America Honda Lists Data Center One of Five LEED Buildings

America Honda Motor has a press release announcing the certification of five LEED Buildings. Honda calls attention to the data center in the press release.

American Honda Motor Co. Certifies Five Green Buildings in U.S. This Year
Honda's Data Center First Silver-certified in the Country

American Honda Motor Co., Inc. has certified five new green buildings under the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards this year as part of an effort to further reduce the environmental impact of Honda's operations and products in the U.S. One of these facilities - Honda's Data Center in Longmont, Colo. - is the first LEED Version 2.2 Silver certified data center in the country. Data centers are considered difficult to certify because of their large energy consumption.

Honda's five LEED-certified facilities this year include:

  • LEED-EB Platinum - Northwest Regional Facility in Gresham, Oregon;
  • LEED-NC Gold - Honda R&D America's Acura Design Studio in Torrance, Calif.;
  • LEED-NC Gold - American Honda's Midwestern Consolidation Center in Troy, Ohio;
  • LEED-NC Gold - Honda Aircraft Company World Headquarters, Greensboro, N.C.; and,
  • LEED-NC Silver - Data Center in Longmont, Colo.
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Embodiment Living Data Centers, The Future of Data Center Design

Microsoft James Hamilton has a post about Butler Lampson, The Uses of Computers: What's Past is Merely Prologue -- Butler Lampson

Butler Lampson, one of the founding members of Xerox PARC, Turing award winner, and one of the most practical engineering thinkers I know spoke a couple of days ago at the Computing in the 21st Century Conference in Beijing. My rough notes from Butler’s talk follow. Overall Butler argues that “embodiment” is the next big phase of computing after simulation and communications. Butler defines embodiment as computers interacting directly with the physical world. For example, autonomously driven vehicles. Butler argues that this class of applications are only possible now due to the rapidly falling price of computing coupled with systems capabilities driven by Moore’s law.

Embodiment is something I think can also describe where data center design is going, “interacting directly with the physical world.”  Data center design in the past isolated itself from the physical which made it environmentally and financially expensive.  The future of data centers are designed for the site and to reduce its impact on the environment, while reducing its financial costs at the same time.  As Google, Microsoft and many other data center operators focus more on the environmental impact of their data centers, embodiment as a concept works for what they are striving to build.

This is a sustainable future which will have pressures from various areas. One of the top pressures is going to come from ISO 26000.  The ISO 26000 standard should:

  • assist organizations in addressing their social responsibilities while respecting cultural, societal, environmental and legal differences and economic development conditions;
  • provide practical guidance related to operationalizing social responsibility, identifying and engaging with stakeholders, and enhancing credibility of reports and claims made about social responsibility;
  • emphasise performance results and improvement;
  • increase confidence and satisfaction in organizations among their customers and other stakeholders;

    • I’ve written about Skanka’s efforts in Living Data Center, and here is another little know fact. A Skanska employee is co-chair of the ISO 26000 standard along with a Petrobas employee.  Sweden represents the developed countries and Brazil is the developing countries.

    Awareness of how ISO 26000 will change social responsibility ahead of the competition. If you agree with this, you need to think about who can build a Living Data Center, an embodiment data center that interacts directly with the physical world.

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    Amazon’s New Oregon Data Center

    DataCenterKnowledge reports on Amazon.com’s new Oregon Data Center.

    Amazon Building Large Data Center in Oregon

    November 7th, 2008 : Rich Miller

    Amazon.com appears to be the tenant in a large data center rising on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon, joining Google in harnessing the region’s cheap energy resources to power huge cloud computing data centers.

    The $100 million data center is being built in Boardman, Oregon in the Port of Morrow, a 9,000 acre industrial park. Plans call for three large buildings on the site, according to The Oregonian, which reports that representatives of Amazon have attended local meetings to discuss permits for the site. The first building is underway and will be 116,000 square feet.

    I was starting to wonder if Amazon had some secret to keep us from knowing what is was building.

    Amazon is historically tight-lipped about the location of its data centers. But the rapid growth of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform long ago exceeded the excess capacity in the data centers supporting the company’s retail operations. As AWS grows, Amazon will need to continue adding dedicated infrastructure to add capacity. Amazon recently said its S3 cloud storage service was now storing 29 billion objects.

    But, you can’t build big data centers without the insiders finding out or the local press.  Especially when you are looking for cheap and/or green power for your data center.

    The Columbia River basin has large resources of hydro electricity generated from dams along the river. This cheap, clean power was a factor in Google’s decision to build a huge data center in The Dalles, Oregon and has fueled the tranformation of  Quincy, Washington from a small farming town into a data center hub with new facilities from Microsoft and Yahoo.

    A 10-megawatt power substation is being built adjacent to the new data center in Boardman, the Oregonian reports. The paper said a $320,000 Oregon Department of Transportation grant was awarded to the port to connect the data center to local utilities. The grant will cover about half the total cost of the additional power infrastructure.

    We’ll see if Amazon changes and follows the Microsoft and Google model to share some of their best practices.

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    BBC Tours Inside Microsoft’s Quincy Data Center

    Here is a BBC Video inside Microsoft’s Quincy Data Center.

    image

    The online article is here.

    The town in the cloud...
    • Rory Cellan-Jones
    • 27 Oct 08, 09:15 GMT

    I'm in the United States to report on several stories, including the whole phenomenon of cloud computing. More on that on the television and radio on Tuesday, but in the meantime, let me take you to one of the places we've filmed, the town with its head in the cloud.

    Ariel view of data centre, QuincyWe've been to Quincy, a remote farming town of 5,000 inhabitants in the middle of the state of Washington, where just about the only activities until recently were either planting potatoes or turning them into chips - or rather French fries. Now it's home to three giant data centres.

    The biggest belongs to Microsoft, which completed its brutally ugly building on a former bean-field last year, to be followed swiftly by Yahoo and now the financial software firm Intuit. We were allowed access to Microsoft's centre - the first TV crew to get inside - and after passing through several layers of security found ourselves in one of the server rooms.

    There are 10 of them, with up to 30,000 servers in each, an almost unimaginable amount of computing power. Walking around, deafened by the roar from the cooling systems needed to keep the computers chilled, you feel you're right in the belly of the modern internet.

    Oh yeh thanks to Steve Clayton’s: geek in disguise blog I found this post.

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    Australia’s First High Density Data Centre

    Australian IT writes on Australia’s first high-density data centre.

    Data centres cluster to trim costs

    Mitchell Bingemann | October 28, 2008

    AUSTRALIA'S first high-density data centre complex is on track for completion next year, after phase one of its construction.

    Data centres cluster to trim costs

    Michael Tran says virtual blades are key to cuts

    The Data Centre City, being built by Digital Sense at an undisclosed site outside Brisbane, will consist of five high-density data centres, Digital Sense chief executive Michael Tran says.

    Due for completion in the second quarter of 2009, Data Centre City will cover 12,500sqm.

    Tran says it will have a maximum capacity of 6500W per square metre, compared with about 800W per square metre in traditional data centres.

    "In traditional data centre terms, Data Centre City's 12,500qqm will represent about 140,000sqm of floor space," Tran says.

    "We are modelling these high-density data centres on the American style, which typically features much larger and higher quality data centres."

    High-density data centres differ from traditional data centres in that they virtualise blade servers to achieve greater capacity, power efficiency and big savings in floor space. Digital Sense has completed the first phase of construction with a $300,000 purchase of Sun gear consisting of 20 AMD servers, a tape library and back-up storage systems.

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