4 Green Data Center Tools

GigaOm has a post on 4 data center tools for energy efficient data centers, focusing on server power management.

Appistry EnergySaver: An add-on to Appistry’s Enterprise Application Fabric, EnergySaver lets customers define performance-based policies for power management. When resources are no longer necessary, EnergySaver puts them to sleep, only bringing them back up as needed. If target resource utilization for a system is set at 50 percent, EnergySaver can power on or power off machines to keep aggregate usage at the predefined level.

Cassatt Active Power Management: Available across Cassatt’s line of Active Response solutions or as a standalone product, Active Power Management takes into account a variety of factors — from system performance to your electric utility’s peak and off-peak pricing schedules  — to determine when to turn servers on and off. If machines are needed for failover or to maintain application service levels, Active Power Management can bring them back up automatically.

Virtual Iron LivePower: A standard but still “experimental” feature of Virtual Iron v4.4, LivePower lets users set pre-determined utilization levels for physical machines. (Virtual Iron calls the feature experimental because “it has not yet been widely tested in production environments.”) When utilization falls below that level, LivePower leverages Virtual Iron LiveCapacity to move VMs running on that machine elsewhere. The physical server is shut down, rebooting and reentering the pool as demand picks up.

VMware Distributed Power Management: Another “experimental” feature, Distributed Power Management (DPM) is part of VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). DPM monitors power consumption in DRS pools and uses vMotion to consolidate workloads onto fewer physical servers automatically. Unneeded physical machines go into standby mode and come back online as predefined utilization policies dictate.

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California Declares Water Drought Emergency, Considers Mandatory Water Rationing

Water is one of the most under appreciated resource. Except in California where a water drought emergency has been declared.  The state is considering mandatory water rationing and a 10 billion bond pack for water infrastructure improvements.

Reuters covers details.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 27 (Reuters) - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state emergency due to drought and said he would consider mandatory water rationing in the face of nearly $3 billion in economic losses from below-normal rainfall this year.

As many as 95,000 agricultural jobs will be lost, communities will be devastated and some growers in the most economically productive farm state simply are not able to plant, state officials said, calling the current drought the most expensive ever.

California is known as the sunshine state.  Now it may be known as drought state.

"We're going to have droughts. That's a fact of life. They may be worse in the future," state water chief Lester Snow told reporters on a conference call.

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200 + articles on Microsoft Research Intel Atom Based Servers

I wrote about Intel Atom based servers starting in Aug 2008, and people thought it was silly to think of Intel Atom as a server product.

Well, thanks to Microsoft Research’s Intel Atom project, there are now over 200 articles about the idea of Intel Atom Servers. http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=intel+atom+microsoft+research

Microsoft tests Intel Atom netbook processor for 'green' servers

Computerworld - ‎2 hours ago‎

Judging by the $300 to $400 cost of Atom-based netbooks, Ohara said that racks of Atom-based server blades could be made for even less. "Intel hates this ...

Microsoft experiments with servers based on Intel Atom processors FierceCIO

all 4 news articles »

Boston Globe

Microsoft TechFest: A pinch of your fingers and images, videos move

Seattle Times - ‎Feb 25, 2009‎

... data center built from 100 of the low-power Intel Atom processors used in cheap netbook computers. Hrvoje Benko, of Microsoft's advanced research group, ...

Microsoft builds atomic cloud ComputerWeekly.com

Microsoft plays with small, sleepy servers Register

Microsoft debuts cloud R&D team EETimes.com

GigaOm  - Enews 2.0

all 200 news articles »

DigitalJournal.com

Microsoft studies new ways to turn servers on and off

DigitalJournal.com - ‎Feb 25, 2009‎

With Project Marlowe, Microsoft is looking at trade-offs between using a large amount of Intel Atom chips compared to using Intel Xeon chips. The Intel Atom ...

Microsoft powers data centres with netbooks Inquirer

all 3 news articles »

New York Times Blogs

Microsoft Studies the Big Sleep

New York Times Blogs - ‎Feb 24, 2009‎

With Marlowe, Microsoft has created a prototype server that relies on Intel’s Atom chip, most often found today in ultra-portable computing devices like ...

