Solar power has been only capable of producing a small part of data centre energy needs, but this may change, says Peter Judge Solar power has always seemed a good long term bet for renewable energy. After all, pretty much every single Joule of energy we use on the planet comes from the sun originally The sun’s energy is caught by plants, which make fuels, either through the long process of fossilisation producing oil and gas, or by directly producing wood, or man-made ethanol to burn. Animals’ energy comes from plants, and the sun drives the water cycle which produces hydro-electric energy. Nuclear power uses energy stored from older suns where the heavier elements are made. Geothermal energy does include energy originating on earth – it is the heat of the earth’s core, but it is maintained at that temperature by radioactive decay inside the earth.

Survey reveals use of multiple devices, acceleration of business and cost are main incentives of cloud Research commissioned by CSC has revealed that the main incentive for organisations to adopt cloud technology is the desire to connect its employees to a multitude of devices. The research, conducted by market researchers TNS, surveyed 3,645 IT decision makers from private and public sector organisations from eight countries on cloud computing usage trends. Flexibility and cost The ability to access information across a variety of devices was given by 33 percent as their reason for moving to the cloud, a figure which increased to 46 percent among small businesses in the US. Other popular reasons included the acceleration of business, with 21 percent, while 17 percent said it was a cost cutting measure.

Apple is considering a data centre in Prineville Oregon, near to Facebook, a move sure to anger Greenpeace Apple is reportedly considering following in the footsteps of Facebook by building a mammoth data centre in Prineville, Oregon. However if the reports are true, the move will surely incur the wrath of environmental campaigners Greenpeace. According to OregonLive.com, which cited two people with direct knowledge of Apple’s plans, Apple is close to making a decision about whether to build a large data centre in Prineville, which will be located a quarter mile south of the Facebook server farm that opened in 2011.

latency, and links to Icelandic data centres Wait years for a fibre-optic cable, and two come along at once. The United States and Europe will be soon linked by not one, but two new trans-Atlantic 100Gbps cables. The Emerald Express – so called because it touches down in Ireland – is a £191 million submarine cable system which also has a spur to Iceland on its way from New York. It is expected to be finished by late 2012, and will join the Hibernian Express, which (obviously) goes to Scotland, starting in New York and going via Halifax in Scotland, which should be running by mid-2012.

STEC has expanded its range of Solid State Drives aimed at enterprises deploying heavy-duty workloads Solid-state drive (SSD) specialist STEC has expanded its ZeusIOPS SSD family to include an ultra-high-endurance model. Purpose-built for write-intensive enterprise applications, the company’s ZeusIOPS XE (Extreme Endurance) SSD is a Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash-based drive that uses STEC’s CellCare technology to enable at least 30 full-capacity writes per day for five years. Offered in MLC capacities of 300GB and 600GB, the XE SSDs support latency responses up to 50 microseconds and have a 6Gbit serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface.

Batteries only last a few years and contain noxious chemicals, says Active Power Green considerations will prompt more data centres to adopt mechanical flywheel-based uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) to replace environmentally damaging batteries, a London conference heard. Mechanical flywheels can store enough energy to keep data centres running in the event of a power cut, and they compare well with batteries on most measures, Active Power said, and showed a containerised flywheel power supply at the Data Center Dynamics event in London.

Cutting costs and carbon is critical, but Romonet’s Zahl Limbuwala says the way data centre services are ‘charged back’ is the key We all agree that cutting energy costs and cutting carbon are both vital in the data centre – but the way that data centre user costs are measured and portioned out needs to radically change if we want to fully realise the benefits of the latest energy efficient technologies. For me, the usual way that costs are divided out is badly flawed – and this is something that occurs in businesses across the world. It fails the user who might want to reap the returns of buying the latest energy efficient IT and it fails the industry as a whole because it discourages people from using IT in a more innovative, responsible and energy efficient manner. In turn, this means that data centres (and the IT equipment within them ...

The Open Compute Project is looking deeper into green data centres, from storage to systems management If Facebook officials have their way, their Open Compute Project will go beyond servers and power supplies, touching on every aspect of a data centre’s infrastructure. The initiative kicked off in April when Facebook open-sourced the server and data centre specifications the social networking giant employed in building its data centre in Prineville in Oregon. The project has since enrolled an impressive array of members, from Intel, Asus and Rackspace to Mellanox, Huawei and Red Hat, not to mention a few research and education institutions. Spreading the initiative It is an indication of the various directions in which the project is rapidly moving, Amir Michael, hardware design manager at Facebook, said in an interview with eWEEK during the recently concluded SC 11 supercomputing show in Seattle. Facebook is already moving forward with the ...

