Green IT
How much CO2 does one Google search produce? How much for one EBAY auction or for a SecondLife avatar, or running one blog like http://www.thehotaisle.com? How do our activities on the Internet compare to driving our car? The answers might surprise you……
Fellow blogger Rolf Kersten pulled together some quite surprising numbers:
Web service
CO2 emission
Same emission as
One [...]
Continue ReadingThe Hot Aisle is delighted to serve up another exclusive interview with a senior industry figure, 3PAR’s Senior Director of Strategy Geoff Hough. In this interview, Geoff answers some searching questions about 3PAR’s product capability and environmentalism and its intersection with self-interest - reduced running costs.
The Hot Aisle: Can you explain 3PAR’s strategy around environmental [...]
I recently met with Mark Shirman, CEO and Founder of Glasshouse Technologies and had the opportunity to get another exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mark is uniquely placed to comment on the recent changes in the Data Center and Storage markets with particular emphasis on Green issues.
For many years Glasshouse has been the leading independent Storage [...]
Our atmosphere (the air around us) is made up of gasses consisting of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), carbon dioxide (0.3%) and water in the form of vapor (humidity). The amount of water in the atmosphere is measured as a Relative Humidity (RH)
Data Center air should contain the proper amount of water vapor to maximize the availability [...]
I read a very interesting article from fellow blogger Christian Belady, who is Principal Power and Cooling Architect at Microsoft.
Christian decided to take the PUE challenge and see if he could build a data center with a PUE of one! That is to have all of the power delivered to computing equipment and none at [...]
I met up with the Mike Klayko the CEO of Brocade last week in the restaurant of the St Regis Hotel in New York (famous for creating the best burgers, bar none, in the city) for an exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mr Klayko is an industry veteran with decades of experience starting at IBM, HP, [...]
I met up with Andy Monshaw, General Manager of IBM’s Storage Division last week for an exclusive Hot Aisle interview and found him in ebullient mood. Andy has been running Storage for IBM since January 2005 and is an industry veteran. Andy had prepared a huge list of new products and initiatives he wanted to share with [...]
Recently we have been writing a lot about how hot-aisle/cold aisle containment. It is important to be aware this strategy, fire detection and protection requires special attention.
A recent article in Search Data Center gives some good advice:
Hot-aisle/cold-aisle containment – a variation on the traditional data center best practice of hot-aisle/cold-aisle design – is a way for data [...]
I read a cool article about some community action to deliver a green outcome:
Cobweb Solutions, has joined together with 58 customers to produce a total energy saving equivalent to a tonne of carbon, in just one night on 14th August. The CO2 saving is equivalent to the emissions generated by ten passengers on a return [...]
My friend, the inventor and green innovator, Peter Hopton from VeryPC has a unique view on how to be environmentally responsible whilst deploying PCs into an office environment and he is presenting his ideas at The Carbon Footprint Energy Efficient IT Summit on the 4th and 5th September.
Peter says that there are three basic approaches:
Give [...]
Continue ReadingIT Infrastructure specialist Richardson Eyres recently issued a press release to help drum up some consulting business in the Retail market but make some generally applicable and interesting points worth looking at.
Even though most organizations are making energy cuts a top priority for 2008/9, many are not taking green issues seriously enough and are adopting a do-it-yourself [...]
This photograph shows an Intercooler unit in the basement of the I.Net data center in Milan.
Continue ReadingToday we are going to look at practical changes that we can all make to our data centres that will improve cooling efficiency, to enable us to install more equipment in the same space or reduce our electricity bills.
There are a few basic rules that will help us become more efficient.
The first is the less [...]
Continue ReadingGlassHouse Technologies, a global provider of independent IT infrastructure consulting services, announced on the 5th August 2008 the release of Reflector, a proprietary tool for managing data center migrations and consolidations. Reflector acts as a “single point of truth,” creating an efficient and streamlined process for managing a successful migration or consolidation project.
In my opinion if you [...]
AVIVA (aka Norwich Union) is set to open its third data centre - Data Centre 3 (DC3) at the Broadlands Business Park near Norwich, UK this September. Although the site uses some modern design principles to minimize energy use, AVIVA have been far too conservative with the design and the opportunity to really go green has been missed.
The site [...]
I was reading an article about the recent Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) Data Center Energy Summit, in San Francisco, engineers and data center pros gathered to study 11 case studies on energy efficiency. The data center studies varied, but one green data center tactic stood out: hot-aisle/cold-aisle containment.
The Hot Aisle readers know that data center best [...]
A photograph from the BT Rochdale Data Center showing how the transparent curtains are attached to the roof. These curtains are used to separate the Hot Aisle from the Cold Aisle in order to drive up cooling capacity and efficiency. There are a number of articles about using Curtains to drive energy efficiency on The [...]
Continue ReadingONStor Inc., recently announced the launch of their new Cougar 6000 series NAS gateway and claim:
“Cougar’s advanced multi-core storage network processors are built into a highly available “cluster-in-a-box” design offering 18 cores per filer. This delivers high throughput, smallest footprint per rack unit, excellent power and cooling efficiency, and low cost per terabyte. This enables enterprises to process more data [...]
HVAC Economizers (sometimes known as air-side Economizers) are useful for data centers which are located in regions of the world where the outdoor temperature is lower than the desired data center temperature (for at least some of the day or year) and the outdoor humidity is mild. Economizers save energy by cooling buildings with outside [...]
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Dry coolers are used in many air cooled refrigeration systems. In case of low outdoor temperatures, outdoor air can be applied for cooling applications. In dry coolers, large fans create a forced airflow along air-to-water heat exchangers. Subsequently, the water circuit can be used for cooling of data centers, office buildings and industrial processes.
Dry coolers play an important role in [...]