While conducting some research on Facebook’s upcoming IPO, I ended up on the Open Compute Project (OCP) website (Facebook’s a member). It turns out that a lot has been happening in the past several months, and most of it is great news for the future of energy efficient data centers and cloud infrastructures. Unfortunately, it [...]
Data Center
Is Apple operating a dirty, coal-powered cloud? Greenpeace seems to think it is (PDF), along with industry heavyweights Microsoft and Amazon. By its estimates, Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina not only consumes a lot of energy, but it relies on power derived from coal-fired plants that service the region. If it sounds familiar, that’s because [...]
Read more Apple and Greenpeace at odds over cloud data center
If you’ve been following some of my Big Data coverage on Enterprise Apps Today, then you know that it’s kind of a big deal in IT circles lately. And true to its name, storing, processing and analyzing Big Data takes some pretty big IT infrastructure, which in turn results in big, power-hungry data centers. Or does [...]
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
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 [...]
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
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
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
Over the past couple of years, some startups have been using mobile chips as a way to bring high performance computing to the data center in the form of low-power, space-saving servers. On Friday, August 19, one of those startups, SeaMicro, will be discussing the tech behind its Intel Atom-powered SM10000-64HD server (pictured above) during [...]
Read more SeaMicro to show cool Atom-powered server tech at Hot Chips
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?
