All Posts Tagged With: "Green Ideas"
The London Financial Times published an interesting article about data center cooling. Written by fellow blgger Dan Ilet of Greenbang.com it focuses on the strain being put on data centers by increased numbers and power demand of servers and the rapid increase in the cost of electricity. Its often amusing what journalists pick up in [...]
I picked up an interesting news article about field force automation. Believe me that even a small amount of effort to automate and optimize Field Engineers pays off handsomely. At BT we did some home grown stuff and even that made a great difference to calls per Engineer, and fuel, distance per call metrics. I wish [...]
A picture paints a thousand words. This graphically depicts the distribution of water on our planet. WoW!
Milan has a high (and rising) water table and the city authorities encourage the use of groundwater for cooling. They want to keep the water level in check to protect subway lines and utilities. Groundwater is pumped through a heat exchanger for condenser water and then dumped to the sewer. The authorities pump out the [...]
The Hot Aisle reader, Mark Hatton of Trapdoor dropped me a mail a few days ago about a company based in Las Vegas called Switch Communications and the CEO, Rob Roy was making a lot of claims about how good their proposed new data center was. You can read the original article in The Register. [...]
On Monday the 23rd June, Dr. James E. Hansen, a physicist of the Columbia University Earth Institute, testified to Congress about global warming, 20 years after his June 23, 1988 testimony, which alerted the public that global warming was under way. He states that there are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference. Read [...]
One of the things that prompted me to write about CHP and Biomass was an email I received from a colleague, Howard Pheby of 5 nines. Howard, and his partner Paul Foskett, are announcing their plans to build a new data center complex co-located with a Biomass Plant just up the road from my home [...]
As we have been discussing CHP and Biomass Power Stations recently, I though that it might be interesting to explore this subject in more detail. I live in East Anglia in England, a largely agricultural area that is leading the way in Biomass electricity production, so this is a matter of local interest for me. [...]
At last the trade press is waking up to the fact that IT is an enormous consumer of power and that making CIOs responsible for the electricity bills is the right thing to do. My colleague Duncan Scott CIO at DTZ Holdings was interviewed for an Article in Computing - IT departments threatened with rising energy [...]
Average retailer wastes over £1million per annum on excess energy usage in data centres On average, top UK retailers are overspending by £1.25 million a year on the power needed to run their data centres which can equate to 50 per cent of total data centre costs and 10 per cent of their total energy [...]
I have just been exchanging emails with my good friend and colleague, Will Forest. Will runs the Data Center Consulting Practice for top drawer strategy consultants, McKinsey & Company. I engaged Will, and we worked together on delivering BT’s Data Center Strategy. Will and his team brought a great deal of experience and clarity of [...]
A 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 [...]
Electricity 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 [...]
During my time at BT I set the Data Centre team the challenge of getting Asset Management right, the team thought I was just being stupid and unreasonable but buckled down and with a bit of hard work got it close to 100% right with processes to keep it right. As a direct result of this [...]
Today I spoke at the Sustain IT, Green IT Conference in Central London, The topic I chose was Green IT through Discipline and Hygiene. My conference notes as well as two of the other presentations are available here on my .mac Public Folder. (I love the whole .mac Web experience, like most things Apple it is just [...]
Data Centre Basics There are some basics that just need to be done to keep a data centre efficient and as green as possible. Maintaining the floor is often a task that is left too late. Gaps and unnecessary holes in the floor are bad news and lead to the mixing of hot and cold [...]
DC 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 what [...]
Cooling for Free (Almost) Fresh air cooled data centres simply draw fresh air from outside (via filters) and pump it under the plenum floor rather than the refrigerated and recycled air that is used in 20th Century Data Centres (see picture above). This approach can reduce the energy required to cool a site by 80% [...]
