Articles from Wired News

Apple and Greenpeace Trade Blows in Data Center Grudge Match

Explore Wired News (Apr 21 2012) Construction , Power and Cooling , Fuel Cell

Call it the battle of Maiden. This week, Apple and Greenpeace traded very public barbs over how much clean power is used by Apple’s $1 billion state-of-the-art data center in Maiden, North Carolina. But it appears that much of the arguing stems from their inability to agree on what they’re arguing about. On Monday, Greenpeace released a report calling Apple’s data center a power-hungry threat to the environment, but Apple responded by saying Greenpeace got its facts wrong. The key sticking point is a simple question: How much energy is Apple’s data center burning? Greenpeace says 100 megawatts, while Apple says it’s only 20 megawatts. The truth may be somewhere in-between.

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Comment Mentions:   Apple   Greenpeace   Google

Not Easy Being Green: Are Solar Farms 'Pure Marketing'?

Explore Wired News (Mar 21 2012) Construction , Solar

Cloudline asked recently how green the cloud was , or whether green claims were more “greenwashing” than reality. Now Amazon’s James Hamilton is questioning Apple and Facebook’s seemingly easy-being-green data center solar farms. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Apple   Amazon.com   James Hamilton

2011: The Year Data Centers Turned Green

Explore Wired News (Dec 30 2011)

The amount of data the world stores is on an explosive growth curve. According to research outfit IDC, the digital universe will grow 44 times larger over the course of the decade, thanks to the rise of worldwide obsessions with things like social media and cloud computing. And that means more data centers. But this data center boom comes at a time of high energy prices and heightened concern about carbon emissions. The days of cramming truck loads of servers into a room and firing up a bunch of industrial air-conditioners to cool them are over. Data center operators are gaining control of their energy bills and earning green points by increasing data center efficiency, from server processor chips to warehouse-size buildings. There’s no how-to manual on building green data centers. The industry is feeling its way on energy efficiency — and no two data centers are alike. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Apple   Amazon.com   Iceland

IT Minds Quest for 'Holy Grail' of Data Center Metrics

Explore Wired News (Dec 9 2011) Servers

What’s the best way to measure the efficiency of a data center? No one really knows. But there’s no shortage of IT minds trying to figure it out. Last month, in partnership with Intel, data-center management software vendor iTRACS took up the challenge of developing a metric — a single number — that will allow data-center operators to assess the efficiency of their facilities relative to their bottom line, and the company is only the latest in a string of organizations trying to develop similar metrics. Industry coalition The Green Grid has been working on the problem for four years. “A lot of folks have been interested in this issue for some time, and there’s never really been a good consensus in the industry on how to tackle it,” says John Pflueger, a Green Grid board member and principal environmental strategist for Dell. “And we quickly came to the ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Intel   Gartner   The Green Grid

Water-Cooled Supercomputer Doubles as Dorm Space Heater

Explore Wired News (Jun 23 2009) Power and Cooling , Servers , Supercomputer

Massive supercomputers that devour electricity to keep them humming are not exactly the poster children for green technology. But IBM hopes to change that with its plans to build a supercomputer that will use water to keep the system cool and even recycle some of the waste heat to help heat the university where it’s housed. The technology could lead to a reduction in overall energy consumption by at least 40 percent, when compared to similar air-cooled machines, says the company. “Energy is arguably the number one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century,” says Dimos Poulikakos, lead investigator of the project. “We cannot afford anymore to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone.” Supercomputers are used in energy research labs such as Argonne National Laboratory, in space research by NASA and at universities for scientific research, all applications which have ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Europe   IBM