Green IT

New federal data center energy-efficiency guidelines on tap

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 05 March 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

The Feds are starting to think lean and green! Excellent! :)

via [techtarget.com]
By Mark Fontecchio, News Writer
26 Feb 2010 | SearchDataCenter.com

The federal government and major industry groups are on the cusp of developing widely accepted standards for measuring a data center's energy efficiency.

Along with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is working with six data center industry groups: 7x24 Exchange, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the Green Grid, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Uptime Institute. The goals? To standardize data center efficiency metrics, which could help prevent "greenwashing," and to give data center pros tools to reduce energy consumption in their facilities.

Earlier this month, the coalition agreed to guiding principles regarding power usage effectiveness (PUE), which compares total data center power with IT power used. And by June, the EPA's Energy Star program will launch a benchmarking program that will enable companies to rate their own data centers on a scale of 1 to 100. If they're green enough, data centers can even earn Energy Star status.

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State of Green Business Forum 2010: Can IT Solve the World's Problems?

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 08 February 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

We can make a difference. This is exactly the movement we need.

via [greenbiz.com]

It's a widely repeated statistic that the IT industry is responsible for about 2 percent of the world's carbon footprint, largely due to the energy used to power electronics.

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Warming Up To Iceland

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 12 January 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

Now some good news, folks are looking at the naturally cooling places to put data centers. So SMART, right!

via [forbes.com]

Server hosting company sees potential for free cooling and cheap power.

Verne Global CTO Tate Cantrell

Moving data centers out of the big cities to places where power and cooling is cheaper has been under way for the better part of a decade.

Companies like Google ( GOOG- news - people ) and Microsoft (MSFT - news - people ) are locating data centers in the cool and windy Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. Others have moved to Arizona, where nuclear power is plentiful and cheap. Still others have buried data centers beneath the ground in old mines, where the temperature is always cool.

Data centers are expected to move to even more extreme locations over the next decade. Forbes caught up with Tate Cantrell, chief technology officer at Verne Global--a data center developer based in Iceland and Washington, D.C., to talk about the shifts and what's driving them.

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Green IT Era : Year 2010

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 12 January 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

This is going to be a good year for the planet. If we can just get mojor corporations on board, then BOOM! :)

via [amidstthesea.blogspot.com]

Green IT: Colour for 2010

Green IT, until now preached more than practised, will be a keen area of focus. Springboard Research in a recent survey pointed out that fewer than 10 percent of enterprises in Asia have formally implemented a Green IT strategy.

However, a majority of enterprises including IT majors — TCS, Infosys, Wipro — have taken steps to implement Green IT at their end. Wipro, for instance, is planning to reduce its carbon footprint from the present 3.96 tonnes per employee to 2.5 tonnes in the next five to seven years. Global firms like IBM, Cisco and HP have already initiated steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

Analysts also say that the initial uptake for Green IT would be from a cost efficiency point. The study’s findings also indicate that the market also needs aggressive education as nearly 15 percent of respondents claimed that they did not know how or where to begin with regard to Green IT.

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Will Google Energy Power Its Data Centers?

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 12 January 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

I love this company. They ar so innovative and really change the game when they get involved. :)

via [datacenterknowledge.com]

A look at a working solar thermal power generation facility.

Google (GOOG) has formed a new subsidiary to buy and sell power on the wholesale market, and hopes the move will help provide more renewable energy to meet its corporate carbon reduction goals. The company formed Google Energy last month and has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to allow it to participate in the energy markets.

“Right now, we can’t buy affordable, utility-scale, renewable energy in our markets,” Google representative Niki Fenwick told CNet. “We want to buy the highest quality, most affordable renewable energy wherever we can and use the green credits.”

Target: Data Centers?
Google isn’t saying how it will use any green energy it generates or purchases, but the company’s vast, power-hungry data center network could be the primary beneficiary. Google has shown an intense focus on energy efficiency in the design and operation of its data centers, and has also invested in renewable energy, primarily through its Google.org non-profit arm.

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DOE Offers $47M For Green Data Centers

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 07 January 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

This is some great news for the Green IT movement.

via [nicernews.com] by Author: Ariel Schwartz
servers_big

Think the U.S. Department of Energy might stop throwing cash at the renewable energy sector sometime soon? Not even close. The DOE’s promised $30 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy projects is still pouring forth. The latest recipient is the data center sector, which will get $47 million for over a dozen efficiency-improving projects.

It might not be the sexiest grant (that award goes to the ARPA-E project), but industry servers are responsible for a whopping 1.5% of all U.S. energy use. As cloud computing becomes more popular, that number will grow exponentially. To that end, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has selected 14 projects to focus on, including Alcatel-Lucent’s data center cooling project, HP’s power supply chain projects, and IBM’s equipment and software project. Even a few startups made the list–stealth company SeaMicro took $9.3 million and 3 year-old PowerAssure received $5 million.

According to Chu, cutting down on data center energy usage could potentially save 400 trillion BTU’s of energy each year, or enough to power 2 million homes. $47 million probably won’t be a big enough boost to overhaul the entire sector, but it’s a start. And in this case, data center operators have a powerful economic motivator to keep the research going: cost. It’s expensive for data centers to use so much electricity, which is why we’ve seen a slew of efficiency projects in the past year. Even without ample government funding, the data center industry is going to have to become a whole lot more efficient if it wants to survive.

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Are We On the Cusp of Dramatically More Efficient Computing?

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 05 January 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

Moore's Law is so amazing, just when we thought that we would reach the end of our current technology, so new technology steps up to take it's place.

via [matternetwork.com] By Timothy B. Hurst of EarthandIndustry.com

There have been several quiet revolutions in the history of the computer chip industry, but as news filtered out of the scientific world of materials science this summer, we learned that we may just be on the cusp of a revolution that could not only have a dramatic effect on superconducter speed, it could make silicon wafers a thing of the past.

