Articles from ComputerWeekly.com

Birkbeck College consolidates servers to cut PUE rating to 1.3

Explore ComputerWeekly.com (Mar 20 2012) Construction , Power and Cooling

Birkbeck College has consolidated four equipment rooms into one £700,000 datacentre with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of just 1.3. The University of London college's datacentre will support the IT requirements of diverse teaching and research staff and facilitate ongoing innovation, including desktop virtualisation. The datacentre was designed and implemented by 2bm, which included its Sensorium metering product. This keeps track of the performance of the equipment and ancillary plant, including the cooling unit, UPS and PDUs.

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Comment Mentions:   Forrester Research   Cisco

Gartner: Build your own datacentre rather than hosting

Explore ComputerWeekly.com (Nov 28 2011) Servers

Comment "It’s startling that in today’s volatile environment Gartner is prescribing such a high risk strategy. Building your own datacentre means ..." - ControlCircle

In a session covering best practices in saving datacentre costs at the Gartner Data Center & IT Operations Summit 2011, Rakesh Kumar, Gartner research vice-president, said it was cheaper to build a new datacentre than use a hosted service. “In this economic climate where people are under pressure to save costs, we are seeing a net increase in new datacentre designs. People are finding the capital to build 30,000 square foot plus datacentres.” His revelation is astonishing, given that a European datacentre costs around £25m to construct. Hosted services are becoming very expensive, he said. Gartner estimates the cost of renting rackspace in a hosted datacentre is doubling every two years. “If you pay a hosting company over four years, you will have paid for a new datacentre,” said Kumar. Given that a datacentre building will last 25 years, he recommends sweating the asset over moving to a hosted datacentre ... (Read Full Article)

1 Comment Mentions:   Gartner   Facebook

How Experian is retro-fitting its datacentre to boost efficiency

Explore ComputerWeekly.com (Nov 25 2011) Power and Cooling , Carbon Footprint , Servers

To most people, Experian is a credit rating agency. Consumers only hear about the company when they are turned down for a loan or credit card. But the firm does far more than this – it is a data company. It provides analytics to banks, marketing services to help retailers understand customer demographics, and has a part to play in fraud detection. Its datacentre knows a lot about you. Experian operates in more than 50 countries globally and runs twin datacentres in Nottingham, Texas and Brazil, along with a number of datacentres in Asia. Barry Westbury, operations director, global technology services at Experian, is responsible for managing the two established facilities in Texas and the UK. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   ASHRAE   Facebook   IBM

Green IT: Software for counting carbon and controlling costs

Explore ComputerWeekly.com (Sep 9 2009) Monitoring , Cap and Trade , Carbon Footprint , Emissions , Fossil Fuel

Reports early in 2009 about the ICT sector's carbon dioxide emissions must have caused embarrassment to senior board members. In one case, it was suggested that a North American datacentre belonging to a major search engine might need as much power as all the homes in Newcastle, UK. So the rapid development by several ICT companies of a whole range of software with an environmental theme has come not a moment too soon. (Read Full Article)

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