Showing posts with label Green IT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green IT. Show all posts

November 10, 2013

Green Data Center Cooling

I read with great interest this week in BBC about 2 mysterious barges off the East and West coasts of the U.S.

One barge is by San Francisco and the other by Maine. 

The 4-story barges belong to Google. 

There is speculation about these being, maybe, floating data centers.  

I think that is more likely than showrooms for Google Glass.

These barges would potentially avail themselves of the ocean water for cooling the IT equipment. 

I would imagine that there could be some backup and recovery strategy here as well associated with their terrestrial data centers.

But how you protect these floating data behemoths is another story. 

A white paper by Emerson has data center energy consumption in the 25% range for cooling systems and another 12% for air movement, totaling 37%.

Other interesting new ideas for reducing energy consumption for data center cooling include submersion cooling. 

For example, Green Revolution (GR) Cooling is one of the pioneers in this area.

They turn the server rack on its back and the servers are inserted vertically into a dielectric (an electrical insulator--yes, I had to look that up) cooling mineral oil. 

In this video, the founder of GR identifies the potential cost-savings including eliminating chillers and raised floors as well as a overall 45% reduction in energy consumption, (although I am not clear how that jives with the 37% energy consumption of cooling to begin with).

Intuitively, one of the trickiest aspect to this would be the maintenance of the equipment, but there is a GR video that shows how to do this as well--and the instructions even states in good jest that the "gloves are optional."

One of my favorite aspects of submersion cooling aside from the environmental aspects and cost-savings is the very cool green tint in the server racks that looks so alien and futuristic. 

Turn down the lights and imagine you are on a ship traveling the universe, or maybe just on the Google ship not that far away. ;-)

(Source Photo: Green Revolution)
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September 3, 2009

Zipcar = Cloud Computing

No, not exactly. But they actually do have a lot in common in that they are both about sharing resources and using them to achieve cost-savings and flexibility.

An article in Fortune Magazine (September 14, 2009) on Zipcars really got me thinking about this.

With cloud computing, we are sharing our IT infrastructure, storage, and/or applications with others and using the services of cloud providers. It is one big virtual environment, where instead of everyone having their own technologies and applications, we make use of shared resources and we meet our information technology needs on demand and pay only for what we use.

Zipcars has the same-shared model as the cloud, and shifting toward this new paradigm is going to help preserve the environment.

Usage: Like cloud computing, Zipcars provides for the use of automobile when you need one and you pay by the hour or day, according to what you use. It’s flexible, saves money, and cuts down on the number of vehicles on the road and therefore on the pollution associated with them.

Cost: Both Zipcars and cloud computing cost pennies on the dollar. For a basic $50 membership and $11.25 an hour you can drive a Zipcar (note: drivers who give up their own cars save an average of $800 per month). For 12-25 cents per month you can store a gigabyte in the cloud or for 10 cents-$1.25 an hour you can process tasks on the Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2).

Functionality: Zipcars move people around and cloud computing moves data.

Centralization: Zipcars are co-located in “company created ‘pods’ or group of cars in parking lots or garages,” and cloud computing services are centralized in data centers of large cloud providers (like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM)

Market: Zipcars has grown already to 325,000 members and is growing 30% a year with a overall market for shared vehicles expected to balloon to $800 million over the next five years (Fortune), and business IT spending on cloud computing is expected to rise from $16 billion last year to $42 billion by 2012 (IDC).

Users: Major companies (not just individuals) are using Zipcars—so far “about 8,500 companies have signed up, including Lockheed Martin, Gap, and Nike.” And brand name companies are signing up for cloud computing, such as NY Times, NASDAQ, Major League Baseball, ESPN, Hasbro and more. (http://www.johnmwillis.com/other/top-10-entperises-in-the-cloud/).

Going green: Each shared Zipcar “takes up to 20 cars off the road as members sell their rides or decide not to buy new ones.” Each move to cloud computing makes some or all of organizations unique servers, storage devices, and applications obsolete.

The trend: With the transportation market, the future will be “a blend of things like the Zipcar, public transportation, and private car ownership (according to Bill Ford), and with the IT industry, the future will be a combination of cloud computing, managed services, and in-house IT service provision.

Zipcars and cloud computing are benefiting from the new shared services model driven by cost-savings, flexibility, efficiencies of allotment, and eco-consciousness. These are driving change in our usage of transportation and computing for the better.


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July 10, 2009

The Microgrid Versus The Cloud

It’s strange how the older you get, the more you come to realize that life is not black and white. However, when it comes to technology, I once held out hope that the way to the future was clear.

Then things started to get all gray again.

First, I read a few a few weeks ago about the trends with wired and wireless technologies. On one hand, phones have been going from wired to wireless (many are even giving up their landlines all together). Yet on the other hand, television has been going the other way—from wireless (antennas) to wired (cable).

Okay, I thought this was an aberration; generally speaking technology advances—maybe with some thrashing about—but altogether in a specific direction that we can get clearly define and get our arms around.

Well, then I read another article—this one in Fast Company, July/August 2009, about the micogrid. Here’s what this is all about:

“The microgrid is simple. Imagine you could go to Home Depot and pick out a wind or solar appliance that’s as easy to install as a washer/dryer. It makes all the electricity your home needs and pays for itself in just a few years. Your home still connects to the existing wires and power plants, but is a two-way connection. You’re just as likely to be uploading power to the grid as downloading from it. You power supply communicates with the rest of the system via a two-way digital smart meter, and you can view your energy use and generation in real time.”

Is this fantasy or reality for our energy markets?

Reality. “From the perspective of both our venture capital group and some senior people within GE Energy, distributed generation is going to happen in a big way.” IBM researchers agree—“IBM’s vision is achieving true distributed energy on a massive scale.”

And indeed we see this beginning to happen in the energy industry with our own eyes as “going green” environmentalism, and alternate energy has become important to all of us.

The result is that in the energy markets, let’s summarize, we are going from centralized power generation to a distributed model. Yet—there is another trend in the works on the information technology side of the house and that is—in cloud computing, where we are moving from distributed applications, platforms, storage, and so forth (in each organization) to a more centralized model where these are provisioned by service providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM—to name a just a few. So in the energy markets, we will often be pushing energy back to the grid, while in information technology, we will be receiving metered services from the cloud.

The takeaway for me is that progress can be defined in many technological ways at one time. It’s not black or white. It’s not wired or wireless. It’s not distributed or centralized services. Rather, it’s whatever meets the needs of the particular problem at hand. Each must be analyzed on its own merits and solved accordingly.


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