Pictures of Microsoft's Wind Powered Container in Boulder, CO

On Dailycamera.com there are pictures from Microsoft's Wind Powered Container event in Boulder, CO. The picture at the bottom has a shot of a Verari Systems Rack.

The article is here.

The new additions near the parking lot of Microsoft Corp.'s Boulder office may have the look of three white semi-trailers, but what's inside is powering the world.

Or, rather, the virtual world.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft on Thursday unveiled its new wind-powered, container-based data lab, which houses processing servers for the photorealistic 3-D city models used in the company's Virtual Earth online mapping program.

The data center also is wind-powered, officials announced, noting the purchase of wind-generated power from Boulder-based Renewable Choice Energy.

The cores of the servers can support more than 10 petabytes of data, said Jim Curlander, principal development manager of Virtual Earth. Combined with the servers located in the Boulder facility, that storage capacity is 15 petabytes, he added.

The pictures here and here.

Photo by Cliff Grassmick

Debra Chrapaty, left, and Stephen Lawler christen one of Microsoft Corp.'s new wind-powered, container-based data labs.

Photo by Cliff Grassmick

Lab Manager Brian Cunningham talks about the data center containers during the grand opening. Microsoft introduced its new wind-powered container-based data lab Thursday in Boulder.

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How to Green Your Data Backup

eWeek.com has an article titled How to Be Green in Your Data Center: Four Suggestions, but I would have title How to Green your Data Backup.

There are a lot of ways to save energy in your data center, including virtualization of both your servers and your backup. Andrew Madejczyk, vice president of Global Technology Operations at Sterling Testing Systems, explains this in more detail. Sterling had found itself with a backup solution that was too slow for its virtual environment. Madejczyk shows how that challenge can be made into both a performance and energy-saving opportunity.

Suggestion No. 1: Leverage the Value of a Backup Assessment

Suggestion No. 2: Virtualize Your Backup

Suggestion No. 3: Compress and Deduplicate Data

Suggestion No. 4: Use Thin Provisioning in Your Backup Environment

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Microsoft Unveils Wind-Powered Containers

DataCenterKnowledge posts on Microsoft's latest demonstration that leverages an advantage of containers.

Microsoft is thinking a lot of about green power these days, as Michael Manos explained at Data Center World. Manos, Microsoft's director of data center services, believes the federal government will become more active on power issues. "Sustainability regulation is coming," he said. "The conversation is not if, but when. It's more about what we're going to require companies to report against."

With some data centers now provisioning more than 100 megawatts of power, utility capacity is a primary issue in data center site location. But it's likely that green power profiles are beginning to gain more weight as companies decide between specific cities and utilities. For now, the percentage of renewable energy vs. coal in a utility's generating base is probably serving as a tiebreaker between competing locations.

But that may change as more companies offer carbon neutrality pledges and federal agencies weigh sustainable IT as a regulatory issue. This is an area where container solutions have the potential to be disruptive, allowing companies to move computing infrastructure to places where they can run on wind, hydro or solar power. Will we see cities of container data centers springing up next to utility-scale thermal solar power plants in the Mojave Desert? 

There are lots of potential scenarios, and it's hard to say how often green power plays using containers will work from an operational standpoint. But given data centers' energy use as a percentage of a company's total power bill, the math suggests these approaches will be seriously studied.

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Security is The Opposing Force of Green, demonstration - techniques to remove hard drive data

I was a having a brainstorming session with another smart guy, I don't want to name him, because the idea is too controversial.  We were discussing Green Ideas and we stumbled on the issue of Security being un-Green.

Why? Security at its simplest level creates friction in processes to make things more difficult, this takes more energy, effort, and other resources.  The enemies of your Green IT efforts will be your Security group as they will not want to compromise their security policies.

Now I am not arguing for no security.  It is requirement of any system, but how much security creates an environmental cost which is not sustainable?

As a demonstration of the extreme, no change that the typical methods, see this ComputerWorld article that discussing removing hard drive data.  None of their techniques is environmentally friendly.  They are all about destroying the drive so it is not usable.

April 18, 2008 (Computerworld) With stories surfacing on news channels regularly about lost or stolen data or the ability to recover data from discarded or resold computers and their hard drives, Computerworld decided to look at some cheap methods of removing that sensitive data from your hard drive permanently. And, what better place to look than YouTube?

While some of the behavior in these videos clearly displays a somewhat alarming level of violence and pent-up rage (and are probably illegal), we nevertheless were fascinated with the myriad ways to destroy a hard drive -- from a plasma cutter to a train to machines we don't even know the name of -- not to mention aluminothermic reactions.

Who knew there was such a subculture devoted to abusing hard drives? We even tried it ourselves, and you know, it is kind of fun. Make sure to go to the end of the story to see our version of disk destruction.

Please remember to wear safety goggles if you attempt any of these at home. Which you probably shouldn't do. Seriously.

Computerworld's recommended video is here http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1351827287/bctid1507761342

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Oracle 11g Goes Green, a database?

ChannelWeb writes on Oracle 11G being a "green solution."

Mention "green solution" and databases aren't usually what jump to mind first. Yet Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL), the industry's market-share leading enterprise database vendor, has developed the latest 11g database as a more streamlined, greener product with new features, such as advanced data compression and Partition Advisor.

Though Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle officially launched 11g last summer, the Test Center opted to examine the database in light of news from archrival Microsoft that its SQL Server 2008 would be delayed by several months.

Ah, a way for Oracle to generate some news to compete against Microsoft's SQL Server 2008.

Where is the Green?

Test Center reviewers also took a look at the advanced data compression capabilities, and here's where the "green" comes in: Compression in 11g goes across all databases -- not just production -- which decreases the level of real estate needed in the data center. Compressing large volumes of data can significantly decrease the need for additional disk space.

In 11g, unstructured documents can be compressed with binary compression and structured documents are compressed by way of duplicate data values. There is less overhead with data compression because of an improved algorithm. Compression is up to four times greater than in previous versions.

Looking a little further at Oracle's web site turned up a Green Data Center article, part 1 and part 2.

A central plank of green IT is server consolidation. According to OnStor's statistics, fifty-five per cent of respondents stated that storage consolidation would be a central element of their green policy. While an even more upbeat Gartner survey found that 92% of respondents had a data centre consolidation planned for, in progress or completed.

Storage consolidation is really important, although equally essential to reducing energy consumption is ensuring companies have streamlined their applications and data. Duplicated data and applications is a major problem in many organizations and these cause a range of operational inefficiencies, including demand for more storage space. Most companies know that at the data and applications levels they are far from efficient, but the problem has been that the risk, cost and time to consolidate applications has put them off. Celona recently conducted a survey amongst telecoms executives and 59% said they'd been so discouraged by an application migration that they decided not to go ahead with it. The new-generation of migration technology overcomes these problems, making the long-awaited benefits of application consolidation a reality.

Many vendors have cottoned on to the fact that there is a sea change in the air, and this is not the oceanic smell of green altruism – there is a distinct whiff of hard business reality about it. "Environmental sentiment is all well and good, and it helps that environmental issues currently enjoy a high media profile, but few companies have the financial freedom to go green overnight" says Simon Sherrington. "They simply can't justify decommissioning equipment unless there is a clear cost benefit in terms of saved opex, or unless the kit is becoming obsolete anyway. That is why companies with comparatively high energy costs, and companies in markets with high rates of technology obsolescence, have been swifter out of the blocks than peers in other industry sectors."

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