1. Doug Mohney

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    1. Mentioned In 209 Articles

    2. Prepare for HPC, big data -- it has to be green by Doug Mohney

      Prepare for HPC, big data -- it has to be green by Doug Mohney

      Datapipe's announcement it is putting its latest and greatest cloud technology into Verne Global's data center in Iceland (Disclaimer: Yes, Verne underwrites this blog) should be a wake-up call to the rest of the industry.  High performance computing and/or Big Data applications are 1) Big growth areas as the world wants to accumulate more data and analyze it and 2) Big whopping energy consumers.

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    3. And today's cost of carbon is... by Doug Mohney

      And today's cost of carbon is... by Doug Mohney

      About two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Energy updated energy efficiency standards for microwaves. Pretty much a yawner, except for the fact the agency is now assigning a higher value to the social harm caused by the cost of carbon dioxide emissions. Green data centers might want to take note since the ruling will no doubt end up being applied to other devices down the road. In 2013, the harm assumed by carbon dioxide emissions came to about $22 per ton. Energy department regulars are now using a figure of about $36 a ton, according to a Washington Post article. If my rusty math skills are close, that's nearly a 40 percent increase over one year.

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    4. Bloom Energy continues data center progress, but-- by Doug Mohney

      Bloom Energy continues data center progress, but-- by Doug Mohney

      Verizon is the latest company to install Bloom Energy fuel cells, announcing it will put systems in three facilities. All of them are in California, however, casting a slight cloud over the announcement IMHO. Two of Verizon call switching centers in Los Angeles and San Francisco, plus a data center in San Jose are expected to generate more than 16 million kilowatt hours of clean electricity for Verizon in California each year. It's part of a bigger $100 million solar and fuel cell project to power 19 facilities in seven states in the U.S., enabling the carrier to generate more than 90 million kilowatts of hours of energy annually. 

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    5. Video, Big Data, Both? by Doug Mohney

      Video, Big Data, Both? by Doug Mohney

      Will video, big data or both categories drive your next wave of data center expansion? Or will you simply go to "the cloud" to store video and analyze numbers? I'm betting for the majority of you, it's going to be big data. Cisco and others are in love with the whole exponential growth of video theme so they can sell more network gear and services, but sooner or later the growth curve will level off. Yes, I said "Level Off." I know YouTube continues to grow and brags about more than a billion unique users visiting each month -- one out of every two people on the Internet --and 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, but there's an upper bound to growth.

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      Mentions: Cisco Doug Mohney
    6. Flexibility, software, simplification driving hardware changes by Doug Mohney

      Flexibility, software, simplification driving hardware changes by Doug Mohney

      Las Vegas, Nevada -- The flexibility of software and the desire for simplicity continues to drive changes throughout the IT world. Managers want fewer servers and boxes from fewer (but not a single, sole-source) vendor and the ability to add, subtract, and move around functions between servers without having to lock those functions onto one platform. At CTIA this week, Ciena is preaching “consolidation” for network operators with a data center twist. Service provider are currently operating parallel optical and packet (IP) networks, said Ciena’s Industry Marketing Director Barry Zipp. If you’re into the 7 layer model, one layer is optical transport with IP stacked on top of it.

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      Mentions: Doug Mohney Ciena
    7. The little guys: Survival vs Green by Doug Mohney

      The little guys: Survival vs Green  by Doug Mohney

      Are data center operators burned out from working on energy efficiency? A survey from the Uptime Institute suggests it. About 50 percent of respondents in North America said they consider energy efficiency to be very important in their companies, according to a summary piece published by IDG News. Last year, the number was 52 percent while in 2011 it was 58 percent, with the decline bigger at smaller data centers. An Uptime Institute spokesperson attributed the lack of interest to a combination of factors, including less resources (people, money) to devote to energy efficiency projects, and some "sick of hearing" about success stories with big budget projects.

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    8. Green shows up in PERSPECTIVES 13 by Doug Mohney

      Green shows up in PERSPECTIVES 13 by Doug Mohney

      Last week I was in Orlando, Florida for GENBAND's user event, PERSPECTIVES 13. Two minutes into the open keynote, GENBAND Chairman David Walsh is talking about the need of data centers to "power up and cool down" -- not exactly a message I was expecting at a carrier and enterprise-focused event. "Bandwidth, power, and infrastructure costs have all gone down over the past decade," Walsh said. "Power costs have gone up 50 to 100 percent." Walsh's day job is a Managing Director of One Equity Partners, a firm that manages $10 billion in private investments for JPMorgan Chase & Company. His favorite green topic for his address was Inertech, a company that designs and manufactures modular data center pods and energy-efficient cooling systems. 

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      Mentions: Doug Mohney LEED
    9. Flashy PR isn’t making green go by Doug Mohney

      Flashy PR isn’t making green go by Doug Mohney

      Being green is old. It doesn’t matter if it is saving energy and water within the data center or finding renewable power, the sizzle that once surrounded green has been slowly eroded by the fact that the most practical and reasonable near-term solutions are dull and boring. I say this all against the backdrop of Europe and Japan back-peddling on cutting carbon emissions because they’re trying to ditch nuclear – a “grey” power choice, given the consequences of a major accident. The U.S. steadily grows its production of natural gas through fracking and may even end up as an oil exporter while the developing world uses a patchwork of fossil fuels and renewables to run its data centers and broadband infrastructure.

