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Facebook Recruits Google Green Energy Czar for Sustainability Push
Facebook has hired Google's former "green energy czar" Bill Weihl, in a move designed to demonstrate the company's commitment to low-carbon computing and renewable energy. Weihl will begin the new post in January 2012, Facebook confirmed.
Weihl reportedly told online magazine Fresh Dialogues that he plans to "advance sustainability" at Facebook. While his job title and responsibilities at have not been decided, the focus will be on sustainability, clean energy and energy efficiency, he said.
The news comes just as Greenpeace winds up a long-running campaign calling on Facebook to "unfriend coal" as a source of energy for its data centres. The environmental campaign group singled out Facebook because of the company's decision to site its first wholly-owned data centre in Oregon, using electricity from PacificCorp - an energy company which makes two thirds of its power using coal.
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Comment Mentions: Apple Greenpeace Amazon.com
Gartner's Top 10 IT Challenges Include Exiting Baby Boomers, Big Data
In Gartner's list of the top 10 trends in IT infrastructure and operations are multiple threats and opportunities for data center operations.
Among the threats is the exodus of baby boomers and the emergence of a younger generation that's been less loyal to corporate employers and are more likely to move to another job.
Designing a job structure that ensures IT skills and corporate knowledge can survive the workforce transition is but one important challenge for companies, according to David Cappuccio, a Gartner analyst.
Gartner's Top 10 list of IT infrastructure and operations trends, presented today at the research firm's annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo here, follows:
One : Virtualization continues to expand in the enterprise from servers to desktops. "You do not do desktop virtualization to save money, because you're not going to," Cappuccio said. "You are going to spend more money on your infrastructure," in ...
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How Cloud Computing Is Changing Data Center Designs and Costs
How Cloud Computing Is Changing Data Center Designs and CostsCIOIn it I discussed trends evinced at the San Francisco DatacenterDynamics conferenece: energy efficiency, raised operating temperatures, and "chicken coop" data center building designs. A couple of developments this past week reinforced the perspective ...
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CIOs See Promise in Public Cloud Storage
Three quarters of companies are either currently using or plan to use public cloud storage offerings. What's more, all organizations with more than 500 employees are using or planning use of public cloud storage, mostly for e-mail, data protection and front-office applications like CRM, especially SaaS-based CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com.
That's the upshot of a recent survey of 133 CIOs/CTOs and their operations staff in North America conducted by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) and our industry analyst firm, Storage Strategies NOW. The survey paints a picture of a technology that's poised for takeoff — if providers can overcome user apprehension over two big concerns: security and performance.
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Comment Mentions: Storage Networking Industry Association Microsoft Corp
Cloud Computing's Present and Future: What You Need to Know
I had the opportunity to participate in two conferences over the past couple of weeks, and got what are essentially headlines ripped from today's newspapers about the state of cloud computing in the real world as well as a figurative text message from the future of cloud computing.
The first conference was "The Business of Cloud Computing," sponsored by Opal Events. It was a relatively small event, but the content represented perhaps the best end-user perspective on cloud computing I have ever seen at a conference. The second conference was Structure 2011, put on by GigaOM. It was also outstanding and carried the feel of a peek into the future of IT and just what a wrenching transformation cloud computing will impose onto established IT practices.
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Comment Mentions: Oracle Facebook Interactive Data Corporation
NYSE Launches Cloud Service for Wall Street
NYSE Euronext's technology division this month announced what it called the first cloud service for the financial services industry.
NYSE Technologies said its Capital Markets Community Platform is designed to "increase business agility, simplify market access and reduce trading friction by using rapid, on-demand computing resources."
NYSE Euronext said that its 1,200 broker-dealer clients can purchase the computing power they need at a given time so they can focus on their core business operations rather than on the design and maintenance of complex IT infrastructures.
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Comment Mentions: Amazon.com Google Oracle
The Green IT Movement has Lost the Plot
When it comes to environmental sustainability, the information technology community has seriously mistaken its priorities. Our latest research has confirmed what we have been saying for four years. The IT industry is already energy-neutral in terms of its consumption and savings, but there is still no credible scenario for safely managing the global production and disposal of literally billions of personal computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices. Yet even today, improving the energy efficiency of IT equipment is still the overwhelming focus of the Green IT community.
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Comment Mentions: Oracle Network World CSC
8 Radical Ways to Cut Data Center Power Costs
8 Radical Ways to Cut Data Center Power CostsCIOThe holy grail of data center energy efficiency metrics is the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUI) rating, in which lower numbers are better and 1.0 is an ideal objective. PUI compares total data center electrical consumption to the amount converted into ...and more »
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Hire Green IT Managers Now, Forrester Urges
Although the majority (nearly 70 percent) of respondents to Forrester's April 2010 Global Green IT Online Survey reported that they were implementing sustainability projects, just 25 percent said they had a comprehensive green IT plan in place.
