Recently in Green IT Category

Enough to pay for a huge LED retrofit, at least.

Using a financing system similar to the "soft loan" "Warner homes, greener homes" program being launched in the UK to fund energy efficient home upgrades, New England Energy Management is upgrading 50,000 fixtures at Ford's Detroit Campus. Ford pays nothing upfront, and will instead pay for the retrofit with the energy savings over five years.

And there's another wrinkle. While LEDs are pretty energy efficient to start with, the units will be paired with automatic dimming systems to maximize the savings. Cool!

Sensors are becoming critical to maximizing energy consumption in data centers, but IBM feels that it can spread the love to other areas. Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau writes:

IBM isn't building sensors, but it expects to see wide adoption of sensor technology that can cover an office complex or a city like a blanket. The sensors could gather information about the health of physical systems and, for instance, discover leaks in pipes by detecting changes in the environment near the pipes. Sensors in manhole covers could detect problems there as well.

Neat, right? However, for such a vision to become reality, many of those sensors will need to communicate wirelessly and have long-lived on-board stores of energy. Or put simply, batteries that are in it for the long haul. Fortunately, there's good news on that front from Michigan.

A startup called Ambiq Micro won a $27,000 grant at the Michigan Business Challenge hosted by The University of Michigan's Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. Sure it's peanuts compared to some of the awards and funding rounds I typically cover, but this one could have a huge impact. According to Lora Kolodny at the You're the Boss blog at The New York Times:

Ambiq Micro plans to sell low-power microprocessors that could substantially extend the battery life of a range of tiny wireless devices. The start-up's technology could be used in smart credit cards, computers, sensors that control temperature or detect motion in smart homes and buildings, and a variety of medical and mobile devices.

The day may soon arrive that you can unbox a sensor, pop it into place regardless of how far its from a power source and not have to worry about it for years. Also imagine being able to turn your "vintage" digs into a futuristic smart home without paying for a costly rewiring job.

Excited yet?

A green PC is the sum of its parts. Credit: bit-tech.net

A "green" PC isn't really energy efficient if it consumes less electricity at the expense of performance. That's the subject of bit-tech.net's excellent article that tackles the green claims often made by PC component makers. By pitting various PC parts against one another, Richard Swinburne draws up a pretty good picture of how to balance energy savings without sacrificing computational power.

Take, for instance, hard drives vs. SSDs.

Surprisingly, the SSD doesn't save us that much power either - just 2 - 3W again on top of the 5,400 - 5,900RPM drives at idle and when writing, however compared to the performance drives from Seagate and Western Digital the difference is a more considerable 7W per drive. You're unlikely to have many SSDs unless you're in enterprise storage, where 7W a pop (or more for 10 - 15k SAS drives) means power savings abound.

Beyond storage, a lot also hinges on the type of processor (AMD or Intel), memory, power supply and motherboard. Selecting the wrong one can not only blow the efficiency gains of the rest, but also fail to deliver the performance boost you'd expect by pumping more electricity through them. And vice versa.

It goes to show that an energy efficient -- yet very capable -- rig is truly the sum of its parts.

Want more proof that it makes financial sense to go green in the data center? How about tax incentives for going green?

Pursuing energy efficiency strategies for the data center is often viewed as a process that takes a while to pay off. You sacrifice a little extra now, for a big return on that investment down the line. But what if you can cut costs all around in the near term?

Cindy Waxer at ComputerWorld tackles one of the rarely discussed aspects of green data center builds and retrofits: taxes. It turns out that the government (both federal and some states) provides businesses some juicy tax deductions if they outfit their facilities with energy-saving tech.

Here's one example:

Companies can claim a tax deduction of $1.80 per square foot on new or existing buildings by installing interior lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation or hot water systems that reduce a building's total energy and power costs by 50% or more.

The lesson here is to research and take advantage of those tax breaks. Combined with some utility incentives, it can lead to huge savings all around and smaller power bills for years to come. Here are some more online resources to help you get started:

• DSIRE - Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency
• Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency - Business.gov (see the Tax Deductions for Commercial Buildings section)
• Tax Breaks for Businesses, Utilities, and Governments - Energy.gov (primarily renewable energy generation - i.e. solar panels, wind turbines, etc.)

Researchers are zeroing in on shrinking chips and vastly bumping up energy efficiency without many of the disadvantages that threaten to derail the onward march of Moore's Law. According to PhysOrg.com, a team from the University of Michigan is pursuing a method called near-threshold computing (NTC) that can result in super-low voltage chips that shatter the constraints encountered by electrical engineers and live up to their full design potential.

As researcher Ronald Dreslinski explains to PhysOrg.com...

"The major impact of the work is that, for a fixed battery lifetime, significantly more transistors can be used, allowing for greater functionality. Particularly, [NTC allows] the full use of all transistors offered by technology scaling, eliminating 'Dark Silicon' that occurs as we scale to future technology nodes beyond 22 nm where 'more transistors can be placed on chip, but will be unable to be turned on concurrently.'"

There are still some hurdles to overcome, but if NTC can lead to low-power servers and mobiles with days worth of battery life, then yes, please!

Source: PhysOrg.com

Google Funds 'Radical' Efficiency Research - Data Center Knowledge

The team will explore ways to create low power modes in servers, allowing parts of the computer to be turned off while other parts remain accessible. The goal is to allow less active servers to move their processing loads to other servers and essentially go to sleep. But information on the sleeping servers' memories must still be instantly accessible.

