Written by Ryan Hollitz | 03 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

We've heard of data centers that are running on green power, though these are often mostly done through buying energy credits for distant generating facilities. But Woodstock, IL-based Other World Computing is the first to have 100% on-site wind power to run its operations. The 39 meter (128 foot) diameter, 500 kW turbine is expected to generate an estimated 1,250,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. This is more than twice as much electricity as is used by all of OWC's operations. The facility is grid-tied, and will sell the excess power back to the local utility, as well as being able to utilize grid power as backup during slack wind periods.

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Written by Ryan Hollitz | 02 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

1&1 Internet, Inc., the world’s largest Web host by known servers, today announced that its Lenexa, Kansas Data Center has been recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a Green Power Partner for its annual purchase of 17.5 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power (electricity that is generated from environmentally preferable renewable resources, like wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal). This is equivalent to 100 percent of the purchased electricity use for the Kansas Data Center.

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Written by Ryan Hollitz | 02 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

New facility a showcase of energy efficient design and function, and a test bed for data center optimization

ARMONK and SYRACUSE, N.Y., Dec. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM ( IBM), Syracuse University, with partners IBM and New York State, today celebrated the construction of its new Green Data Center (GDC) -- a showcase of world-class innovations in advanced energy-efficient information technology and building systems.

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Written by Ryan Hollitz | 02 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

Data growth will hit 650% over next half-decade, Gartner says

Enterprise data needs will grow a staggering 650% over the next five years, and that's just one of numerous challenges IT leaders have to start preparing for today, analysts said as the annual Gartner Data Center Conference kicked off in Las Vegas Tuesday morning.

Gartner buying AMR Research in $64 million deal

Rising use of social networks, rising energy costs and a need to understand new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing are among the top issues IT leaders face in the evolving data center, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio said in an opening keynote address.

The 650% enterprise data growth over the next five years poses a major challenge, in part because 80% of the new data will be unstructured, Cappuccio said. IT executives have to make sure data can be audited and meet regulatory and compliance objectives, while attempting to ensure that growing storage needs don't break the bank. Technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication and automated storage tiering can help reduce costs.

"If you're not doing thin provisioning in storage today, you need to start," Cappuccio said. "It's an easy, logical way to reduce storage consumption."

Article continues here. [networkworld.com]

Written by Ryan Hollitz | 01 December 2009
Posted in Blog - Green IT

Data Center Underneath Cathedral Will Heat Finland Homes

Data centers generate a lot of heat.  In fact, over 50 percent of the energy used by data centers is for cooling the servers, not computing.  Almost all efforts to make them more efficient focus on keeping the equipment cool with less energy.  But what if all that heat could be used for good? We recently wrote about the potential of using waste heat to generate electricity, but this time the benefit of the heat is the heat itself.

The excess heat generated by a new Finnish data center will be used to warm homes throughout Helsinki.  The data center will be builit under the Uspenski Cathedral, nestled in the bedrock in a former WWII bomb shelter.  The waste heat will be captured and pumped into the city heating network that consists of water-heated pipes that deliver heat to homes.

The data center, being built by company Academica, will be able to heat 500 large houses, equivalent to the energy output of one large wind turbine.

In order to attain the title of "world's greenest," the data center will also consume half the energy of a typical data center.  Academica expects the efficient data center to cut half a million dollars from their energy bills.

via Reuters