Cloud services providers are making enormous strides in data center efficiency. Take, for instance, Microsoft. “Today, Microsoft delivers more than 200 online services to 1+ billion customers and 20 million businesses in over 76 markets worldwide,” posts Brian Janous, Utility Architect, Data Center Advanced Development, at the Microsoft Global Foundations Services Blog. And that takes a lot of […]
Getting warmer… DoE’s data center cooling secret revealed
Warmth and water… Two things that don’t fit the brisk and bone dry image of a data center. But the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), along with HP and Intel, are blazing new trails in IT efficiency with a novel data center cooling system based on warm water for a new high-performance computing (HPC) site […]
Apple’s green data center details emerge
Remember all that hubbub about Apple’s “dirty cloud” data center in Maiden, N.C.? Long story short, Greenpeace released a scathing report on the state of cloud data centers and their detrimental effects on the environment. Though some companies got a pass — Facebook, Yahoo and Google, mainly — others like Apple were raked over the coals […]
Patent war clouds Open Compute Project progress
While conducting some research on Facebook’s upcoming IPO, I ended up on the Open Compute Project (OCP) website (Facebook’s a member). It turns out that a lot has been happening in the past several months, and most of it is great news for the future of energy efficient data centers and cloud infrastructures. Unfortunately, it […]
Raytheon saves 30 percent in IT energy costs by raising temps
Today’s impressive statistic comes courtesy of this Computerworld article that explores how the defense contractor is cutting energy costs, to the tune of “$23 million in annual savings” in 2010 with a host of energy efficient IT strategies. One of the ways the IT sustainability pros at Raytheon are achieving this is by taking a […]
HP’s modular EcoPOD data center
HP’s taking its build-a-data-center business seriously. Today the company’s Converged Infrastructure division unveiled what it’s billing as “the world’s most efficient data center,” the HP POD 240a. Or the EcoPOD as the company has taken to calling it (a naming convention I fully support). As has become the norm for modular data center vendors, the […]
Facebook friends Green IT
After taking some lumps by situating its first ever data center in a primarily coal-powered region, Facebook is now making a concerted effort to become synonymous with Green IT. With its newly launched Green on Facebook page, the social networking company is spotlighting relevant articles from around the web and pulling back the curtain a […]
Emerson unwraps “direct-to-server” cooling system
Emerson Network Power unveiled a targeted cooling system called Liebert XDS that aims to help data center operators keep energy costs low by combating hotspots right in the rack. Liebert XDS brings cold plate server cooling tech from rack-cooling specialist Clustered Systems to industry standard server racks. The cooling plates work their temperature-lowering magic in […]
Tech Vault: Security and green IT mix in Vermont-based data center
Security is the ruling consideration for Tech Vault’s data center, which opened late last month, in South Burlington, Vermont. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no room to run the facility in an energy efficient way. Unsurprisingly, the window-less, hardened facility with backup fiber connectivity exemplifies the “no expense spared” credo of ultra-secure data centers […]
Heat wheels for cool data centers
Targeted cooling, free-cooling, liquid-cooled servers… There are many ways to reduce the cost of cooling data centers, but Montana state’s computing facility takes a different approach that’s long been used in industrial plants. Government Computer News reports that the state contracted with Kyoto Cooling International, a Dutch maker of cooling systems, to outfit its data […]
