Tag Archives: Data Center

Google obtains a Renewable Energy Power Purchase Agreement in Texas

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Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The structure of this agreement is similar to our earlier commitments in Iowa and Oklahoma. Due to the current structure of the market, we can’t consume the renewable energy produced by the wind farm directly, but the impact on our overall carbon footprint and the amount of renewable energy on the grid is the same as if we could consume it. After purchasing the renewable energy, we’ll retire the renewable energy credits (RECs) and sell the energy itself to the wholesale market. We’ll apply any additional RECs produced under this agreement to reduce our carbon footprint elsewhere.<

See on googleblog.blogspot.ca

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Inside look at General Motors’ new hyper-green data center

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WARREN, Michigan—General Motors has gone through a major transformation … a three-year effort to reclaims its own IT after 20 years of outsourcing.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The first physical manifestation of that transformation is here at Warren, where GM has built the first of two enterprise data centers. The $150 million Warren Enterprise Data Center will cut the company’s energy consumption for its enterprise IT infrastructure by 70 percent, according to GM’s CIO Randy Mott. If those numbers hold up, the center will pay for itself with that and other savings from construction within three years. […]

The data center is part of a much larger “digital transformation” at the company, Mott said. GM is consolidating its IT operations from 23 data centers scattered around the globe (most of them leased) and hiring its own system engineers and developers for the first time since 1996. Within the next three to five years, GM expects to hire 8,500 new IT employees with 1,600 of them in Warren. “We’re already at about the 7,000 mark for internal IT from our start point of about 1,700,” Mott said. […]

So far, three of the company’s 23 legacy data centers have been rolled into the new Warren data center. That’s eliminated a significant chunk of the company’s wide-area network costs. “We have 8,000 engineers at (Vehicle Engineering Center) here,” Liedel said. And those engineers are pushing around big chunks of data—the “math” for computer-aided design, computer aided manufacturing, and a wide range of high-performance computing simulations.

“Now with the data center on the same campus, we’re not paying for the WAN bandwidth we had before,” Liedel explained. “We’ve got dark fiber here on the campus, and the other major concentration of engineers is at Milford at the Proving Ground.” Milford and Warren are connected over fiber via dens wave division multiplexing, providing 10 channels of 10-gigabit-per-second bandwidth.<

See on arstechnica.com

Proliferation of wireless devices and networks detrimental to environment

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Cloud computing should be driving sustainable development, but its turning us into energy consuming monsters, write Stuart Newstead and Howard Williams

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>There is a familiarity and comfort in our almost-everywhere connection to always-on communications networks and to the ever-increasing array of services they deliver us. We don’t just consume these network services directly, they give us what economists call “options” – options to connect, options to seek out new services, options to find new information. Clearly we don’t use this network services 24/7, but we value highly the options for instantaneous and simultaneous access at any time.

Cloud-based applications – those stored and managed by massive data centres run by the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple – are providing step changes in the financial and environmental efficiency of delivering these services. But the centralising power of the cloud has its corollary in the dispersing effect of wireless networks and devices.

In wireless networks and devices we see fragmentation, duplication and a fundamental shift from mains power and green sources of energy to battery powered always-on devices. In environmental terms here lies the rub. Rather than the “aggregation of marginal gains” (the Sir Dave Brailsford strategy that has propelled success in British cycling), in which lots of tiny improvements add up to a large visible improvement, we are witnessing the aggregation of environmental disadvantages from billions of low-powered but fundamentally energy-inefficient antennas and devices providing the ‘last metre’ connectivity to global networks.

Wireless networks and devices, technologies that should drive sustainable development, are turning into energy-consuming monsters.<

See on www.theguardian.com

The Datacenter & Cloud Computing: Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines

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Clipped from http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdfplus/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y201306CAC024

“While we draw from our direct involvement in Google’s infrastructure design and operation over the past several years, most of what we have learned and now report here is the result of the hard work, insights, and creativity of our colleagues at Google. The work of our Technical Infrastructure teams directly supports the topics we cover here, and therefore, we are particularly grateful to them for allowing us to benefit from their experience.”

Jobs for the Future: Energy Efficiency creates Employment — ECEEE

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Energy efficiency initiatives create jobs, and normally very good jobs.  Recent analysis shows that between 17 and 19 net jobs can be created for every million euros spent.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Jobs to improve energy efficiency in all end-use sectors are of high value.  Many require technical qualifications, such as engineering or architectural degrees.  Many require re-training from existing jobs. There will be a demand for financial specialists, construction engineers, behaviour specialists, project managers, auditors, data base managers, policy analysts and the like.  And these jobs are available to all, regardless of age or gender.

The hard work of creating these jobs begins once the Directive is finally approved.  The long-term policy framework needs to be in place and the funding and implementation strategy need to be well developed. But in the longer term, opportunity is knocking at the door, and it deserves a welcome mat.<

See on www.eceee.org

Renewable Energy or Efficiency for the Data Center: Which first? #GreenComputing

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New advancements in green technology and design are making the idea of a green data center into a reality.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Without doubt, the facility is a triumph of advanced environmental design and will serve as a template for future construction. Indeed, activity surrounding renewable-based data infrastructure is picking up, with much of it being led by the burgeoning renewable energy industry itself. VIESTE Energy, LCC, for example, has hired design firm Environmental Systems Design (ESD) to plan out a series of data centers across the U.S. that run on 100 percent renewable energy. A key component of the plan is a new biogas-fed generator capable of 8 to 15MW performance. The intent is to prove that renewables are fully capable of delivering reliable, cost-effective service to always-on data infrastructure.

