Green Options

Earlier today, we wrote about The Green Grid, a consortium of tech companies aiming to create a “multi-year set of design guides proposed for use by data center operators and designers to build and operate energy efficient data centers.” There are a variety of products that can help operators green their data centers, and some of the best come from a Green Grid member called Avocent.

Yesterday, Sentilla announced the release of its Energy Manager, a powerful piece of software that works with a microsensor system to detect and manage the energy consumption of data centers. The core of Sentilla’s product is a series of microprocessors embedded in intelligent power strips. Each strip measures power use at the server level.

The planet’s 44 million servers actually use 0.5% percent of the world’s electricity. If you total up data centre emissions, one guesstimate is that they are close to the same level as carbon output of nations such as Argentina.

This week’s Sustainable IT newsletter by Ted Samson of InfoWorld departs from the regular format because Ted is home sick and his editors are “filling in.”  Although Ted’s regular newsletter is a great read, this week’s “collection of links centered around one topic: how to cut energy usage” are terrific in their own right.  Here they are:

• IT ignorant on pending power shortages
• Datacenters explore novel ways to cut

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This week, Ecoworldly celebrates the Water Week, and between September 8 - 14, readers of the blog will be reflecting on a lot of water issues here. But isn’t it exciting that this is also the week that word finally leaked out that Google was patenting a retrofitted floating water and wind energy data center.

What does that mean? According to documents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office August 28, the Google water-powered data center will be - a system that includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.

When the Internet extended its wiry tentacles to the small town that I grew up in, I had no idea what it was. I pictured it being a room full of wires and lights, like a super computer android version of a phone operator.

As I matured, I realized it wasn’t that at all, but a more mystic existence of floating pockets of digital information in constant flux, existing in digital clouds that were suspended just above the atmosphere.

Of course, neither of those images is or was correct. But as it turns out, I was closer to the target with my first guess. Massive server rooms take up space and energy all over the world, storing the information and websites we web junkies feed on for survival. Luckily, they are starting to go green.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc., a technology real estate company, has taken a bold step into the green world by renovating a 90-year-old printing facility in Chicago. They have turned the plant into the world’s first LEED gold-certified data center. Not only is this a paradigm shift for future data centers—it may change the way LEED building companies approach renovations.

At the end of the 1970s, the world saw a computer revolution, and waves of new business development followed. By the early 1990s, there were signs of a green computing revolution, and now businesses are taking advantage of the industry’s need for environmentally-friendly products. Data centers, in particular, have become a target market, since the past few years have seen a sharp increase in their rate of energy consumption.

One of the more successful technologies to have been developed is virtualization. Broadly speaking, to virtualize is to make a single piece of hardware function as multiple pieces. Different user interfaces isolate portions of the hardware, and make each one operate as a separate entity. As applied to data centers, installing virtual infrastructure allows more operating systems and applications to run on fewer servers, which reduces overall energy use and cooling requirements. Running fewer servers also means that data centers could reduce their building size as well.

“Infomration technology (IT) should have a minimal environmental impact.”

“Infomration technology (IT) should have a minimal environmental impact.”