Physicists at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips. And some companies are betting that bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) could even become the bedrock of an entirely new kind of computing industry — one based on “spintronics“. Spintronic devices use the spin, rather than the charge, of materials to store information.

Theoretical and experimental physicists led by Yulin Chen and Zhi-Xun Shen at the Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Science tested the behavior of electrons in the compound bismuth telluride. The results, published in June at Science Express, show a clear signature of a material that enables the free flow of electrons across its surface with no loss of energy.

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Investment in green IT will continue to grow despite weak Copenhagen agreement on CO2 says investment bank Jefferies

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 04 January 2010
Posted in Blog - Green IT

via [documentmanagementnews.com]

Despite the Copenhagen climate change conference not coming up with the goods, there will be continued growth in green IT investment, says investment bank Jefferies.

Jefferies' CleanTech investor survey, based on responses among over 200 participating institutional investors, found that government subsidies and a general recovery of the credit and broader financial markets were the most important drivers for green IT growth - not a strong agreement at Copenhagen on global CO2 emission cuts.

Investors are confident that government subsidies are likely to remain the same or increase. As a result, the investment community is positive in their outlook towards the broader clean technology sector.

Europe is seen as leading the pack ahead of the US and Asia in terms of driving green IT innovation, said survey respondents.

Bruce Huber, head of Jefferies' European CleanTech investment banking group, said, "Europe continues to be perceived as a major innovation hub for CleanTech, which may be why continued incentive plans at the country level that nurtured the European CleanTech industry are seen as more crucial to investment and continued growth than the outcome at Copenhagen."

He said, "What is clear is that both local government incentives and transnational policies aimed at putting the brakes on climate change are fundamental to the continued growth of the CleanTech industry."

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The Hot Aisle Predictions

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 24 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

Here is some great insight as the what may come in the coming years.

via [ctoedge.com] Written by Julius Neudorfer

As we wrap up the end of the first decade of the new millennium, I felt compelled to think about what the first year of the next decade might bring.

First, a quick look back. 1999 was a wild time for IT. Y2K anticipation and remediation spelled good economic times for almost anyone who had anything to do with computers. After it was over, the lights were still on and there was still money in the bank statements. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, but many wanted to know if it was all an overblown threat ... and some Y2K consultants started driving cabs in 2000. Some data centers were still being designed for 35-50 watts per SF, with 500-1000 watts per rack. The hot aisle-cold aisle concept was not yet a commonly accepted standard practice.

2001 brought a sobering new reality to the U.S. and the world. It affected people in a way not seen since Pearl Harbor in 1941. For the government and IT, there was recognition that “cyber security” had a new importance. It was no longer just hackers seeing if they could deface the Washington Post for kicks.

In 2002, the U.S. and most of the world’s economies were still reeling and IT suffered. By the end of 2003, we began to return to the new “normal.” IT and the U.S. economy were somewhat back and on the upswing.

By 2003, average density was 50-75 watts per SF, racks 1-2 KW.

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300 Million-Year-Old Limestone Cave to Cool Data

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 22 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

Now we are talking some sense. Using the already naturally cooling abilities of our planet to help us, brilliant!

via [cleantechnica.com] Written by Susan Kraemer

After a good 20,000 years out of caves, we are heading back to them - and just like your worst fears, it’s the damn global warmers and Al Gore-ists leading the way, because it saves so much energy.

It turns out that limestone caverns might be the cheapest and best option for carbon neutral data-center cooling, because by nature limestone can absorb 1.5 BTUs per square foot for free. And data centers need lots of energy for cooling.

So this time we’re taking computers back in there with us. Or rather we’re leaving them down there. At least the data centers, that is.

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Powerful Firewall Protection

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 19 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

More power from your firewall. Doing more with less is always a green solution!

via [processor.com] by Holly Dolezalek

Palo Alto Networks Specializes In Firewalls That Do More With Less
Firewalls first came out in the late 1980s when security breaches drew attention to the need to make networks more secure. In those early days, just having a firewall made a network more secure, because hackers hadn’t yet written applications that could get around it. But as hackers have created new applications, the firewall has become like a utility belt with more and more necessary gadgets—URL filtering, content filtering, intrusion detection—to block new threats that can dodge the firewall’s port-based security.

Then came unified threat management, or UTM, the practice of putting all those gadgets in the same box as the firewall. Vendors touted the benefits of UTM, suggesting that the one-box solution was the way to have a simpler but more effective security infrastructure.

But to Chris King, director of product marketing for security software provider Palo Alto Networks (www.paloaltonetworks.com), UTM was just putting old code in new boxes. “The way that traditional firewalls have denied or allowed traffic is by network port, but applications stopped respecting their assigned port years ago,” says King. “So organizations have had to add more and more to the traditional firewall to help it do what it’s supposed to do. Our position is to stop with the Band-Aids and fix the core problem.”

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Green IT

New federal data center energy-efficiency guidelines on tap

State of Green Business Forum 2010: Can IT Solve the World's Problems?

Warming Up To Iceland

Server hosting company sees potential for free cooling and cheap power.

Verne Global CTO Tate Cantrell

Green IT Era : Year 2010

Will Google Energy Power Its Data Centers?

DOE Offers $47M For Green Data Centers

Are We On the Cusp of Dramatically More Efficient Computing?

Investment in green IT will continue to grow despite weak Copenhagen agreement on CO2 says investment bank Jefferies

The Hot Aisle Predictions

300 Million-Year-Old Limestone Cave to Cool Data

Powerful Firewall Protection

More Articles...