The question of reliability has always weighed heavily on the renewables market, but initiatives like the VIESTE program could help counter those impressions in a very important way, by establishing a grid of distributed, green-energy data supply. In fact, this is the stated goal of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which has gathered together a number of industry leaders, including AMD, HP and GE, to establish a network of distributed, green data centers that can be used to shift loads, scale infrastructure up and down and in general make it easier for data users to maintain their reliance on renewable energy even if supply at one location is diminished. In other words, distributed architectures improve green reliability through redundancy just as they do for data infrastructure in general.

But not everyone on the environmental side is convinced that renewables are the best means of fostering data center efficiency. In a recent article in the journal Nature Climate Change, Stanford researcher Dr. Jonathan Koomey argues that without populating existing infrastructure with low-power hardware and data-power management technology first, data operators are simply wasting precious renewable resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. For projects like the NWSC and VIESTE, then, renewables may make sense because they power state-of-the-art green technology. But not as an industry-wide solution–renewables won’t make sense until hardware life cycles run their course.<

See on www.itbusinessedge.com

Green Computing – Business migration to Data Centers and the Cloud

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>With the cloud computing scenario, time and power savings mean everything, in these huge scales, running hardly used servers is effectively throwing money away as well as annoying the environmentalists. In this scenario resource scheduling becomes amazingly effective. so we go back to our 5:30pm shutdown, but on this occassion the technology hosting the Virtual infrastructure kicks in, instead of sitting there half used, it will begin to migrate VM’s that no longer require resources to the same host, so although as a whole they may be using quite a lot of resource, it will enable hosts to be powered down and be sat in a ‘power saving’ state awaiting resources requirements to increase and as such power up from their slumber. Again, getting to the scale of this, you could effectively save power on as an example, 100 hosts – these hosts being the beefiest and most cutting edge servers available, are going to have requirements for a large amount of power, effectively turning these off when not used, is a god send to the idea of cloud computing. Why leave the light on in the attic if you have no intention of going there?

So that is effectively how these datacentres work from a green perspective, but from the company utilising this infrastructure, what do they save?

  • Downsize or offset office space.
  • Downsize onsite infrastructure requirements.
  • Expand the ability for users to work remotely (or globally dependent on your requirements)
  • Support the mobile workforce.
  • Reduce consumables use (printing, ink, paper, file storage costs).
  • Reduce hardware (desktop computers/server systems/UPS’s/cabling)


Green Computing – Office365 #greencomputing.

IBM Uses Hot Water To Cool Supercomputer, Saves Energy by 40%

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IBM, in collaboration with the Leibniz Supercomputer Center in Munich, is using hot water to its SuperMUC supercomputer. This is not new for IBM. It

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The system, called LRZ “SuperMUC”, is based on an IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 server. It is said to feature 150,000 cores and provides peak performance of up to three petaflops. In layman’s language it could be described as something equivalent of the processing power of 110,000 personal computers.

IBM claims that the technique needs 40% less energy to cool this machinery as compared to the other air-cooling systems. The heat is then used for the heating systems of the Leibniz Supercomputing Center campus. This accounts for an annual savings of $1.25 million on their heating bills.<

See on www.greenpacks.org

The 21st century data center: You’re doing it wrong | ZDNet

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Outdated designs are keeping data centers from reaching their full potential.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>One example of this are data centers that use raised floors for cooling. Many IT pundits have discredited this method of cooling as wasteful, including Schneider Electric’s territory manager for the Federal government and the ACT, Olaf Moon.

[…]

Cappuccio notes that engineering firms that are consulted to build data centers know about the newer and more efficient ways to do things. But rather than try something new, they prefer the stock standard cookie-cutter approach to creating data centers because it’s fast and easy, he said.

[…]

“I’ve seen a lot of data centers being built that are too big,” says Cappuccio. “We’re finding people with data centers that are three to four years old when they realise they have far too much space, and are still providing air conditioning to those areas. So they begin to shrink them, putting up walls, bringing down the ceiling so they don’t air condition the extra space.”

See on www.zdnet.com

Sierra Club, utilities spar over Nebraska wind power

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The Sierra Club in Nebraska criticized the state’s public power utilities for failing to get more wind power online to compete with Iowa, which landed a planned data center for Facebook Inc. in Altoona and increased incentives for Google Inc. that allow it to expand in Council Bluffs.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

A Facebook spokesman confirmed in email to Midwest Energy News that access to wind power was a factor in its decision to locate in Iowa.

But John Boyd Jr., a New Jersey consultant who helps companies site data centers, told Midwest Energy News the demand for wind power was driven by marketing. “There’s public relations value above and beyond the economic value of wind energy,” Boyd said.

He acknowledged he doesn’t think wind power is the leading criteria for siting decisions. More important factors, he said, are tax incentives, real estate costs and the price of the electricity.  Altoona will provide a 20-year property tax exemption to Facebook, but the jobs must pay at least $23.12 per hour.

Data centers typically are extremely large buildings that house computer servers designed to store massive amounts of data. They typically create few jobs.

See on siouxcityjournal.com