This led to 44 percent saying they had no defined ownership of green IT initiatives and 57 percent saying they were dealing with too many competing priorities. Forrester said the lack of coordination produces results that are inconsistent, hard-to-measure and difficult to replicate.
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Comment Mentions: Forrester Research
Forrester: 3 More Ways to Cut Data Center Energy Costs
CIO — As the global economy is recovers, pent-up business demand for new apps and market initiatives is driving server investments. Forrester finds that 25 percent of organizations expect server spend to grow by 5 percent to 10 percent, and 6 percent expect it to grow by 10 percent or more. And to reduce operating and capital costs, improve disaster recovery, and accelerate time-to-market for new apps, organizations are turning to server virtualization. But a new motivator to expand and improve the use of server virtualization is bubbling to the surface: reducing energy consumption. Why? Forrester finds that there are three primary motivators:
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Comment Mentions: Forrester Research
Green IT: CIOs Can Demand Sustainability from Vendors
Pamela Rucker doesn't want to spend money with IT vendors that waste water or energy, or that have large carbon footprints. After all, she says, as vice president of IT for environmental services firm PSC, it would be hypocritical to not hold vendors to high standards.
When considering a deal with a software, hardware or services provider, Rucker demands to see its written policies governing sustainability. On top of that, IT staff might walk through vendor facilities to verify a company's green claims: How high heat density is in the data center; how water consumption is minimized; whether renewable energy sources are used; how old computers are recycled. Rucker and team don't just take such claims at face value, they look for proof.
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How Tasty Baking Co. Moved Its Data Center in 13 Hours
Sometimes, waiting for a long time can make the result all the sweeter.
Slideshow: Secrets of Successful Data Centers
That's been the case at Tasty Baking Co. of Philadelphia, when it moved out of its cramped factory building and into a new state-of-the-art data center and bakery facilities across town. It's been an IT manager's dream.
There are no more unidentifiable, spaghetti-like, ancient coaxial, Ethernet and telephone cables and wires running who-knows-where through the ceilings and floors in the data center. The IT staff is no longer crunched together in a small, windowless room in the midst of the noisy, server-filled space in an old brick factory building, which was always freezing cold regardless of the season.
And the new space even has new gear, because, in 2007, while still in the old data center, the IT staff replaced all the computing and networking equipment.
Now, in ...
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Comment Mentions: Microsoft Corp
Amazon's Data Center Outage Reads Like a Thriller
When an Amazon Web Services data center lost power early Wednesday, the company wrote about the unfolding event with the brevity and tension of one its bestselling pot boilers.
Data Center Definitions and Solutions
Our anonymous author, who we'll call Sysadmin, begins his story simply, without emotional complications and love interests.
"We are investigating connectivity issues for instances in the US-EAST-1 region," Sysadmin writes on Amazon's operations status board at 1:08 a.m. PT.
With one sentence, we're intrigued. Something's up with Amazon's data center in Northern Virginia, just a short drive to Washington; Tom Clancy country.
You can almost feel what's going on. Cloud-based services are crashing and there's a scramble for answers. Elsewhere, PC screens are refreshed as readers wait for an update from Sysadmin, (Kindle edition not yet available). Some 18 minutes pass. Tension builds.
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Comment Mentions: Amazon.com Google
22 Stories Underground: Iron Mountain's Experimental Room 48
own a road that winds through the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, just across from a cow pasture, the bucolic scenery of Butler County is interrupted by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
Cars entering the compound are channeled into gated lanes before being searched by a guard. A short distance beyond the security point, the road disappears into a gaping hole in a cliff face. The hole is sealed off by the thick, steel bars of a tall sliding gate controlled by guards carrying semiautomatic pistols. They are protecting a 25-foot-high passage that leads 22 stories down to Iron Mountain's main archive facility, which takes up 145 acres of a 1,000-acre abandoned limestone mine.
Behind steel doors
Among dozens of red steel doors inserted in the rock face along corridors that create an elaborate subterranean honeycomb, you'll find Room 48, an experiment in data ...
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Solar Storm Could Zap Power Grid in 2013
Solar Storm Could Zap Power Grid in 2013
Data center managers will need to keep an eye on the solar weather, because a geomagnetic storm (now predicted for May 2013) could knock out electric power.