IBM has said its new solar array is the first to be designed especially for powering IT systems IBM has created a solar array system designed with the data centre in mind, arguing organisations could use it to reduce the carbon footprint of their existing IT infrastructure or power sites in areas without a reliable electricity supply. The company claims the 6,000 square foot array in Bangalore, India can power 50 kilowatts of computer equipment for 330 days per year, running five hours per day. The rooftop array currently supplies nearly 20 percent of the power requirements of IBM’s India Software Lab – which consumes around 25 to 30 teraflops of compute power.

Data centres could run hotter and save energy, if vendors published accurate product information, a report says Data centre operators need more help from equipment manufacturers to save energy by running equipment at higher temperatures, according to a 451 Group report. Increasing the operating temperature in server racks helps cut cooling costs, which currently account for up to 70 percent of expenditure in data centres, but equipment makers are not giving data centre owners all the information they need, says the report .

The pre-configured 4TB-8TB DX4000 Sentinel can connect to public clouds or provide a local private cloud Digital storage specialist Western Digital announced the release of the WD Sentinel DX4000, a network storage server aimed at small and midsized businesses. The DX4000 includes the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials operating system software and the Intel D525 Dual Core Atom CPU. The DX4000 offers centralised shared storage and automatic server-based backup and restore for up to 25 devices (PC and Mac) in the network, as well as data protection with built-in hardware and software redundancy for all of the connected devices in the network.

UK data centres currently cover three square miles – says DatacenterDynamics Research Data centres in the UK occupy a total area of 7.6 million square metres (81m sq.ft.) and consume enough energy to power six million homes. DatacenterDynamics Research has been preparing for its conference at the London ExCeL International Convention Centre (ICC) by measuring up the floor-space and power consumption of the UK’s data centres. The company based its findings on data from its Global Data Center Industry Census 2011. Predictive model sizes the market The researchers, in conjunction with CBRE (CB Richard Ellis), built a predictive model based on its census to determine IT-based demand for data centres in a given location, and the context in which they operate. Other input factors such as organisational size and IT dependence were also considered and factored in with known and observed information about data centres and data centre ...

Containers got backing this week from Swedish designers and data centre nerds, says Peter Judge. How can they fail? Modular data centres, once seen as inefficient compared compared with bespoke buildings, have been rapidaly gaining acceptance. In fact, they now have endorsement from two sources almost the exact opposite of each other – hipsters and geeks. They have been simultenously adopted by a “cool” Swedish designer and been given the thumbs-up by that engaging bunch of anoraks and train-spotters, the Green Grid. A data centre fit for Mars? Modular Data Centres Stockholm is the brainchild of Jon Karlung, who designed the Bahnhof facility in Stockholm known as the “James Bond” data centre as it is designed to look like a spy’s lair. That was very much a bespoke system but Karlung has now been converted to the idea of modular.

Rackspace has expanded its support to manage OpenStack private clouds in customers’ data centres Rackspace is branching out from its cloud hosting business with the release of a supported reference architecture to allow customers to roll out their own OpenStack-based private clouds. The company will then provide support for the implementation based on its experience within its hosted managed services, or “Fanatical Support” as the company prefers to call it. A private erudition Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition is a template for building a data centre (DC) cloud, based primarily on Cisco and Dell hardware hosting an OpenStack software framework. The system can be self-built by customers or installed by Rackspace partners. Stuart Simms, vice president of OpenStack, said that there are three elements. First is the reference architecture blueprint based on Rackspace’s experience of deploying cloud. On top of that is the managed services. “For the first time Rackspace ...

The launch of the iPhone App Store created a rush to build third-party mobile services. J. Gerry Purdy explores whether the iCloud will have the same effect When Apple launched its iPhone 4S and the new iOS 5 on 4 October, the company also detailed its effort to bring more content to the cloud. Apple iCloud is a combination of free cloud-based services and a set of APIs that allow third-party developers to take advantage of storing and processing information in a virtual cloud-computing environment rather than just on a physical device such as the iPhone or iPad. The initial set of free iCloud prebuilt apps provided by Apple includes iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, iCloud Backup, Application Synchronisation and Newstand.

Gartner research has discovered a growing uptake of recovery-as-a-service (RAAS) among businesses More and more companies are adopting a cloud-based recovery service, known as recovery-as-a-service (RaaS), said Gartner. It predicted that by 2014, 30 percent of midsize companies will have adopted recovery-in-the-cloud to support IT operations recovery, up from just over 1 percent today. Cloud Recovery RaaS describes the managed replication of virtual machines (VMs) and production data in a service provider’s cloud, together with the means to activate the VMs to support either recovery testing or actual recovery operations. The location of the data centre equipment, the party housing the provider’s cloud equipment and the price vary by provider.

