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Greenpeace questions the green in clouds
Okay, so I mentioned yesterday, in this blog, about Greenpeace’s new report, “How Clean is Your Cloud?” It’s a comprehensive report on the energy consumption and energy sourcing in the data centers of some of the largest tech companies, and delves into data center deployments of 14 of the leading players in the market. The international environmental organization has established what it calls the Clean Energy Index to evaluate and compare the energy related footprints of major cloud providers and their respective data centers. Greenpeace makes the case that there is little transparency regarding providers’ electricity consumption, despite the availability of a variety of industry metrics, including PUE. What’s missing, Greenpeace says, is data that illustrates how much dirty energy is being used, and which companies are choosing clean energy to power the cloud? Hence, the Clean Energy Index. This index focuses on recent investments and the ...
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Mentions: Apple Greenpeace Amazon.com
Greening up data centers could matter
A new report on green technologies estimates that their use could limit total data center greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent through 2016. The report, “Green Data Centers” from Pike Research, explores global green data center trends with regional forecasts for market size and opportunities. Data center efficiencies – and ways to reduce their energy footprints – continue to top IT executives’ agendas. Budgets remain tight and companies dislike having to spend their hard-earned cash on operational expenses that do little for top-line growth (except, well, keep the lights on), and data center operators are finding it tough to keep energy demand in check while continuing to grow their capacity. The rising price of electricity, greenhouse gas emissions, IT improvements, cloud computing, virtualization, large advances in cooling techniques and improvements in monitoring and management solutions are all driving the need to reduce energy consumption, according to a press release issued by Pike ...
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Mentions: Apple Greenpeace Europe
IT outsourcing buyers still don't care about sustainability
There's been no shortage of announcements by global IT service providers about their sustainability projects in recent years --from run-of-the-mill energy consumption reduction goals and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified buildings to more fascinating waste conversion to manure efforts and personal carbon calculators for employees. But for the most part, IT outsourcing buyers still don't care. "For most commercial clients, it is not top of mind," says Todd Hintze, managing partner at outsourcing consultancy Everest Group. "Clients will select the sustainable and environmentally friendly provider where it is shown to also meet the client's other--and generally higher prioritized--objectives of cost, quality, and performance. Rarely is it an explicit request."
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European Commission touts 'data center in a rack' tech to tackle HPC efficiency problems
The European Commission has launched a programme, dubbed CoolEmAll, to tackle the energy efficiency implications that are likely to arise from increased investment in High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. Exa-scale computing is used in a variety of industries to carry out rapid simulations and the EC has announced plans this month to double its investment in HPC from 630 (£532) to 1.2bn (£1.01bn) before 2020. However, HPC requires a datacentre infrastructure that consumes a large amount of energy and resources. For example, one supercomputer can consume more power than a medium sized data centre and can cost more than $100,000 (£63,700) a year to run.
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Mentions: Europe
Iceland’s carbon-neutral data center opens for business
Beth Bacheldor is a freelance writer and editor with more than 20 years' experience, with much of that time covering the high-tech and IT industries. She has worked for numerous publications covering nearly every type of business technology, including IT ...
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Mentions: Iceland Europe Verne Global
Bay Area climate to help cool exascale systems
February 08, 2012, 7:10 AM — In a picturesque spot overlooking San Francisco Bay, the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab has begun building a new computing center that will one day house exascale systems. The DOE doesn't know what an exascale system will look like. The types of chips, the storage, the networking and programming methods that will go into these systems are all works in progress. DOE is expected to deliver to Congress by the end of this week a report outlining a plan for reaching exascale computing by 2019-2020 and its expected cost. But what the DOE does have an idea about it is how to cool these systems. The Computational Research and Theory (CRT) Facility at Berkeley will use outside air cooling. It can rely on the Bay area's cool temperatures to meet its needs about 95% of the time, said Katherine ...
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Mentions: Department of Energy
Smart lights, bright data center
So the law firm is Fenwick and West LLP, a national law firm with offices in California, Washington and Idaho that specializes in technology and life sciences. When the firm updated its 2,000-square-foot data center, it focused on energy efficiencies across the board, such as cold aisle containment and controlled airflow management. Its efforts helped the data center attain its U.S. Green Building Council LEED Gold certification, according to the article.
Included in the renovation was the selection of LED fixtures and Redwood Systems’ lighting technology. The lighting system centralizes control of the data center’s lighting, with web-based access, improved lighting quality, and increased visibility into the facility’s energy usage, the article states. The system lets the firm use light in its data center only when and to the degree needed, and analyze data gathered on each individual light fixture to enhance configuration and space utilization ...
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For 2012, power-efficient servers could get a shot in the ARM
In 2012 a fundamental change in server architecture could be on tap as companies look to cut data center costs with the help of technologies like ARM processors and graphics chips, analysts said.
