that interconnect people. Like horses, cows and sheep data centres need water, fresh air and plenty of space, and the Facebook green data centre is the most well-known.

Unlike a farm, a data centre is mechanical and use electricity – lots of electricity. With the Columbia River  about 80 miles away, providing hydroelectric power, Prineville has this in plenty, and this is why the world’s largest social network  decided about four years ago to build its first wholly owned data centre in Prineville.

Legal, regulatory and compliance issues are often cited as the biggest barriers to the adoption of cloud computing services. And, after a rummage through the  books looking for cloud laws, this is no surprise.

Cloud computing will inevitably open up this proverbial can of worms; as soon as an organisation outsources its data storage to a third party, in this case a cloud provider, there are serious considerations to be made. A lot of personal data has restrictions over exactly where it can be stored. Some must be kept within the country, some within the European Union. Furthermore, financial data must be stored for at least seven years while European data-sovereignty laws also require organisations to keep all of their customer data in the customer’s own country. This can become very difficult for international companies.

Metrics, they are not always perfect, but are a useful tool for us to measure our performance and improvement. PUE is a commonly used metric in the data centre industry, but there is room for more – and one of the most promising is called FVER.

PUE (power usage effectiveness)  measures the waste in supporting mechanical and engineering (M&E) equipment by assessing the ratio of overall power to IT equipment power. Despite a little marketing abuse and users moving some of their loads into the IT equipment, PUE has been a success for the industry, driving common M&E efficiencies from wasteful to rather efficient.

Dell has launched a highly mobile containerised data centre, aimed at military operations and emergency response teams. The Tactical Mobile Data Center is a roughly ten-foot cube containing servers, storage and networking, along with power supplies and cooling, which can cope with a harsh environment and which can be flown in, instead of being delivered by truck.