And, thanks to Eric Lai from ComputerWorld  I am in one of the articles as well. ;-)

Because they were designed for laptops and netbooks, Atom CPUs can be quickly put into sleep/hibernate states and then quickly woken up, said Dave Ohara, a consultant who runs the Green Data Center blog,unlike desktop and server CPUs.

The next step is a big name Server OEM shipping an Intel Atom server.  Here is a scary # for Intel quoted in the NYtimes.

With Marlowe, Microsoft has created a prototype server that relies on Intel’s Atom chip, most often found today in ultra-portable computing devices like netbooks. Such chips consume about one-tenth as much power as a regular Xeon server chip from Intel, and computer boards based on the chip cost about $70 instead of $1,000. The Atom chips, however, can perform only about one-fourth the amount of work in a given period of time as the Xeon chips, said Navendu Jain, a Microsoft researcher, during an interview Tuesday at the company’s headquarters.

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Mix Green Actors and IT = Pressure for Green IT

Rackable has a press release with a focus on the Media and Entertainment Industry and Green IT.

NEW STUDY SHOWS IT DEPARTMENTS IN DIGITAL MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY LACKING ACTION IN THEIR QUEST TO GO GREEN

Image-Conscious Industry More Aware Due to Press, Celebrities, and Consumer Demand to Go Green, According to BPM Forum, Rackable Systems and Intel Report

PALO ALTO, CA (February 24, 2009) — A nearly unanimous 99 percent of IT professionals feel that it is important for their digital media & entertainment industry-related businesses to reduce their carbon footprint, and most are becoming much more aware of ecological issues due to recent press, celebrity involvement, and consumer demand. Despite these pressures, 76 percent give the industry average or poor grades in their progress towards embracing so-called Think Eco-Logical processes and practices.

These are among the many findings in an executive report: “Think Eco-Logical – IT Sustainability Imperatives in Digital Media & Entertainment Business” by The BPM Forum and its Global Renewable Energy and Environmental Network (GREEN) in conjunction with Rackable Systems (NASDAQ: RACK) and Intel, around a comprehensive online survey and executive dialogs including insights from over 100 IT professionals. The new report is part of a Think Eco-Logical initiative to educate companies on the need to address both the environmental side (Eco) of IT sustainability imperatives and the economics (Logical) of achieving environmental efficiencies in the data center.

Didn’t know California’s film industry is the state’s 2nd largest Polluter.

According to a UCLA study, California’s film industry is the state’s second largest polluter, with only the oil industry having a greater negative impact on the environment. However, according to the BPM Forum study, more than 53 percent of companies don’t have or don’t know if they have a corporate sustainability agenda in place. And lack of awareness of business benefits was identified as the top challenge to environmental sustainability.

Here are a few facts from their report.

  • 88 percent say it’s important to have Eco-Logical servers

  • 90 percent have begun to implement Think Eco-Logical activities to some extent in their organization

  • Top potential benefits of ecological practices are reduced power/cooling costs (79 percent), social responsibility (73 percent), and positive PR (62 percent)

  • 80 percent say the digital media & entertainment industry is more sensitized towards the move to Thinking Eco-Logical than they were a year ago

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Carbon Monitoring Satellite Bites the Dust

There was lots of news about NASA’s Carbon Monitoring Satellite.  Unfortunately, it failed to reach orbit and came down in Antarctica.

In this recent undated photo provided by Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., a Taurus XL rocket with NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory on-board, sits on the launch pad. The rocket carrying the observatory blasted off early Tuesday morning, Feb. 24, 2009, from the base, but apparently failed to separate from the launch vehicle and splashed into the ocean. (AP Photo/U.S. Air Force, Senior Airman Cole M. Presley)

NASA rocket failure blow to Earth watching network

By SETH BORENSTEIN – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new satellite to track the chief culprit in global warming crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after launch Tuesday, dealing a major setback to NASA's already weak network for monitoring Earth and its environment from above.

The $280 million mission was designed to answer one of the biggest question marks of global warming: What happens to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas? How much of it is sucked up and stored by plants, soil and oceans and how much is left to trap heat on Earth, worsening global warming?

"It's definitely a setback. We were already well behind," said Neal Lane, science adviser during former President Bill Clinton's administration. "The program was weak and now it's really weak."

Failure was caused by

NASA officials said a protective cover on the satellite didn't release and fall away, and the extra weight meant the satellite couldn't reach orbit.

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