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By Mitch Betts
MON, DECEMBER 07, 2009 — Computerworld — Alarmist news reports earlier this year warned that solar storms coming in 2012 will cripple electric power, GPS equipment and communications systems for months, creating an electronic apocalypse not dreamt of since the days of pre-Y2k hysteria. Those reports then spread throughout a blogosphere already saturated with hype about the Hollywood disaster flick 2012 .
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Iceland: New Hot Spot for Data Centers?
With data center costs on the rise, Jeff Monroe is always looking for a deal.
The CEO of Verne Global, a wholesale data-center hosting company, has searched the world for places that offer cheap power, easy cooling and reliable communications. While energy costs in the United States are uncertain, Iceland, with its seemingly-unlimited renewable energy, cool temperatures and three (soon to be four) transoceanic cables fits the bill perfectly, he says.
"We are finding those points on the Earth that are optimized for server operation—Iceland hits on all those points," says Monroe.
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Cisco's Data Center Guru Talks Direction, Strategy
As a 13 year Cisco veteran, John McCool, senior vice president and General Manager of Cisco's Data Center Switching and Services Group, has seen a boatload of change. He is responsible for the strategy, engineering and marketing of Cisco's family of enterprise Ethernet switching solutions, including the Catalyst series, the Nexus data center switches and the MDS storage area network line. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix and Managing Editor Jim Duffy recently got McCool on the phone to find out what he sees coming down the pike.
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Comment Mentions: Cisco Network World
Analyst: Enterprises Fail to Handle Data Center Costs
Businesses are failing to address the problem of assessing the costs of running the data centre making it near impossible to assess costing according to a senior analyst.
Data Center Definitions and Solutions
It's an issue that all companies have to address, said Nik Simpson, the Burton Group's senior data centre analyst., in a research report Counting the cost of the elephant in the data center (subscription required) that he had written. He said that most managers were suffering from insufficient information about the costs of their IT infrastructure, making it difficult to predict the return on investment on any technology.
"Part of the problem seems to be that the information seems to be spread out across the organisation," said Simpson. "An IT manager would have to go to facilities manager to get the electricity costs, to accounting to get the level of depreciation of equipment and real ...
(Read Full Article)
Many Companies Say They Will Adopt Cloud Computing Within Two Years
One-third of 1,200 organizations (33%) plan to convert their application environments away from a traditional, client-server model to one based on virtualization and cloud computing over the next two years, according to a study commissioned by Microsoft and released today. The study sought to broadly determine global IT spending priorities.
Slideshow: 5 Tools to Prevent Energy Waste in the Data Center
10 Cloud Computing Companies to Watch
While the survey was far from comprehensive, it did uncover a few silver-lining facts. IT spending budgets will not be cut, with 98% saying they will generally maintain or increase their planned investment. Nearly 2/3 say the economy has created reason to invest more in one or more areas of technology. And of those, virtualization, security, systems management and cloud computing are the areas of choice. Specifically:
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Microsoft Corp
Researchers Speed Up the Chase for Cooler Data Centers
With energy costs rising and data centers at the core of IT strategy for many companies, cooling the growing number of computers jammed into data centers is an issue that has taken center stage.
Some innovative university researchers are focusing on cutting the cost of cooling the hot racks of servers in data centers. Last month, Syracuse University teamed with IBM to create one of the world's most efficient data centers on the school's campus, while the Georgia Institute of Technology announced last week that its faculty had created a 1,100-square-foot testing facility where researchers can test new cooling designs and measure the impact that the designs have on power efficiency.
The Georgia Tech researchers aim to analyze power consumption "all the way from the chip to the data center facility," says Yogendra Joshi, a professor of mechanical engineering at the university.
"We are addressing the inefficiencies ...
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Are You Ready for 'Green Soa'?
Although not yet a global phenomenon, the green data center movement is rampant in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. A corporate social conscience? No. A corporate economic conscience? Yes. From CIOs to purchasing managers, the belief that a green IT infrastructure reduces recurring expenses has become self-evident. (Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: United Kingdom IBM
Intel Finds Significant Savings By Using Free Cooling
An economizer draws on outside air to cool the datacenter, then pushes the hot air that exits the machines outdoors. But use of this so-called free cooling tends to be limited to regions with temperate climates, where there's no risk to servers from ... (Read Full Article)
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ControlCircle » Gartner: Build your own datacentre rather than hosting
It’s startling that in today’s volatile environment Gartner is prescribing such a high risk strategy. ...
Carbon3IT Ltd » Does efficiency matter when your power is renewable (and affordable)? - By Peter Judge
Peter, do you really think that this is good practice?, as you say its like ...
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