All Posts Tagged With: "Electricity"
I just read an article in the New York Times that made me smile….
“For years, they toiled in relative obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computing power plants [...]
You may be very surprised to see that McKinsey believe that Data Center costs are 25% of all IT costs. Many CIOs will find it difficult to reconcile this view with their own budgets. There are a two key reasons why this is a difficult and badly understood process.
Within many organizations many of the data center [...]
Continue ReadingZinc whiskers, although a catastrophic problem, are not new (they were discovered in 1948 by Bell Labs). They grow on many zinc coated components and structures commonly used in Data Centers. Zinc coating is used to slow the rusting of steel components. There are two types of zinc coating, Hot Dipped Galvanized (HDG) or electroplated. Only one [...]
Continue ReadingA key management principle is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So if we want to manage the energy efficiency of our data center estate, then we had better be in a position to baseline where we are today so that we can identify the value of the changes that we implement.
The problem [...]
Way, way back in the stone age (whilst I was a student) I worked in the Edinburgh University Computer Labs keeping all of the hardware going. I had got a report of a DEC PDP 9 (drop me a mail if you know what one of these is) that kept restarting every few days all [...]
Continue ReadingWe all worry about failures in our data centers, some types of failure more than others. Losing a server is bad, losing a storage array extremely bad! How then might we categorize a full power failure in a data centre? Catastrophic certainly, even careless perhaps?
I can hear the questions already:
How could I have a full [...]
The consequences of data center failure can be pretty catastrophic for your business, so unsurprisingly, you will have very high expectations about availability and reliability. Unfortunately for many of us, our expectations will not be met by reality. Very often the system that is our data center facility is significantly less reliable than we might [...]
Continue ReadingElectricity is a traded commodity with a Futures Market, exactly like oil, tea and pork bellies. The wholesale electricity price is driven by analysts’ perceptions of the relationship between supply (how much is readily available and at what cost) and demand (how much is required now and in the future).
The wholesale electricity price is one of the [...]
The thing about data centers is just how much power they use. This one in Cardiff, Wales uses about 20MW of power and has huge strings of batteries storing power to drive the UPS units. The batteries are kept in dedicated battery rooms that are air conditioned to keep the cells cool and maintain a [...]
Continue ReadingDC Power in Data Centres
The discussions amongst Data Centre specialist about the relative benefits of AC and DC are by far the most heated. In my opinion these are mainly driven by the technology that the protagonists are most comfortable with. The 20th Century Data Centre guys are all into AC, it is [...]
Continue ReadingWhere does all the power go?
Electrical power generally originates from a machine that turns water into steam to turn turbines (or HEP, Gas Turbine) - in all cases some form of original energy is used to drive a generator set. Typical coal, nuclear or oil fired power stations generate steam to drive the generators. [...]
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