Asia Data Center Alliance commits to Green Data Centers

January 18, 2011 Dave Ohara

Asia Pacific is one of the big growth markets. Equinix and Digital Realty Trust are expanding in the these markets with partnerships. Those left out of these partnerships could try to compete individually or create their own partnerships like the Asia Data Center Alliance (ADCA). Which has a commitment to Green Data Centers.

This Data Center Alliance sets the precedence for ASEAN data center service providers to join forces & collaborate in enabling region's enterprises to stay competitive in the global economy. The other objective of ADCA is to develop Green Data Centers by applying modest energy saving technologies as the contribution for reducing the greenhouse effect and global warming.

The ADCA comprises.

ADCA founding members include:

1-Net Singapore Pte Ltd (Singapore)

CMC Telecommunication Services Corp. (Vietnam)

The AIMS Asia Group Sdn Bhd (Malaysia)

T.C.C. Technology Co., Ltd (Thailand)

ADCA associated members includes:

HKCOLO Limited (Hong Kong)

The combined space is 450,000 sq ft.

The Asia Data Center Alliance (ADCA) has a combined space

of more than 45,000m2. We strive to be one of the biggest data

It is too bad they follow the traditional approach in quoting space and not power.

New NSA “spy” data center adding up the staff

January 17, 2011 Dave Ohara

DefenseSystems.com discusses the new NSA “spy” data center.

Work commences on $1B NSA 'spy' center

Cyber intelligence data center reportedly will support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative

By Henry Kenyon

Jan 07, 2011

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground this week on a massive new National Security Agency cyber intelligence center in Utah. Located at Camp Williams, 25 miles south of Salt Lake City, the $1.2 billion facility — officially known as the Utah Data Center — will be responsible for collecting and aggregating incoming intelligence data.

According to USACE, the center will have 100,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space and more than 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space. Support facilities will include an electrical substation, a vehicle inspection facility and visitor control center, fuel storage, water storage, and a chiller plant. Camp Williams is a National Guard training site operated by the Utah National Guard.

Salt Lake City news, Desert News also writes about the employment #’s.

Utah's $1.5 billion cyber-security center under way

Published: Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011 1:10 a.m. MST

By Steve Fidel, Deseret News

45 comments

E-MAIL | PRINT | FONT + -

CAMP WILLIAMS — Thursday's groundbreaking for a $1.5 billion National Security Agency data center is being billed as important in the short term for construction jobs and important in the long term for Utah's reputation as a technology center.

"This will bring 5,000 to 10,000 new jobs during its construction and development phase," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said on Wednesday. "Once completed, it will support 100 to 200 permanent high-paid employees."

See all 5 photos | Click to enlarge

Stuart Johnson, Deseret News

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and National Security Agency host a joint groundbreaking ceremony for the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative (CNCI) Data Center Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011, at Camp Williams. Construction of the $1.2 billion Data Center is scheduled to be completed in October 2013.

But, something doesn’t add up. 100 to 200 staff to support 100,000 sq ft of NSA type of white space is plausible. But, 900,000 sq ft for technical support and administrative space means there is 4,500 – 9,000 sq ft per employee.

What data center do you know of has 1/10 dedicated to white space and 9/10 for support?

Something doesn’t add up in terms of what is in the NSA “spy” data center unless there are a lot more people there.

Olivier Sanche Memorial Service Jan 28, 2011 in Los Gatos, CA

January 17, 2011 Dave Ohara

It’s been almost 2 months since Olivier Sanche voice went silent and we’ll never hear him again, speaking with passion on data centers and the environment.

A Memorial Service will be held on Jan 28, 2011 at 4p in Los Gatos, CA.

Here are details.

Dear all,

Some of you might not be aware of this terrible news so it is with great sorrow that I must inform you that Olivier passed away on November 26, 2010 in Europe from a sudden heart attack.

The funeral took place on December 3rd in Pignan ( his hometown), France.
There will be a memorial in his honor on Friday, January 28, 2011 at St. Mary's Catholic Church, 219 Bean Avenue in Los Gatos ( California) at 4PM.
Here is the link for directions.

The memorial will be held after school hours so there should be some parking available in the church's parking lot, otherwise the town of Los Gatos has several free public parking lots (along University Street ) as well as street parking.

Sincerely,
Karine Sanche

Please feel free to send me stories you have about Olivier as I’ll be helping to pull together a perspective on his awesome past.

