DataCenterKnowledge covers Skanska’s green data center project.

Skanska Hired for $150M Data Center Project

October 20th, 2008 : Rich Miller

Skanska says it has been awarded the construction management assignment for a new, $150 million data center project in the western U.S. for “one of the largest companies in Internet trading.” The facility will be approximately 19,000 square meters, or about 204,000 square feet. Construction has begun and is scheduled for completion in May 2010, according to Skanska, which said its focus on energy efficiency was “decisive” in its selection.

“We have focused on developing our expertise within Green Construction,” says Mike McNally, President, Skanska USA Building. “Our green solution benefits us, the customer and the environment. We strengthen competitiveness for both parties while at the same time reducing environmental impact.”

Skanska is one of the world’s leading construction groups with expertise in construction, development of commercial and residential projects and public-private partnerships. Skanska USA is based in Parsippany, New Jersey and has approximately 4,000 employees.

The original press release is here.

Energy efficient solutions that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases were decisive in selecting Skanska for implementing the project. Skanska has developed a total solution that reduces energy costs for operation and cooling of the facility by up to 60 percent compared with traditional technology.

Christian Belady has a new post on Intense Computing  or In Tents Computing.

Intense Computing or In Tents Computing?

Introduction

Now that we have introduced you to the concept of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and provided a mechanism to calculate this value, I wanted to talk about an idea that may be considered extreme. But just as the extreme nature of Formula One technology eventually ends up in a Ford Focus (and, as I discovered while commuting to campus the other day, so does the driver!), maybe what we are discussing could one day be a feature of a data center near you.

The Challenge—Achieving the Power of One

The central premise of this post is what would a data center look like with a PUE of 1.0? A PUE of 1.0 essentially means that all the power consumed in the data center generates compute operations and there is no additional cooling or power overhead. OK, so we would have to turn off the techies’ coffee machine (or maybe attach a USB-powered one to a customer’s server. Only joking, some people would call that gaming the metric!)

And, Christian closes with qualifier of Microsoft's intent.

In summary, my point is not that we should rush out and build all our data centers under canvas (although I would love to watch Mike Manos’s face if someone did propose putting all the Microsoft data centers into tents). However, I think we should continue to research how we can deploy ultra low cost, power-efficient infrastructure in situations where it makes sense. Areas that would be particularly appropriate are where applications are more resilient to failure and organizations can tolerate minor outages.

We aren’t the only ones working on this approach. You might want to take a look the work that Intel started at the same time as us, here:http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2008/09/intel_air_side.html.

I leave it to you to think about where this option could make sense. Our team has already committed itself to investigate these possibilities.

Can Microsoft patent a data center tent?

WSJ has an article on Computing Makers seeing Green (money) in Retooling Client’s Data Centers. Let’s start with the highlights form big names.

IBM surprised Wall Street this year when it said its new "Green Data-Center Services" business -- which redesigns customers' data centers and sells energy-efficient products -- signed $300 million in orders in the 2007 fourth quarter.

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IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano recently told analysts that IBM expects more than 70% of the world's biggest companies "will modify their data centers significantly in the next five years" to deal with energy shortfalls and rising costs.

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H-P last November bought EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc., a 350-person engineering firm that specializes in designing data centers. EYP President Rick Einhorn says that while energy efficiency used to be an afterthought when customers requested quotes, today "every request we see has a requirement for energy-efficient design."

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Savings can be significant. EMC Corp., a Hopkinton, Mass., provider of storage systems that also has an energy-consulting business, redesigned its own computer rooms to eliminate unneeded equipment and use air-conditioning more efficiently. EMC projects that over three years it will avoid $4 million in costs of energy and expanded floor space.

Virtualization is covered.

Virtualization software is another big trend in power-efficient computing. In the past, companies used a separate physical server for every software application. Frequently, each ran at only 10% of its capacity, while using a full load of electricity. With virtualization, many jobs can be run on a single computer using more of its capacity, which cuts power needs.

Albert Esser, head of power and infrastructure solutions at Dell, says that advising customers how to cut power use through virtualization is an increasingly important part of Dell's $6 billion-a-year services business. He declined to disclose specific amounts.

EMC's VMware Corp., the biggest maker of virtualization software, says that a company that virtualizes 100 servers to run on 20 physical servers can save nearly $67,000 a year in energy costs.

And a small world connection. In the WSJ article Citigroup is mentionedfor its Frankfurt green data center.

Citigroup Inc. is scaling down to 14 major data centers from 52. The financial giant has been building so-called green data centers, including one in Frankfurt, Germany, with an earth-topped, green roof and exterior wall planted with sedum, a dense, succulent plant that retains cooling water in its leaves, shielding the building from the sun's rays and reducing the need for air conditioning.

I blogged about the Citigroup effort back in Dec 10, 2007 identifying the work by Harvey Cobbold.

A group of us had the pleasure of having Harvey Cobbold who is responsible for Citi's Data Center construction on our Green Data Center panel discussion at IT Forum. Behind the scenes of any Green PR release is a team of people who have been working on the project for years. These are the people who are now being recognized by their companies and industry as doing the right thing for the environment.  Great Job Harvey!!!