Low-power processors from companies like ARM could be in full use in data centers by 2013, and mixing them up with graphics chips could bring massive performance improvements and power savings, analysts said. Experiments around implementing ARM processors in servers are already underway, and graphics chips are already being used in some of the world's fastest supercomputers.
Power efficiency has been among the top determining factors in server purchases as customers keep costs in mind while deploying applications, analysts said. This year, there was a spike in the build-out of cloud and high-performance servers around the hyperscale model, in which servers are densely packed to cut power consumption while scaling performance. For further power savings, companies ...
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Mentions: Amazon.com Intel Hewlett Packard
EBay finishes data center in a very hot place
Temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona -- one of the most arid places in the U.S. -- routinely exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). That's about the opposite of the typical cool-weather environments companies often choose to build data centers. read more
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Mentions: Interactive Data Corporation eBay Mike Lewis
The University of Toledo fires up microturbines in the data center
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to interview the CIO of Syracuse University (SU), Chris Sedore, to talk about the completion of the university’s new green data center. There’s plenty of cool green factor at SU’s data center, which is a $12.4 million, 12,000-square-foot facility that was built in partnership with IBM and the New York state government. For example, it operates completely off the grid and incorporates an energy-saving direct current (DC) power distribution system.
But the thing that I liked most was this new tri-generation system that’s used to produce all of the data center’s required power, plus chilled water to cool all the servers, and the cooling and heating needs for the building next door.
That system includes natural gas-fueled microturbines that power the data center; heat generated by the microtubines is captured as it rises up each ...
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Mentions: IBM
Apple tills a solar farm to power its data center.
Apple tills a solar farm to power its data center.ITworld.comAfter that, hardware elements will be added, including HP's POD with systems running AMD's Opteron server processors, which the chip maker said are designed for greater energy efficiency and cloud computing. This company, CG Tech Services, ...and more »
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Mentions: Apple Greenpeace Hewlett Packard
Raytheon: Boosting data center temperatures cuts energy use by 30%
As the IT sustainability program lead at Raytheon, Brian Moore says he saw a chance to learn from the company's past successes to find ways to deliver even more results.
For Moore and his colleagues in IT, that meant taking cues from Raytheon's efforts to improve data center energy efficiency and applying those steps to other areas. Toward that end, the IT team has focused on the company's networking and telecommunications infrastructure for the past year.
"The corporate network guys run the wide-area network and the backbone, so they can do it top-down, focusing on the design of the gear," he says.
Moore says Raytheon, a defense and aerospace company based in Waltham, Mass., has also spent the past year building up its cloud computing capabilities -- leading to a reduction in hardware requirements and therefore energy needs -- as well as replacing older equipment with new, highly energy-efficient ...
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What's behind Iceland's first major data center
A few weeks ago, I saw this article on The Swedish Wire about how several Swedish northern towns were promoting themselves as ideal locales for data centers. The article pointed out that an undisclosed “major U.S. Internet company, widely believed to be Facebook, is planning to build a giant data center outside the town center of Luleå,” in Sweden. It was around this time, too, that Google announced the opening of its data center in Hamina, Finland. And it was around this time, too, that I got a call from representatives for Verne Global, which was getting ready to open the doors to its new data center in Iceland. There's something about those chilly northern locales that are becoming the hot spots for data centers.
Verne Global’s 18-hectacre (about 44.5 acres) campus in Keflavik, Iceland, is 100% carbon neutral and draws its commercial power from Iceland ...
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Mentions: Apple Greenpeace Iceland
Data center energy consumption will increase. Are you (not) surprised?
Data center energy consumption will increase. Are you (not) surprised?ITworld.comThe eastern United States ranked the highest in overall, continuous monitoring of energy efficiency (the western US ranked fifth and the central US ranked eighth). There is plenty of other interesting information. The Global Data Center Energy Demand ...and more »
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Mentions: Amazon.com Google Oracle
Are Lessons Learned Still Being Applied?
9/11: Are Lessons Learned Still Being Applied?ITworld.com“Talk to anyone and ask them what are the hot buttons regarding data centers, and they'll tell you energy efficiency and sustainability. Those are the areas that are most easily getting funding now. Second, you'll hear the cloud and whether or not it's ...and more »
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Six energy-efficient data center practices How vendors and industry groups are confronting the challenge of data center power and cooling in new and unusual ways.
Many data centers are up against the maximum electric power available to them from their utility. Others are facing management challenges: the amount of time to deploy new capacity, and to manage existing capacity and systems. And gains made by virtualizing and consolidating servers are often lost again as more gear is added in.
The demand for more CPU cycles and petabytes of storage won't go away. Nor will budget concerns, or the cost of power, cooling and space.
[8 radical ways to cut data center power costs and Facebook's 'green' data center design to have ripple effect]
Here's a look at how vendors, industry groups, and savvy IT and Facilities planners are meeting those challenges -- plus a few ideas that may still be a little blue-sky.