Simplicity yields efficiency at new Hurricane Electric data center - InfoWorld

The new cooling system, which Hurricane has also installed in its original data center, uses a significantly more energy-efficient approach to cooling, compared to employing constantly spinning fans that push artificially chilled air up from the floor...

HP Opens First Ever Wind-cooled Data Center - PCWorld

The building sits in a blustery and chilly area about eight miles west of the North Sea in the northeast of England. It is entirely air-cooled: HP has built eight 2.1-meter stainless steel and plastic intake fans to draw cool air.

Verne Global Aims to Put Iceland on the Data Center Map - TMCnet.com

Perhaps more important, however, is that Verne Global's data centers will employ 100 percent renewal energy sources and thus have a zero-carbon footprint, he says, adding all energy used at the sites will be geothermal and hydroelectric. Those sources are affordable and accessible, he adds, and the fact that Iceland has a relatively new utility grid means less maintenance and thus lower costs.

Storage Networking Industry Association Opens Data Center in Colorado - Web Host Industry Review

The technology programs housed at the facility are designed for those professionals who manage data center storage operations and develop storage products and technologies, addressing topics such as energy efficiency, storage management, standards conformance, data archiving and cloud computing.

This week, IBM unveiled the Power7 processor which will show up in four server models set to start shipping within the next few weeks. Mind you, the release of a faster, more powerful and energy efficient chip isn't earth-shattering news these days. What is interesting is IBM's decision to position the 45 nanometer, virtualization-friendly processor as just the technology for the smart grid.

It's a smart move, considering all the activity surrounding the smart grid these days. You see, most server vendors and chipmakers extol the number-crunching virtues of their tech, hoping to catch the attention of IT managers and execs that outfit the data centers that make Wall Street and other big businesses hum - firms that pay a premium for high-end (and high-margin) servers that can process the continual flow of data and broker millions upon millions of transactions.

You can add utilities to the list of firms that will soon require servers that can handle the torrent of data generated by smart meters. Feeble servers and batch processing just won't cut it anymore. IBM feels that Power7 fits the bill as the processor to analyze and make short work of the enormous amounts of data generated by a smart electrical infrastructure. Here's a snippet from the company's press release:

A smart electrical grid requires per-the-minute data to deliver electricity where it is needed most, in real time, while helping customers monitor their energy consumption in real time to avoid or reduce usage during the most expensive peaks each day. A major U.S. utility moving to a smart grid pilot is moving from processing less than one million meter reads per day in a traditional grid, to more than 85 million reads per day in a smart grid. The utility needs to collect, analyze, and present all that information to its nearly five million customers in real time versus the overnight batch processing of a traditional electrical grid which delivers monthly billing statements.

That's IBM's reasoning for using its upcoming Power7 systems, but moreover, it's telling of how the company is positioning itself as a tech provider for the IT-heavy aspects of the smart grid and opportunities therein (sub req'd).

Will it work? It certainly doesn't hurt. (eMeter's already smitten, FYI.) And for you tech vendors looking for a way to tap into a growing smart grid market, it's wise to get the message out about how your wares can benefit the smart grid, particularly now while it's still early.

Just don't overdo it, OK?

Image Credit: IBM

Here's a great quote of the day from HP's John Bennett, head of data center transformation solutions:

"Anyone walking into a data center should break a sweat, not have to wear a jacket."

The idea of a toasty data center may send shivers down the backs of experienced data center managers, but the energy savings are worth it provided the hardware can take the heat (and that it's expelled properly). Running a warmer, less cooling intensive data center is just one of many steps companies can take to save money on operating their IT infrastructure, but as ZDNet's Heather Clancy reminds in the title of the post the above quote came from, it's critical to "take one step at a time."

Unless you're Microsoft, Google or Facebook, chances are that you can't simply build a new data center when yours starts getting a little long in the tooth. So how do you cope with an older computing facility that wasn't exactly built with energy efficiency in mind?

You buy time, and perhaps avert a costly new build altogether, with these tips from ComputerWorld's Robert L. Mitchell. Here's a good one that's often overlooked among all the coverage devoted to the latest energy saving innovations:

...If you're running an older data center and don't know where to begin - or even if you think you do - hiring a consulting engineer could pay off.

A typical engagement doesn't have to be a big affair, with a professional engineer conducting a full blown computational fluid dynamics analysis of your entire data center. By applying best practices, a good consultant can cut energy consumption by one third to one half more in an older data center.

Good stuff!

In a departure from signing leases with data center companies like Fortune and Digital Realty trust, Facebook broke ground on its own $180 million facility in Prineville, Oregon.

Why Prineville? According to the Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal,

Tom Furlong, Facebook's director of site operations, said the company underwent a "rigorous review process." But Prineville offered the best set of elements, including a good climate for environmental cooling, renewable power resources.

Of course, a $2.8 million a year in tax breaks doesn't hurt either.

The 147,000-square-foot data center will feature another innovation, a proprietary UPS system that will lower power consumption by 12 percent. Little else is known about it for now, but this implies that Facebook is diverging from Google's distributed UPS (aka "batteries included" servers) strategy or pursuing its own with some sort of twist.

Head over to the official Prineview Data Center Facebook page for more images and a video of this week's groundbreaking.

Photo credit: Facebook