Green IT
There are a lot of them around, Data Centres. A few of them are designed and operated very well and deliver great Power Usage Efficiency. Some could do a bit better, perhaps an airside economiser or two, or some hot or cold aisle containment, or maybe some DC power. Some are just a nightmare and [...]
Continue ReadingA while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
Continue ReadingData Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to feature in the 2020 Data Centre. How are you placed with your existing Data Centre investments to take advantage of these changes? Will [...]
Continue ReadingIf you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes:
Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks
Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon)
There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and SATA are getting [...]
Continue ReadingAround this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years?
Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different from [...]
Here is a video from my friend Professor Masood Amin @Massoud_Amin who is the world authority on Smart Grid. If we want to save the planet from global warming, prevent terrorists shutting down our economy and prevent catastrophic failure of our power distribution systems. This is the template of what we need to do and [...]
Continue ReadingLast week I met with my friend Steve Sole of Nubis who wanted to tell me about the work they have been doing in data centers around improving energy efficiency. Nubis make demountable Aisle Containment systems – they don’t care if it is Hot or Cold Aisle – the objective is to stop the air [...]
Continue ReadingIceotope Unveils First Modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Blade Server
Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server technology. The system is believed to be the first to use modular “liquid immersion” of the server components and is able to reduce data centre cooling costs by 93%, saving hundreds of thousands [...]
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London.
The panel was made up of:
Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy Optimisation, Thomson Reuters
Finlay MacLeod, VP IT Infrastructure, EMEA, First Data Corp
Charles Ferland, VP of EMEA, BLADE Network Technologies
Brian Peterson, VP International Operations, Emulex
Tikiri Wanduragala, EMEA xSeries [...]
Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution. The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all the way from the actual source of the heat – at the processor and memory component level – to its final destination – outside air by [...]
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From the coal or oil delivered to the power station all the way through to the energy that drives our business applications the efficiency story is woeful.
I met with Dr. Bruno Michel who is IBM’s, Zurich based, advanced thermal packaging manager yesterday. We spoke about IBM’s view of cooling technology in the 5 to 10 year horizon and what I heard was interesting and credible. IBM have been working with liquid cooling for some time, in the HydroCube, in the new [...]
Continue ReadingAnyone following the news will have seen that Verari and Cisco are working closely together on developing the highest density UCS deployment so far. My friend Dan Gatti at Verari just sent over the latest photograph from the Verari manufacturing plant. A FOREST Data Center Scale container full of UCS and Nexus.
This really demonstrates the [...]
I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was keen to get an answer to how IBM plan to cool their next range of machines, the z11 series.
IBM [...]
Sometimes the IT business and technology in general gets it right by looking back into history for sensible solutions to intractable problems. By combining modern engineering with old designs we get something extremely smart. To provide stay up power whilst our engines get up to speed we can now use flywheel technology to store kinetic [...]
Continue ReadingHere is a photograph of my ESG colleague Taya Wyss and Cesar Orosco from NetApp in Sunnyvale standing in a smart cold aisle containment system. This is an aftermarket fitting in a relatively old data centre but nevertheless a useful improvement to cooling efficiency.
The photograph shows cabinets facing front to front so that the air [...]
I am on the West Coast of the US this week visiting with NetApp in Sunnyvale again. On this trip I had the opportunity to visit a couple of NetApp’s internal data centers (B11 and the impressive B2 sites) with Cesar Orosco, NetApp on NetApp IT Architect. Cesar is charged with using NetApp technology in [...]
Continue ReadingThis week CleanAnalysis – the research and analyst arm of my friend, Dan Ilet’s Greenbang (www.cleananalysis.com) – will be officially launched.
CleanAnalysis be looking at all sorts of cleantech products and markets with an aim to telling the public and private sector about what will really have an impact on their sustainability, marketing and bottom line [...]
Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with their data centers compared to industry norms. The first take away is that almost none of them conform [...]
Continue ReadingI am old enough to remember the 1960’s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in every single auto spares shop in south east England being raided for deionized water).
In a recent statement IBM claim that direct [...]
I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and experienced people have been doing the same for many years and whilst there is no single, agreed best practice, model [...]
Continue ReadingThis week I am at EMC World in Orlando picking up a sense that cloud is the message, private cloud, public cloud, storage cloud, compute cloud. It’s a strong message that resonates with the CIO and the business as it holds the promise of computing on demand and maybe even the utility computing that we [...]
Continue ReadingWe are all trying to fix the unfixable in the Data Centre. How do we get more cooling capacity from sites we built a decade ago for low power density applications?
One of the biggest problems is that everyone is trying to work against a basic law of physics; hot air rises, and cold air falls. [...]
I was delighted to hear today that my friends, David Wright (CEO) and David Driggers (CTO) at Verari Systems have been recognized for their great work on driving Data Center energy efficiency. For some time it has been apparent that the modular, containerized data center holds huge promise:
Ability to deploy new capacity extremely rapidly
Ability to deploy [...]
I’ve been working on an idea with my old colleague Harqs Singh (@harqs) who is Head of Data Center Strategy at BT and a big cheese at The Green Grid. Well actually.. Harqs told me about the idea and I liked it so much I suggested we try and fill the gap for a Data Center [...]
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