All Posts Tagged With: "Green Ideas"
Yesterday Chris Leahy (my Technical Facilities Manager) and I were agonising over why we had low plenum pressure in our Data Center and why we were seeing symptoms of hot air trapped in the roof void. We looked at all the normal stuff:
Leaks in the plenum space
Badly sealed floor
Cable access holes improperly sealed
Blockages in the [...]
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 [...]
Data 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 [...]
If 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 [...]
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 [...]
Last 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 [...]
Iceotope 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 [...]
Greenwash or Greenbacks? – an eWEEK Europe Webinar
What is the real motivation behind the Green Data Centre movement? Saving the planet… or saving money? …or keeping one step ahead of possible regulations, and saving yourself from a world of legal trouble?
Readers of the Hot Aisle will already know that moves to more efficient data centres [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
At ESG we’ve teamed up with Dell, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware, and Intel on the Virtualization Tour show that’s all over North America (for now)! From September 29th pretty much every day through the end of October, we’ll be in a US city!
The content is excellent – based on some killer ESG research and [...]
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 [...]
Here 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 [...]
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 [...]
I picked up an interesting article on the Executive Business Lifestyle website. (You have no idea the lengths that The Hot Aisle goes to in order to deliver interesting content!)
Scouring through rubbish tips for reusable items and materials is nothing new. We see the practice on TV regularly, usually accompanied by a serious commentary on [...]
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 wrote about Elean Park Data Center some time ago on The Hot Aisle where we looked at the use of absorption chillers that use the waste heat from a biomass power station and gas generation plant on site to drive them. Howard Phelby of 5 nines kindly sent me the attached diagram that shows [...]
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 [...]
Today 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I had two great questions from Hot Aisle readers following the latest article on Cold Aisle containment. Dan asked about the impact on fire suppression and Mark asked about where we got the transparent curtains.
Lets start with the impact on fire systems of having either hot or cold aisle containment. The safety of personel working [...]
