We expect the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory to operate efficiently. And indeed, the agency is making good on its mandate to achieve net-zero operations. According to this Energy.gov post, NREL saved $88,000 in its 2010 fiscal year by, in large part, taking a virtualization-heavy approach to IT. By consolidating servers and shifting to a [...]
Read more NREL’s green data center saves $88K, improves security
by Pedro Hernandez on November 15, 2011
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Remember that report about Calxeda and HP teaming up for low-power ARM servers? Well, now it’s official and it even has a name: Project Moonshot. To get the industry used to the idea of computing on servers built around ARM processors, HP is laying the groundwork with a couple of initiatives. First is Project Pathfinder, which [...]
Read more HP’s ARM server ‘Moonshot’
by Pedro Hernandez on November 1, 2011
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Thanks to some sleuthing by a reporter at the Charlotte Observer, we now know how Apple plans to make its massive, billion-dollar data center in Maiden, North Carolina greener. While some vital specifics concerning the new solar farm are still shrouded in mystery, engineering plans (called Project Dolphin Solar Farm A Expanded) call for a [...]
Read more Apple’s North Carolina data center to go solar
by Pedro Hernandez on October 31, 2011
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Pictured: Lulea mayor Karl Petersen (left) and Facebook’s Director of Site Operations, Tom Furlong – Image Credit: Lulea data center Facebook page Facebook is poised to take free cooling and clean energy to new heights. Up into the Arctic Circle, in fact. The social networking behemoth announced today that it was siting its first data center outside [...]
Read more Facebook bets on cool, renewables for Swedish data center
by Pedro Hernandez on October 27, 2011
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Today’s impressive statistic comes courtesy of this Computerworld article that explores how the defense contractor is cutting energy costs, to the tune of ”$23 million in annual savings” in 2010 with a host of energy efficient IT strategies. One of the ways the IT sustainability pros at Raytheon are achieving this is by taking a [...]
Read more Raytheon saves 30 percent in IT energy costs by raising temps
by Pedro Hernandez on October 24, 2011
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That’s approximately the amount of power required to keep Google’s data centers running. As this NYT piece mentions, all those searches, Gmail accounts, YouTube videos and tons of other services continually absorb 260 million watts, or about a quarter of the output of one nuclear power plant. There are two important things to note from this [...]
Read more Stat of the day: 260 million watts
by Pedro Hernandez on September 8, 2011
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Proving that renewables and big-city data centers can coexist, Interxion is powering its London facility completely with power purchased from SmartestEnergy. Why doesn’t the colo operator just stick to energy efficient IT equipment and infrastructure? Interxion’s Managing Director for the UK, Greg McCulloch, hints at looming CO2 regulations. He states, in a company release, “We [...]
Read more Interxion, SmartestEnergy team for 100% renewables-powered data center
by Pedro Hernandez on September 1, 2011
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I’ve resisted linking the terrible earthquake in Japan to the topics of clean energy and green IT mainly because of the scope of the disaster and the terrible suffering it wrought. That, and the country’s ongoing nuclear energy hardships speak for themselves. But now, as Japanese businesses work to return to normalcy, some interesting after [...]
Read more Nuclear Japan: The data center industry’s energy wake up call?
by Pedro Hernandez on June 23, 2011
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HP’s taking its build-a-data-center business seriously. Today the company’s Converged Infrastructure division unveiled what it’s billing as “the world’s most efficient data center,” the HP POD 240a. Or the EcoPOD as the company has taken to calling it (a naming convention I fully support). As has become the norm for modular data center vendors, the [...]
Read more HP’s modular EcoPOD data center
by Pedro Hernandez on June 6, 2011
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FacilityBlog over at Today’s Facility Manager has some great quotes from Jakob Carnemark, an SVP with construction giant Skanska USA. In essence, he says that in order to keep pace with exploding data center demand, it’s time to break from the past and adopt agile, energy saving and cost effective strategies for getting IT facilities [...]
Read more Traits of an evolved, efficient data center build
by Pedro Hernandez on June 3, 2011
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