Fujitsu has opened a £44m energy-efficient data centre in the UK which it says will contribute towards saving enough electricity each year to power up to 6,000 homes.

The centre was announced last August and is designed to address the shortage of data storage in London.

Located 35 miles from the capital, the site will serve customers in the UK and Europe, giving them increased capacity without the need to build their own facilities.

“Fujitsu’s new data centre combines high resilience and high efficiency, which is difficult to achieve,” said Martin Provoost, head of data centres at Fujitsu Services.

“Attaining high resilience requires more redundant infrastructure, which in turn consumes more energy.

“However, through new technology, Fujitsu’s data centre achieves the optimum resilience level and a leading efficiency rating.”

London, 22 June 2008 – A new report from consulting company and data centre market specialist BroadGroup finds that the India market is experiencing substantial growth and will reach more than USD1.5 billion in value by 2010. Yet power supply remains a critical challenge for the country.
Based on a study detailing the profiles of 34 players, the study reveals that while growth is occurring at unprecedented levels, challenges remain particularly those relating to infrastructure, power – and the quality of power –and land availability.
Technical space will nevertheless more than double over the next two years. Fuelled by offshoring, overseas MNCs, and domestic demand, data centres in India have experienced significant growth over recent years, and as the survey reveals, new build and plans for new build are well advanced producing a spike in space that will more than double current capacity.
The core of the report details profiles of 34 players in India, both overseas and domestic, and the report examines current availability, location and expansion plans. The scale and capacity of the international ambitions of the top five players is supported by significant and growing demand from the local market. Although Global MNCs are becoming selective about the robustness of power supply, security and green credentials, overseas systems integrators and consultancies are sustaining and expanding their investments in India.

Companies don’t need to build a whole new datacentre to begin saving on energy. Below are some steps recommended by Burton Group analyst Andrew Kutz that enterprises can take in their existing datacentres to save on power consumption:

Manchester’s power shortage has forced UK Grid, a data centre operator, to draw up plans to generate its own electricity.

It is considering an investment of at least £4.5m in combined heat and power plants to serve a new centre it is planning in the Northern Quarter.

The company, which has tripled its turnover each year since 2005 — hitting £420,000 in 2007 with a target of £1.5m to year end March 2009 — said if it did not take the step, its growth would soon be hindered by electricity supply problems.

Liquid Computing, Inc., developer of LiquidIQ, the first fully virtualized communications and computing system, and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced an alliance to provide customers with innovative data center solutions by combining networking, computing, and storage capabilities.

The integrated NetApp(R) and Liquid Computing solution effectively offers customers a data center in a box. Now customers can combine easy and non-disruptive management systems, enabling them to provide services without the complexity of day-to-day management or integrating individual nodes, disks, appliances, servers, or networks.
“We’re pleased to establish an alliance partnership with Liquid Computing that will help our customers overcome complexity in the data center with an innovative approach to dynamic management of compute and storage assets,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Together we can help customers rethink their data centers, resulting in lower overall operating costs for our target industries. We are helping our customers and partners to speed deployment of applications, ease provisioning and management, and maintain a competitive edge in their respective markets.”

FREMONT, Calif.–(eMediaWorld)–Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK), a leading provider of servers and storage for large-scale data centers, today announced that Gorilla Nation, the world’s largest online ad sales rep firm, has selected Rackable Systems’ energy-efficient Eco-LogicalTM servers to meet their rapidly-expanding computing needs. As a result of Rackable Systems’ customizable configurations, including energy-saving DC power options, Gorilla Nation will be able to deploy additional eco-friendly, high performance computing in their North American data centers.

“Gorilla Nation is laser-focused on continuing the company’s explosive growth rates, and with this growth comes the immediate need to scale our computing power and other infrastructure,” said Alex Godelman, Gorilla Nation’s Vice President of Technology. “We turned to Rackable Systems, whose reputation for developing powerful, green computing matched our desire to build-out environmentally-conscious infrastructure without sacrificing total cost of ownership, performance, scalability and reliability targets.”

New research commissioned by data centre infrastructure firm RichardsoNEyres shows that 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 bills.

The survey also showed that moe than 80 per cent of the UK’s top retailers are making rising energy prices and wasted costs a top priority for 2008/9.

The research, undertaken in association with industry analysts IDL, profiled organisations from the UK’s top 100 retailers to highlight the main data centre challenges they are facing.

HP’s research arm HP Labs has announced new sustainability research initiatives the company says will include an industry-first to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers by 75 percent; research to replace copper wiring in servers with laser light beams; and tools for measuring and managing the amount of energy used to develop products.

An average data center that consumes 5MW of electricity annually could power more than 4,300 homes in the United States for a year, the company says.

The complexity of a data center environment seems to grow with every new batch of appliances and “cutting-edge” technology, but there are some basics that seem to be a constant, no matter how configurations change. Here are the five things to keep in mind when making the most of your environment.

SUNNYVALE, CA, October 22, 2007 – As companies realize that greening the data center is an ideal way to reduce electricity use and minimize environmental impact, they are quickly embracing server virtualization and VM machines to help reach this goal. The growth of virtualization, however, gives rise to a new problem – server connectivity and I/O infrastructure bottlenecks. Xsigo Systems, Inc., the technology leader in data center I/O virtualization, today issued a list of seven tips to help IT communities leverage virtualization, while removing known risks and barriers.
“As more servers become virtualized, it only makes sense to virtualize the supporting I/O infrastructure,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and investor in companies that contribute to green computing, including Xsigo Systems. “Newer virtualization technologies such as virtual I/O, combined with ‘green’ best practices and management, will absolutely allow data center energy consumption growth to slow over the next few years.”

To help IT managers leverage I/O virtualization for greener data centers, Xsigo published the following tips.