Environment

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2220339/fujitsu-opens-44-million-centre

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.”

Very cool, the demand for data center space continues in the London area in particular, whether it’s new capacity for a grid/virtualization solution or a disaster recovery or additional business capacity will depend on your business. An interesting read, it’s always interesting to see what best practices, what technologies are being used to achieve the power/cooling requirements, do check it out.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080623b.html and http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/cache/49205-0-0-0-121.aspx?bodycontentparams=583627-0-0-0-121&ERL=true

HP today announced new disk-based backup systems with data deduplication technology that increases disk utilization by up to 50 times(1) to deliver scalable solutions that reduce storage costs and protect business critical data.

Data deduplication technology eliminates redundant data from a disk storage device to lower storage space requirements. The technology enables customers to reduce floor space and lower energy consumption by decreasing storage capacity requirements. It also helps them minimize administrative overhead by retaining data on disk for longer periods of time.

Data deduplication as a concept is something I’ve been reading about and talking about with some friends as well as when I met some of the guys from HP. The second url contains some information about data deduplication as a concept and is an interesting read. Interestingly, HP have announced some solutions based upon this concept which look very impressive not only in terms of reclaiming redundant storage, but in terms of energy efficiency. That I can use the storage I have more effectively, reducing the need to or regularity in which I have to purchase more storage could be a real enabler, the ability to scale my IT around the business, to enable and empower the end user, to do everything in the background has to be the way forward, do check it out.

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsID=101742&pagtype=samechan

IBM is trying to do for data centres what McDonald’s did for hamburgers and fries - turn the making of them into an efficient manufacturing process.
There won’t be an assembly line serving up IT facilities. But what IBM says it will do as part of a new initiative announced Wednesday under its Project Big Green energy efficiency program is offer a standardised approach designed to speed construction of data centres and reduce operational costs.

IBM said it will follow a set of best-practices guidelines in designing data centres for customers, and do so in such a way that companies can gradually expand facilities while still matching power and cooling needs to the IT equipment installed them.

Very cool, check out this article about IBM’s green initiative, anything the vendors can do to innovate their products and services to aid in business empowerment, in deploying green solutions that deliver has to be a good thing.

http://www.emediaworld.com/press_release/release_detail.php?id=70775

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.”

Very cool, check out this article about how this online ad sales firm is using Rackable Systems’ servers as part of their energy efficient solution.

http://www.environmentalleader.com/2008/06/05/hp-unveils-ambitious-data-center-project-more-efficient-solar-energy-system/

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.

Check out this article talking about how HP has established a series of initiatives within the data center space, do check it out. The more we talk about the issues experienced, what process and technologies we’ve used to resolve them, the more we can reduce the operations costs, whilst delivering benefit or revenue for the end user. Whether we’re talking about energy efficient power supplies, decommissioning legacy systems or reducing the cooling within the data center, it’s big and small changes together that deliver benefit, and often those small changes made on a big scale that can have the greatest impact on your data center operation costs. Removing the redundant power supplies on the non-production servers, increasing the temperature of the data center from 20 degrees Celcius to 23 can significantly reduce your power and cooling costs without necessarily impacting system reliability - though this is something that you’d need to discuss with your support service provider/vendor.