Efficiency

Cloud Computing and Huge Data Centers are Killing Our Planet!

Posted Fri, 06/04/2010 - 07:53 by mark.thiele

Planet Killer Cloud Computing and Data Centers are killing our planet. Drive to the hardware store, buy a hammer, chisel and piece of stone and begin writing about it. Put away your computer, turn off your internet connection, un-plug the video game console, iPod and the TV. We must do everything we can to get rid of these giant, energy sucking, pollution generating, and planet killing warehouses of death immediately.

All kidding aside, it is true that many of our older data centers are in serious need of improvements in their power efficiency. However, it's also true that data centers contain much of our work effort and play environments. If this work and play was to be distributed in small chunks throughout the business or our households instead of concentrated in data centers they would be considerably more wasteful of our planets resources.

In my 20 plus year career in IT I've always been proud of my ability to bring efficiency to IT, and the business. When Data Center Pulse was founded the driving motivation was to push for the development of power sipping IT equipment designs, combined with more efficient data centers. In parallel we're actively working to persuade owners to implement those new solutions more quickly. We strongly believed that the IT/Data Center industry had a need to focus more attention on effective use of energy. The DCP Leadership team was made up of like minded individuals that each have work history examples of a focus on reducing energy consumption. So why would I be writing an article about data centers getting a bad rap? It seems like I should be agreeing with those articles, as it seems like I'm contradicting myself. Well, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

The State of the Data Center - What's Next?

Posted Tue, 07/27/2010 - 07:29 by mark.thiele

Subject: Free online Data Center Summit – case studies & best practices

Is "Good" Enough? - How Should You Apply The 80/20 Rule?

Posted Mon, 04/05/2010 - 10:09 by mark.thiele

There's 20K in your budget for software and you had intended on using it for a real time data collection system for data center management, but the best solution would cost more than 20K just in professional services. Maybe it's not the money at all, but the concern over potential disruption to your DC production environment. You've got 30K for a monitoring tool, but you really want the comprehensive capabilities of an enterprise solution that starts at 150K.

The Chill-Off, Carbon, GHG, Data Center Efficiency, and the DCP Stack, they're all Linked!

Posted Sat, 10/17/2009 - 09:05 by mark.thiele

On Thursday 10/15/09, several members of the DCP board participated in the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) Data Center Efficiency event in Sunnyvale at the NetApp campus.

Data Center Pulse work showcased at the SVLG Energy Efficiency Summit

PRESS RELEASE

Data Center Pulse work showcased at the SVLG Energy Efficiency Summit

Data Center Pulse continues toward their goal of influencing the datacenter industry through their exclusive, global end user community.

UNION CITY, CA, June 26, 2009 - Data Center Pulse Inc. (DCP), today announced that it has partnered with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) to participate in the 2009 Data Center Energy Efficiency (DCEE) Summit hosted at the NetApp campus in Sunnyvale, CA on October 15, 2009.

The SVLG 2009 DCEE Summit is based on data center demonstration projects showcasing best practices to achieve energy efficiency. The demonstration projects are hosted and led by end users in their own DC environments. Data Center Pulse is championing two efforts at the summit. The first is the Chill Off 2, the largest and most complex SVLG demonstration project comparing different cooling products. The second is the Data Center Pulse standardized data center stack proposal. This framework will allow all datacenters to be compared regardless of industry, tier level, location or design. "We are looking forward to a lively summit where we can discuss this important work.", said Graeme Hay Technical Advisory Board Chair and Data Center Pulse founding board member. "Our members have invested significant time and money into these efforts. They are some of the top priorities for Data Center Pulse.".

THE CHILL OFF 2 (CO2)

In November of 2008, Data Center Pulse started on the Chill Off 2 (CO2), a demonstration project comparing 13 different product solutions and configurations. Products under test include APC, Clustered Systems, IBM, Knuerr, Liebert, Rittal, Sun, and Vette. The Chill Off 2 is an expansion of the first Chill Off which was showcased at the first SVLG Energy Summit in 2008. This years presentation will provide insight into the learnings from this very complicated effort including some intriguing findings and perspectives from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab test engineers and industry leaders . Seven of the 13 test configurations will be completed by the Energy Summit. Final results for CO2 are slated to be published in February 2010.

DATA CENTER STACK FRAMEWORK

Join data center pulse leaders as they discuss and debate the data center stack framework proposal. The goal of this session is to show how different industry architectures overlay on the stack. The goal of the stack is to unite end users by providing a standardized method representing all components, dependencies and interworkings that make up the data center machine. End users want to define how they are compared and ultimately how they can comply uniformly with pending effiiency regulations. The stack framework will allow the users to define and direct the standards rather than having them applied to them.

For more information on these programs email info@datacenterpulse.org.

The Green Team Commits - Let the battle begin!

Posted Thu, 09/24/2009 - 20:49 by geekism

Carbon Killer

This week, eBay announced that by 2012 it will reduce its corporate emissions by 15% over its 2008 baseline.

http://news.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=410332

Let me break this down for you. This is not just some corporate marketing gimic or easily attainable goal to get press coverage - it is very real and affects my world directly. As you saw in the release, eBay is firmly committed to making this happen, but it will not be easy. More than half of eBay's emissions come from our Data Centers. From a carbon perspective, we are in the belly of the beast and will be fighting for every metric ton we remove. An aggresive strategy is underway to reduce both our financial as well as our carbon burdon. The Data Center operations teams in partnership with the Green Team have multi-prong, multi-year projects in play that will ultimately lead to eBay reaching this goal. From an operations standpoint it is all about fine tuning the Data Center "machine", holisitically, to achieve operational excellence.

The teams are clear that success is not measured with a single metric. It is a combination of metrics. We also believe operations and sustainability are synonymous with each other. The operations strategy is to deliver Availability, Cost Control and Agility by levearing our talent pool and innovating at every level. But we also view all aspects of operations through a sustainability lens. In our business if any of these components are missing, you're not addressing the entire problem. For example, we can meet our availability numbers but miss our carbon reduction goal because of excessive, inefficient, redundancy. On the other hand, we could drive our sustainability focus and miss our cost reduction goals. It is an eco system and requires the right balance to be successful.

Real Time Data Center Inventory and IT Equipment Utilization

Posted Mon, 08/24/2009 - 07:11 by mark.thiele

Have you ever struggled to find a particular server in your data center, did someone on the data center or lab staff ever unplug the power or network cable to the wrong server? What about knowing whether your IT equipment is being utilized effectively, how could you tell? Did you view each server through it's resource window, or maybe you walked behind them to see if the network card traffic light was lit up.

TelcomTV

Posted Mon, 06/15/2009 - 00:36 by geekism

Earlier this year I was interviewed by Laina Raveendran Greene (perfect name for Green IT) from TelecomTV. They created a new show called Green Planet, Sustainable ICT. Sun was featured in two different episodes. I couldn't get their embed video to work, so the links are below. :-)

Green Planet Episode 2: Energy Efficiency & the Green Data Centre

Green Planet Episode 3: Innovation for Sustainable Efficiency

Wild West Data Center

Posted Wed, 04/22/2009 - 06:29 by geekism

On January 26, 2009 we had a grand opening for Sun's Broomfield, Colorado Datacenter. It has a been a long project to consolidate 496,000 square feet from our Louisiville, Colorado campus (former StorageTek site) into 126,000 square feet across five floors in our largest building Broomfield.