-Dave Ohara

dave@greenm.com

Increasing Energy Efficient Server Competition, ARM efforts ramps up with Virtualization Support

January 16, 2011 Dave Ohara

James Hamilton has a good post on the state of ARM powered servers. Sometimes when I read other people’s work I think what they say in the end should be moved to the beginning of the conversation. Here is the last paragraph from James’s post.

We are on track for renewed competition in the server-side computing market segment and intense competition on power efficiency at the same time as internet-scale service operators are willing to run whatever processor is least expensive and most power efficient. With competition comes innovation and I see a good year coming.

James points out the ARM instruction set as an advantage.

ARM has become an incredibly important instruction set architecture powering smartphones, low-end network routers, printers, copiers, tablets, and other embedded applications. But things are changing, arm is now producing designs appropriate for server-side computing at the same time that power consumption is becoming a key measure of server-side computing cost. The ARM design team are masters of low power designs and generations of ARMs have focused on power management. ARM has an impressively efficiently design.

Here is another little known fact is Virtualization Extensions in the ARM architecture.

Virtualization Extensions

The ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension and Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) enable the efficient implementation of virtual machine hypervisors for ARM architecture compliant processors.

Connected consumer devices and cloud computing demand energy efficient, high performance systems to handle complex software with potentially large amounts of data.

The ARM Architecture Virtualization Extensions provides the basis for ARM Architecture compliant processors to address the needs of both client and server devices for the partitioning and management of complex software environments into virtual machines.

The ARM Architecture Large Physical Address Extension provides the means for each of the software environments to efficiently utilize the available physical memory when handling large amounts of data.

Part of the Virtualization extensions is more than 32 bit virtual memory addressing.

Virtualization Extensions

As the complexity of software increases the requirement for multiple software environments to be available on the same physical processor increases simultaneously. Software applications that require separation for reasons of isolation, robustness or differing real-time characteristics need a virtual processor exhibiting the required functionality.

To provide virtual processors in an energy-efficient manner requires a combination of hardware acceleration and efficient software hypervisors. The ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension standardizes the architecture for implementation of the hardware acceleration in ARM application processor cores, while high performance hypervisors from the world’s leading virtualization companies provide the software component upon which to build effective software combinations.

Cloud computing and other data or content oriented solutions increase the demands on the physical memory system from each virtual machine. The large physical address extensions provide a second level of MMU translation table so that each 32-bit virtual memory address can be mapped within a 40-bit physical memory range. This allows systems to allocate sufficient physical memory to each virtual machine for efficient throughput to be maintained when total demands on memory exceed the range of 32-bit addressing.

People will laugh at ARM servers, but when you can get a dozen or more for the price of one Xeon, there are scenarios where ARM servers will work.

China Telcos lead countries data center industry, partners with LBNL to green its data centers

January 15, 2011 Dave Ohara

Web Host Industry Review has a post on US DOE LBNL partnering with China to green data center. I have had the pleasure of visiting LBNL labs data center efficiency group, and it is a good group to work with for this type of effort for China. There are also some interesting facts in the post you should think about to understand the China Data Center industry.

First the role of Telcos in data center development.

China differs from the US in that the telecommunications industry has taken the lead over the IT industry in dominating the data center market.

10% of the USA data center capacity is for the Federal government, and there is a huge market for data centers that have nothing to do with the gov’t. China’s government is the #1 player in data center capacity build out, and you will need to fit in China government’s plans.

Another major difference between China's data center market compared to the US is that most data centers in China are owned and run by the government.

LBNL points out the government influence has an advantage to green the data center in that they only need to convince the government to make the changes.

Sector[sic] Sarton says that this difference could be advantageous if they can "convince the government to make the changes... they can make the changes quicker."

Berkeley Lab is also hoping to work with China to install technologies such as warm-water liquid cooling and DC power through its partner agency.

So what is the project?

The project is being run by Dale Sartor, head of the Building Technology's Applications Team, and Bo Shen of the China Energy Group.

The Berkeley Lab scientists will work with the China Institute of Electronics and the China Electronics Standardization Institute to "share best practices, case studies and other material" to help form standards and training programs for China's data center industry.

Sarton says that China has a wide range of energy efficiency within its data centers but ultimately shows "a lot of room for improvement."

The original article referenced is here in Physorg.com.

Berkeley lab to help China improve energy efficiency of data centers
December 21, 2010
The amount of energy consumed by data centers is increasing rapidly around the world, and China is no exception. With its growing information technology and telecom industries and its emerging status as a supercomputer power, China continues to expand its data center capacity. In an effort to help reduce carbon emissions, the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a world leader in high-performance buildings, has started working with China to improve the energy performance of its data centers.