Embedded virtualisation makes more sense than having a layer of software sitting below the operating system, says Navin Thadani When it comes to choosing a product to virtualise your data centre, the choice can be overwhelming. VMware’s vSphere is the undisputed leader in the market, and recent announcements at the company’s VMworld conference in Copenhagen show that the company is not only expanding its enterprise cloud portfolio, but also sharpening its focus on the small and medium business market. However, there are plenty of reasons not to choose VMware. As Microsoft points out, the recent changes made by VMware to its licensing model with the release of vSphere 5 earlier this year have upset some customers. Under the company’s new vRAM-based pricing, VMware now charges per virtual machine so, in theory, the more that customers virtualise their machines the more they end up paying.

A new industry program from HP is promising to drive the advancement of low-energy server technology With the rising cost of power an increasing concern for most IT managers, a new industry program promises to help after HP unveiled its ‘Project Moonshot.’ The new industry program is made up of ia new server development platform, a customer discovery lab and partner ecosystem. This, HP promises, will help customers significantly reduce their complexity, energy use and costs. HP’s Project Moonshot (as expected) works with HP Converged Infrastructure technology to allow the sharing of resources, including storage, networking, management, power and cooling, across a wide range of servers.

Indian authorities have seized hard drives from a server linked with the Duqu worm Indian authorities have seized equipment from a data centre in Mumbai as part of the global investigation into the Duqu worm, which first appeared earlier this month. Symantec researchers who discovered the malware said that its current primary purpose appeared to be to gather intelligence from industrial control systems and had no clear targets. Important clues According to Symantec, Duqu only creates a backdoor on infected systems and connects to a command and control server somewhere in India before self-destructing after 36 days.

Apple fails again to get on the right side of green even though it is building a solar power array Apple is in the early stages of installing an array of solar panels for its data centre in Maiden, North Carolina, it has been revealed. This project, code named Project Dolphin Solar Farm A Expanded, could be seen as an effort by the company to improve its environmental image after repeated criticism over its track-record in China and its reliance on “dirty” sources to power. Slash and burn not very green Unfortunately, the company is in the process of burning and clearing 171 acres of green space near its 500,000 square foot iDataCentre - built in 2009 to house data for iTunes, MobileMe and iCloud – to build a solar power array. If estimates are to be believed, the solar power would only provide a maximum of 24 Megawatts, a fraction ...

Costas Galonis, CTO of cloud provider Cirrus Stratus, says Google’s huge energy bills mask how green cloud computing can be Is Google’s energy footprint really that big or does the sheer scale of the organisation mask a Green agenda? I think the latter is the case and I will explain why. These recent reports about Google’s large energy footprint miss the point that cloud computing offers businesses, and squeezed public sector organisations, not just a number of key advantages over conventional data centres and allied IT storage platforms, but a fundamentally greener, planet-friendly agenda. Besides direct energy savings, cloud computing offers healthy savings to a variety of direct costs which in-turn offer more indirect energy savings, by running key aspects of IT systems on a carefully planned and centralised basis.

Businesses in the UK are pushing into the cloud at a faster-than-average rate, according to VMware The UK is one of the most advanced markets for data centre virtualisation in Europe, with some British enterprises now reaching the point where 70-80 percent of their x86 estates are virtualised. So said Dave Wright, VMware’s vice president of technology services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), speaking to eWEEK Europe at the VMworld conference in Copenhagen. On average, organisations in the EMEA region have server estates that are 30-35 percent virtualised. The proportion increases for larger enterprises at the higher end of the market. However, in the UK, enterprises are moving closer to a model where the majority of their applications are running on virtual machines or in private clouds.

Microsoft has gone modular in an Iowa centre, and denies reports that humidity caused the change Microsoft has opted for a more modular design for the second phase of its data centre in West Des Moines (Iowa) in the United States, and denies recent media reports that suggest the change was becuase of humidity. The second phase of the data centre has a different design to the first phase. The Des Moines Register quoted local officials as saying this is because of the steamy summers in the US state. Steamy Summers? “I think they’re finding out that the individual units are not working so well in the Iowa humidity,” West Des Moines city planner Lynne Twedt was quoted as saying in the Des Moines Register. “They’re going to a different plan of attack with this one,” (i.e. phase two).

New formula shows how to keep users happy and keep the energy bills low by increasing server utilisation A three-man research team has come up with a four-step algorithm that may shed light on the expenses/revenue dilemma when it comes to managing data centre energy consumption. The boffins considered how servers handle jobs given them, and what impact their loading has on efficiency, creating a forumla which determines the best time to switch servers on and off, in order to save power, but make sure users are not kept waiting for service. A tricky balancing act According to the research, expectations in terms of performance and responsiveness have increased significantly over the years, with 75 percent of people stating that they would not go back to a web site that took more than 4 seconds to load. Google reports that an extra 0.5 seconds in search page generation ...