All Posts Tagged With: "Green IT"
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
This photograph shows an Intercooler unit in the basement of the I.Net data center in Milan.
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 [...]
AVIVA (aka Norwich Union) is set to open its third data centre – Data Centre 3 (DC3) at the Broadlands Business Park near Norwich, UK this September. Although the site uses some modern design principles to minimize energy use, AVIVA have been far too conservative with the design and the opportunity to really go green has been missed. The [...]
I just picked up a really neat article from Eric Siebert – When Not to Treat VMs like Physical Servers. The basis of the article is common sense really (but common sense is often left at home by us in IT), mostly we can treat Virtual Machines just like Physical Machines but there are a [...]
ONStor Inc., recently announced the launch of their new Cougar 6000 series NAS gateway and claim: “Cougar’s advanced multi-core storage network processors are built into a highly available “cluster-in-a-box” design offering 18 cores per filer. This delivers high throughput, smallest footprint per rack unit, excellent power and cooling efficiency, and low cost per terabyte. This enables enterprises to process more [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
When was the last time you saw a Data Center press release that didn’t make some green or energy efficiency claim? I guess because data centers are such huge energy hogs vendors must worry that building a new one will raise the hackles of the environmentalists. Nevertheless PR agencies should really stop dressing up stories [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Not before time, the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) has announced that it will be working towards a set of specifications that will outline energy saving solutions for home Internet gateways. Because home based broadband equipment is switched on 24 x 7 x 365, even a small power draw will have a significant total life energy [...]
I just read a neat article in Infoworld about Data Center energy efficiency, conspicuously the article does not talk about carbon footprint or greenhouse gasses, not once, it talks about the cost of energy and how stupid it is to waste money. It talks about using human ingenuity to solve the problem and for once it [...]
Rackspace Hosting, have begun installing equipment in their new Slough data centre, which they claim will be powered by renewable energy sources. The data center is located in Slough close to a Scottish and Southern Energy combined heat and power (CHP) plant with potential generating capacity of 101MW. The CHP plant is the UK’s largest dedicated [...]
Met up with a really nice chap for a Starbucks today, Dan Ilett who is a journalist (for the Financial Times) and a friend of Ewan MacLeod who runs SMS Text News. Dan runs a great blog called Greenbang. Greenbang is all about green issues, not just green IT issues. Dan wanted to get [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I have had a great interchange from a subscriber to The Hot Aisle:- Darek Wichniewicz of ATM SA in Warsaw, Poland. Darek is looking for some real technical advice on building a new Data Center facility of 2000 – 3000 square meters utilizing fresh air cooling. Like many Data Center operators Darek is concerned about being [...]
Leading publication to work with Steve O’Donnell, Green IT guru and SVP IT Infrastructure & Operations at First Data International, the world’s largest provider of merchant processing services, and formerly head of BT’s global data centre business. Data Centre Solutions (DCS), the only pan-European magazine focusing on the seven critical areas of data centre management – [...]
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 [...]
