Green IT
This 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 [...]
We 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We have all been doing this – buy some new light bulbs, screw them in, and save the planet – simple. It was until I picked up an interesting article in today’s New York Times: A lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say [...]
Look for bulbs with the Energy Star label, which indicates they meet at least minimal performance requirements. Be aware that compact fluorescents can take one to three minutes to reach full brightness. This is not a defect. The place where people are most likely to use compact fluorescents, closets, may be a poor choice. Experts at [...]
I really like Twitter, I picked up that my friend Will Forest (@ayewill) of McKinsey & Co is quoted in a Computerworld article offering a number of key pieces of advice: “Should CIOs get ready to add “energy czar” to their list of job roles? McKinsey & Co., a management think tank, seems to believe as much.” Will issued [...]
The team have been working with Fusion-io this week on tuning the large data warehouse application that used to run like a dog. Initial results show that it is at least 18 times faster using the iDrives than a large and expensive EMC DMX4 array.
I have been looking a solving some database performance issue recently particularly around a large SQL Server database that looked like it was going to need to move to a dedicated (and expensive) data warehouse platform to hit our challenging performance targets. I am just about to try an alternative hardware solution that has great [...]
Last quarter, Google posted information about the efficiency of Google data centers and promised to update this information every quarter. They have now kept that promise and published the collected data for the fourth quarter of 2008 to sustainable computing website. Here are the rules: The data center has to have been Google designed (many are colocation [...]
The California Institute of Technology – also known as Caltech — is installing monitors and developing metrics to determine the efficiencies and savings of Hot Aisle Containment enclosures recently installed in one of their data centers. The partitions and dividers were designed and manufactured by Simplex Isolation Systems of Fontana, CA, to isolate hot [...]
Taking social responsibility seriously is a core value at The Hot Aisle so starting today we are launching a new FREE service to advertise IT Jobs with a Environmental component. If you are an employer or agency who is offering a full time or contract position anywhere in the world and that position has a [...]
I picked up a really interesting website from KyotoCooling that has a very interesting new approach to low energy cooling systems. The firm takes it’s name from the Kyoto Conference where our governments met and agreed Carbon reduction targets that none of them had any intention of meeting. The Hot Aisle is firmly of the [...]
I picked up a press release on the wire that caught my attention. A network equipment manufacturer that claims to offer the highest energy efficiency core router on the market. Claims based on a new standards body they set up themselves….. Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR), announced that its T1600 core router has successfully completed testing using [...]
The British Computer Society (BCS) is calling on data centre operators to address growing power consumption and increased carbon emissions, in a white paper. The paper aims to develop understanding, methods and tools for the IT profession to address the cost and environmental impact of data centres. Bob Harvey, chair of the BCS Carbon Footprint [...]
In the largest Hot Aisle survey to date, 6273 readers participated, we asked “Does your IT Department pay the electricity bill for IT Equipment?” Despite best practice advice from industry heavyweights like Will Forest at McKinsey & Company, more than half of polled readers answered no. A staggering 23% just didn’t know if IT picked up the [...]
My friend and colleague Peter Hopton dropped me a mail announcing a remarkable offer that shows that the sticker price of your server is dwarfed by the energy consumption cost. Peter tells me that his VeryPC Janus servers create the same CO2 as a Prius driving 10,000 miles whilst the most popular big brand model [...]
I am a member of the IEEE and receive a great magazine called IEEE Spectrum in the mail. A recent article describes the incredibly advanced thinking within the US Department of Defence on Energy conservation. Why are the DoD so interested in saving the planet? As usual it is driven by economics: Every $10 increase [...]
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 [...]
The 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
