GigaOm – Russia, The Final Frontier for Data Centers?, links to GreenM3

July 27, 2008 Dave Ohara

I was showing a friend this weekend how I blog and at the time I was writing about Russia’s Hyrdroelectric capacity.

Checking my web stats I saw hits from http://gigaom.com/2008/07/27/russia-data-centers/, and it turns out GigaOm’s Om Malik linked to my entry.

Russia, The Final Frontier For Data Centers?

Om Malik, Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 3:30 PM PT Comments (3)

To paraphrase (and mangle) StarTrek’s famous tagline: Can Russia be the place where Internet companies boldly go looking for the final frontier of data centers? At least one blog thinks so, and it points to the massive hydroelectric power capacity on tap in Russia. An article in this week’s The Economist points to RusHydro, a Russian company with the capacity to produce 25 gigawatts of electricity.

Thanks Om.

VMware’s Home Page, Reduce Energy Costs by 80%

July 26, 2008 Dave Ohara

I’ve been digging more around VMware’s website, but today what caught my attention is they have changed their home page.

The folks at VMware must have figured out how big a deal a Green Data Center is for their customers.

VMware’s Green Page is here.

And, they have an energy efficient kit of content.

And, their T-shirts are 100% Organic Cotton.

Green Data Centers in Russia? HydroElectric Capacity 25 GW

July 26, 2008 Dave Ohara

There have been rumors of Google, Microsoft, and others going to Siberia for data centers. The Economist writes on the Russia's hydroelectric industry.

A clean-power colossus hopes to grow even bigger

MANY investors believe there is gold in greenery. They see a sunny future for firms that generate power from solar panels, wind turbines and so forth. After all, their fuel is free, whereas the bills of power stations that run on coal and natural gas are high and rising. And ever more countries are making “renewables” even more attractive through subsidies or taxes on grubbier fuels. So what is the world’s biggest listed renewable-power firm, in the vanguard of this trend?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is RusHydro, a partly state-owned company that owns most of Russia’s hydroelectric plants. Its capacity, of 25 gigawatts (GW), makes it the largest power-generation firm in Russia, the world’s fourth-biggest market for electricity. (Hydro-Québec, a firm owned by a Canadian provincial government, generates more power but is not listed.)

There are additional comments on the WW Hydropower

Hydropower produces about 15% of the world’s electricity, compared with 3% for other renewables. There is still lots of room for growth, anti-dam activists permitting. New Energy Finance, a research firm, reckons that less than one-third of the world’s potential capacity has been developed. Much of the unused part is in Russia, RusHydro says. It has 5GW of new capacity under construction and more than 20GW on the drawing board—enough to double production.

Microsoft’s Lewis Curtis interviews Mike Manos at TechEd

July 26, 2008 Dave Ohara

Here is an interview Lewis Curtis conducted of Mike Manos at TechEd on Microsoft’s data center efforts.

Greening Sharepoint with Virtualization, 74% energy savings

July 26, 2008 Dave Ohara

VirtualGeek has a post about VMware used in a Sharepoint scenario with a 74% energy savings.

The results:

In terms of performance, (omitting the SQL backend - which has been virtualized in other tests showing EXCELLENT performance), across 3 baseline tests, on average:

Our Virtualized SharePoint server infrastructure farm out-performed the physical SharePoint farm by 4%,

But only used 26% of the electrical power (watts) required to power the physical server infrastructure - put another way, that’s a 74% power saving over physical, put yet another way, going physical means 380% more power.

1017 Watts versus 3952 Watts. 6 Power cords versus 22

As Microsoft gets ready for its Hyper-V launch, we’ll see how their #’s match up to VMware’s.

Here is one sharepoint on Hyper-V blog entry. It is a demo environment, but they show a 100% performance improvement for Hyper-V vs. Virtual Server 2005 R2.