Renewable, carbon-neutral power
In addition to looking for affordability, many data center planners are looking at power sources that don ...
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Mentions: Apple Iceland Forrester Research
Data centers turn to outsourcing to meet capacity needs
The Uptime Institute, in its first annual data center survey, reported Tuesday that more than a third of the large companies it surveyed -- 36 percent -- expect to run out of capacity in at least one of their data centers over the next 18 months.
Server consolidation and upgrading of power and cooling equipment are the primary ways the companies said they would boost their capacity, the survey showed. But a significant portion -- 29 percent -- said they plan to lease collocation space, while 20 percent will move workloads to the cloud.
That's notable because large companies traditionally have kept their IT operations in-house, said Matt Stansberry, a research analyst with the Uptime Institute. "This is a trend we've been seeing," toward more companies managing IT operations that are outside their own data centers, he said.
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Mentions: Uptime Institute Digital Realty
Businesses don't know data center's environmental effect
A survey of 100 CIOs and data center managers in the UK has shown that 53% of respondents do not know the environmental impact of their own data centers.
The survey was conducted by researchers Vanson Bourne on behalf of data center infrastructure management solutions provider nlyte Software.
"They're not aware that the data center is a hungry user [of energy] because they don't measure and monitor their business, so they're unable to identify it," said Rob Neave, co-founder and VP of IT and sustainability at nlyte Software.
Although the majority (62%) of businesses said that increased legislation, like the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, would influence them to re-evaluate their data center's green policy, a fifth of respondents said they would not. Eighteen percent did not know if they would.
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Pacific Gas & Electric: Data center divvied up into pods
When it comes to green IT, Pacific Gas & Electric knows how to talk the talk. The California utility already promotes energy conservation to its customers through a variety of incentives targeting everyone from consumers to data center operators.
It also launches internal initiatives, such as its recent "Think before you print" campaign. But the utility practices what it preaches by making green-IT best practices its gold standard. Users don't opt in -- they have to opt out.
For example, all printers are set to two-sided, black-and-white printing by default. Want to print color or one-sided? You'll need to change the print settings for the job. That policy alone cut printing by 51 million pages last year, saving $460,000 in paper and consumables costs, says Scott McDonald, IT architect.
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Mentions: Pacific Gas & Electric
Facebook Shows How to Save $230K in Your Data Center
Want to hear something amazing? In one 56,000-foot data center, Facebook was able to save $230,000 per year in cooling costs just by changing the way the air flowed across the hot equipment.
Do you know what that means? That whoever laid out the servers and cooling in your data center was probably an idiot. Or at least was not being, um, systematic about the whole process.
A few years ago I did a series of stories on how to build more power-efficient data center and discovered -- from data center and facilities managers -- that most data centers are set up for heating and cooling as if the job were given to a monkey with one of those genetic conditions that keeps it from feeling heat or cold.
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Mentions: Uptime Institute Facebook
Should Fuel Cells Power Your Data Center?
Fuel cells are large containers that use hydrogen gas to generate power. Because they create no emissions, they also generate good publicity for companies concerned about their carbon footprints. At the First National Bank of Omaha, fuel cells provide high reliability and make a bold environmental statement to bank and credit card customers. Google uses fuel cells from Bloom Energy to power parts of its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters facility-also to prove its commitment to green computing. However, although the technology has been in use for more than 10 years, it has failed to become widely adopted, says Jim Tully, a Gartner analyst.
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Mentions: Bloom Energy
The new green data center: From energy avoidance to energy efficiency
In my research talking with IT pros around the world, I have found that only 10-15% of respondents say that their organizations have a green mandate or a carbon reduction focus. But if I ask those same people if they have a concern or requirement to boost productivity, reduce costs, address power, cooling, footprint along with technology disposition issues while facing growth and shrinking budget requirements and the responses jump into 55-75% range.
This is an example of the “Green Gap” -- the perception that green is all about reducing carbon footprints.
In fact, there many different facets to being green, a key one being that by addressing business issues or barriers, enabling efficiency and productivity with an optimized environment, the benefits are both economic and environmental.
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Cisco looks to accelerate virtualization deployments
Network World —
Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their data centers, company officials said at a Cisco customer event this week.
Demand for virtualized data centers is high, they said, due to the complexity of managing and provisioning physical resources, securing that environment, maximizing utilization of assets, numerous network connections, and the rising costs of facilities and energy usage.
“Power is increasing at a faster rate than the top line revenue of your company,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s data center, switching and services group. McCool spoke at the Cisco Live conference in San Francisco.
Virtualization removes the logical view of an infrastructure from the physical underpinnings, thus making data center resources transparent to an application and enabling that application to move, McCool said. Cisco itself was faced with a “$100 million server” issue ...
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Mentions: Cisco
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