Green Data Center in India

CXOToday.com has an article about Green Data Center initiatives in India, and momentum is building.

Green data center movement is gathering momentum in India as organizations have started realizing its importance in energy conservation and sustainable development. It is applied to new technologies that can help in cutting down data center energy costs and saving energy, which is synonymous to saving money. It has a big role to play in reducing the power consumption in the data center.

Raritan has planned to come up with a power management solution in India in January 2008. According to Sanjay Motwani, country manager of Raritan India, "Power management tools facilitate less power consumption and so cooling time of data center is reduced and so it helps in promoting the green data center movement".

Kumar further added that for green data centers, the network should be converged and managed effectively. The network needs to be consolidated and energy conservation should be kept in mind while designing the data center. He suggested "TIA 942 data center standard in cabling, which talks about every aspect of cabling with the data center should be followed to promote the concept of green data center."

Companies are now more concerned about environment and energy saving models, so the future of green data center concept is bright in India. According to Motwani, the green data center concept is new in India but organizations have started realizing its importance. He believes that it has started picking up, and in future, it would be completely adopted.

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Power Monitoring Equipment Choice

For quite a while now, I have been stumped with what kind of equipment to get to measure power consumption. For consumers, I have a Kill-a-watt which is fine for curiosity at home, and maybe watts up pro for a USB device.  Extech and Fluke are other pieces of equipment others have used, but nobody gives a huge endoursement.

Keeping my fingers, crossed I think I have found a device that would work well in a Performance Lab environment.  Dan Diesso of Smart Works and I sat down to go over his device and how it works.

Smart-Watt keeps a cumulative total of the energy consumed in 0.1 watt-hour increments and retains that reading even in the event of a power failure.  Smart-Watt conforms to ANSI Standards for watt-hour meters so you are assured of the same high accuracy standards that public utilities require for their meters.  To make reading the meter easy each Smart-Watt is equipped with a unique internal ID and network connection for automated reading.  You can daisy-chain multiple Smart-Watt units together and connect them directly to a PC COM port for automated reading or use our Smart-Net Gateway that provides an IP interface to read a group of Smart-Watt units across your local area network or remotely over the internet.

After I've had a chance to use the unit, I'll report on how well it works, and whether it meets the power needs for a performance lab.  The accuracy, unique ID, and network connection are what differentiates Smart-Watt vs. other equipment I've seen.

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Purple Yahoo Data Center in Quincy, WA

Found a posting about Yahoo's new data center. A bunch of us are wondering why Yahoo would paint their building purple? I've been to the Microsoft Data Center in Quincy a couple of times, and it is a lot bigger. I can't quote you the size, but if you walk around the building you'll have traveled 1.3 miles.  That's a lot bigger than 14,000 140,000 square ft (Below is a typo, the building is 140,000 sq ft) , and the Microsoft guys painted the roof white to help reflect the sun during the hot summers. I wonder how much hotter the building gets when they are purple? I've got to believe it was the PR/corporate image team who decided to paint the building purple.

Yahoo! builds new Data Center the green way

December 13, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Environment, Tech Industry

big_quincyexterior.jpg

A new 14,000 sq. ft Yahoo! data center was open in Quincy, Washington and had a welcome ribbon cutting by David Filo as well as Wylie Gustafson, the original guy who yodels “Yahoo!” at the end of commercials. Quincy, Washington was chosen as the prime location due to its fiber connectivity, network availability, affordable power, land and operations, and welcoming community. The best part about this data center was that it was custom built as opposed to all the other data centers that are usually rented. This allowed Yahoo! to put energy efficiency as a top priority in the design and construction of the data center. One advantange of being in Washington was the ability to draw in the cold air outside to cool the servers without using air conditioning. Carbon-free electricity using hydro and wind power the facility and all the lights operate on motion sensors. This is a great step in Yahoo!’s step in reducing energy consumption and becoming carbon neutral by the end of this year.

Here are more details about the Microsoft Data Center for comparison.

Microsoft has completed its first building at its Quincy, Washington data center and a leisurely walk around it is about 1.3 miles.

That little ditty comes from Michael Manos, senior director of Microsoft’s data center services unit. Manos was interviewed by Tina Wood at Channel 10.

Some other key highlights from Manos:

  • The general idea for Microsoft’s data centers is to make them a development platform (presumably for cloud services in the future).
  • Microsoft takes being green and sustainability seriously to be socially conscious and save money. Manos didn’t serve up many specifics.
  • The software giant goes through a 31-factor heat map to select locations for data centers. These factors include the price of land, power capacity and fiber-optic availability. These maps are also used to find good locations to position Microsoft for the future.
  • Microsoft has started a data center in San Antonio.
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Windows Vista Energy Savings

Found this information on Windows Vista.  On my list of things to do is sync with Windows Vista team and see what else they have, but this is a start.

Optimising Vista for Energy Efficiency

Following the green posting last month I recently came across some more articles. They go beyond the performance improvements are green improvements.

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Green Grid Technical Forum

Green Grid announced their technical forum. I don't know if I'll go, or just talk to a bunch of people who went and get their impression. Or better yet, talk to the guys who are going to present and find out what they plan on presenting. As many events, it is probably worth going if you want to network with the other attendees.

The Green Grid Technical Forum

Get Connected...Assess Today for Efficiency Tomorrow!

Parc 55 Hotel
55 Cyril Magnin Street
San Francisco, CA
February 5-6, 2008

Overview

An unprecedented opportunity to "Get Connected to Efficient IT", The Green Grid Technical Forum is a unique industry event designed to bring members and other industry stakeholders together to further The Green Grid’s mission of advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.  Attendees will learn about The Green Grid’s Data Center Metrics, current and emerging techniques for managing data centers for efficiency and future technical deliverables from the organization.  The Green Grid will also host discussions with leading industry policy-makers from around the world.

Registration

Members can visit The Green Grid Technical Forum Web page to register for this event.

Interested in attending The Green Grid Technical Forum, but not a member of The Green Grid?  Non-members can register by going to the web site.

It looks like it will be hard for non-members to attend.  Here is my response from their registration system.

Thank you for your interest in participating in The Green Grid Technical Forum.  At this time, registration is open to members only.  We will contact you as soon as registration opens to non-members.

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