All Posts Tagged With: "Power"
A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
Continue ReadingIf 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 [...]
Continue ReadingBack in 2008, Steve O’Donnell wrote an article here on The Hot Aisle explaining one of the challenges he set his team during his time at BT, the difficult task of getting Asset Management right. To summarise, Steve kicked off an audit of the whole estate, and where owners couldn’t be found for kit on the [...]
Continue ReadingHere 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 [...]
Continue Reading…that cooling data centres using refrigeration is madder than a box of frogs. Maybe he could have suggested, fresh air cooling or the new Iceotope liquid cooling solution and kept his job whilst avoiding the toxic blob.
Continue ReadingI 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 [...]
Continue ReadingNext 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 [...]
Continue ReadingFrom the coal or oil delivered to the power station all the way through to the energy that drives our business applications the efficiency story is woeful.
Continue ReadingSometimes 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 [...]
Continue ReadingContainerized data center provides flexibility to balance capital expenditures and operating expenses while rapidly meeting needs for incremental, scalable capacity delivering Total Value of Ownership Verari Systems, a premier developer of data center scale blade-based computing and storage platforms with the highest density, availability, and energy efficiency in the market, today announced that Qualcomm selected [...]
Continue ReadingI 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 [...]
Continue ReadingSome time ago I wrote an article called How do I know if my Data Center is about to fall over. This has proved to be very popular because it talks about risk, the risk that our investments in highly resilient data centers can be worth nothing if we fail to operate them properly. By [...]
Continue ReadingIt’s a pretty good question given the perilous state of the US power distribution network, the ever increasing load and the ever increasing dependance (around the world) for US based IT and network systems. My friend Professor Massoud Amin (the global authority on what is wrong and how to fix it) is running a free [...]
Continue ReadingI am old enough to remember the 1960′s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in every single auto spares shop in south east England being raided for deionized water). In a recent statement IBM claim that [...]
Continue ReadingThere are some pretty big movements happening right now resulting from the Cisco announcement of California – Unified Computing System (UCS) – their networked server offering. Politically this has partially alienated HP and IBM, who have big Server businesses and also buy a ton of Cisco equipment. So we are seeing a polarization of network [...]
Continue ReadingI met with Phillip Petersen of Adinfa at a Green Data Center (what an oxymoron) event recently and he briefed me on the progress he had been making with his product – InSite that does real time power monitoring for Data Centers. He told me that they had really started to get some traction, real life big [...]
Continue ReadingYou may remember that The Hot Aisle covered the Elean Data Center in earlier articles about A green Data Center design and Absorption Chillers. The Elean Data Center, near Cambridge, has won a prestigious award from the United States Government after being recognised by the US Department of Energy and the Uptime Institute as Europe’s [...]
Continue ReadingWe 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 [...]
Continue ReadingI 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 [...]
Continue ReadingWASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. concerns about the potential for cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure extended to the American electrical power grid on Wednesday and experts pointed the finger anew at Chinese hackers, among others. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters the power grid is vulnerable to potentially disabling computer attacks, while declining to comment [...]
Continue ReadingFusion-io announced today at SNW that it closed $47.5 million in Series B funding from a group of investors led by global venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company also announced that David Bradford, a Novell Inc industry veteran, has been named CEO of Fusion-io, in Bradford’s last three years at Novell, he reported directly [...]
Continue ReadingWe 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 [...]
Continue ReadingThe BBC reports today that state supported and practical steps are being taken to train the young solar and wind power engineers of the future. The guys who install and maintain wind turbines and solar panels. In Tehachapi, California, it can feel like four seasons in one day. In this remote corner between the Sierra Nevada [...]
Continue ReadingI met with David Wright from Verari yesterday and we were talking about high density computing and power particularly about Verari’s data center in a container product. That got us to talking about power distribution problems and the fact that some of the big firms have been buying up sites in old US steel towns [...]
Continue ReadingI 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 [...]
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