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    10. New green data center builds vs. software - I'm with the software (sorta) by Doug Mohney

      New green data center builds vs. software - I'm with the software (sorta) by Doug Mohney

      If you aren't hip to the latest fad of building/moving your data center to some northern climate for free cooling and renewable power, you can relocate right next to a liquified natural gas plant for a reduction in power usage. I myself am leaning towards more software tweaks as a better solution for most cases. TeraCool, as described in this DataCenterKnowledge piece, has come up with a way to use waste heat from a data center to warm natural gas. This would generate power -- liquid to gas spins a turbine to get electricity. Excess cooling from the LNG infrastructure is applied to data center operations. The various techniques are all patent pending, of course.

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      Mentions: Doug Mohney
    11. Better efficiency through better storage – haven’t we been here before? by Doug Mohney

      Better efficiency through better storage – haven’t we been here before? by Doug Mohney

      New research out of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and MIT claims data energy usage can be cut by 35 percent by simply storing fewer copies of files. I’m having some déjà vu all over again since de-duping has been proposed before. It’s all on paper (well, disk) at the moment, with plans to test network coding next year with “eventually” commercializing the software technology – and hey, if it’s that great, why not simply open source it rather than take 5 years to implement?

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      Mentions: Doug Mohney MIT
    12. Europe's continued green rollback will ripple by Doug Mohney

      Europe's continued green rollback will ripple by Doug Mohney

      A recent news glut about green data centers popping up in Northern Europe is overshadowing more fundamental changes on green energy costs. Incentives to go north for carbon credits may not as great since Germany is backing down on its investments, causing investor concern, according to the Financial Times (FT). "...[J]itters are clearly growing about the cost of talking climate change and building a green electricity infrastructure in the world's oldest industrial powers," says Pilita Clark, Environmental Correspondent at FT.

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      Mentions: Europe Doug Mohney
    13. Progress towards 64-bit ARM continues by Doug Mohney

      Progress towards 64-bit ARM continues by Doug Mohney

      ARM and TSMC announced the first tape-out of an ARM Cortex-A57 processor on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process technology, hitting the first milestone to roll out a 64-bit ARMv8 processor on TSMC's technologies. A 64-bit ARM is expected to give Intel a run for its money in the power-efficient server race. The Cortex-A57 is ARM's highest performing processor while FinFET technology is a process to cram more transistors onto a chip by using 3D structures. FinFET will cost 2 percent to 5 percent more to produce than existing "flat" silicon production, but could yield up to 37 percent faster performance while using less than half the dynamic power - Hello! Less power AND more performance per watt -- according to a Synopsys.com primer. Designers can choose between either running transistors faster at the same amount of power or run them at the same performance using less power.

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    14. Keeping up to date on quick energy policy remorse by Doug Mohney

      Keeping up to date on quick energy policy remorse by Doug Mohney

      Countries around the globe are thinking and rethinking their energy policies. No nukes have become maybe nukes in Japan, the glut of U.S. natural gas may turn into a leaking problem, and Germany isn't getting green fast enough while it plans to shut down its nuclear power plants. Do you have some quick energy policy angst at your organization?

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      Mentions: Doug Mohney Forbes
    15. eBay provides new green data center metrics by Doug Mohney

      eBay provides new green data center metrics by Doug Mohney

      Last week, eBay rolled out its Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) metrics and dashboard. It looks good, provides power and CO2 metrics tied to transactions, and allows the company the ability to measure and fine tune improvements to its data centers.  Can't wait to see the open source clone!

      DSE, shown for the first time at The Green Grid Forum, provides eBay a way to see the cost, performance and environmental impact of customer buy and sell transactions.  The new cliché for DSE is a "miles per gallon" metric for technical infrastructure, allowing eBay to observer the cost, performance, environmental impact, and revenue on customer transactions.  For the online auction company, transactions are straightforward: bid, buy, sell.

      Now that eBay has DSE, it can make what the company calls more informed decisions on how to optimize everything in its technical infrastructure, including the sourcing of electrical power, data center infrastructure ...

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  1. Categories

    1. Data Center Design:

      Construction, Container, Data Center Outages, Monitoring, Power and Cooling
    2. Policy:

      Cap and Trade, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Reduction Commitment, Carbon Tax, Emissions
    3. Power:

      Biomass, Fossil Fuel, Fuel Cell, Geothermal, Hydro, Nuclear, Solar, Wind
    4. Application:

      Cloud Computing, Grid Computing
    5. Technology:

      Microblogging, Networking, Servers, Storage, Supercomputer
  2. About Doug Mohney

    Doug Mohney

    Doug Mohney has clocked over twenty years in the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) arena between working in real world businesses and writing about them.
     
    Doug has written for a diverse group of publications over the past dozen years, including
    Boardwatch, Mobile Radio Technology/Urgent Communications, The Inquirer, and VON Magazine, covering telecommunications, the Internet, and online video. Most recently, he has served at Editor in Chief, Telecom and Digital Media Group, FierceMarkets and Editor-in-Chief at VON Magazine (the pulvermedia incarnation).
     
    His hands-on/real-world experience includes stints at two high-tech start-up companies, one that went public (DIGEX) and one that didn’t (SkyCache/Cidera). Joining DIGEX as employee number 10 in 1993, Doug had a ring-side seat to the trials and tribulations of a fast growing, VC-funded startup doing the boom growth years of the Internet.
     
    You can follow him on Twitter @DougonIPcomm or reach him via email at
    moo@vegascommando.com.