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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Will Apple’s latest “reveal” of its new data center secrets bring others to go green? I know how Apple likes to imply it invented the graphic user interface (GUI), mouse, PC, tablet, and smartphone, so I won’t short them on a try at popularizing themselves as the experts in the green data center field

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?

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 ...

Icelandic President Olafur Rangar Grimsson says its low-carbon economy helped it recover from the country's banking collapse in 2008 and its lessons could help other European countries as well, reports oilprice.com. Speaking before members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at a February 27 meeting in Paris, Grimsson held up his country's move into 100 percent renewable power as a reason why the country made it through the its catastrophic 2008 banking collapse.