UN chooses Microsoft's ITPAC (Container) for African Green Data Center in Nairobi

Microsoft has a press announcement  on the UN choosing ITPAC for its data center in Nairobi, Kenya.

Here is the specific part on the data center - ITPAC.

The ITPAC technology helps increase IT efficiency and reduces costs in a number of ways. It uses outside air for primary cooling, removing the need for mechanical cooling devices, and is based on a modular design that can be used to make the ITPAC modules easy to pre-manufacture, ship and install onsite. In this way, it dramatically reduces the typical datacenter carbon footprint and consumption of materials, such as water, concrete, steel, piping and copper, along with reducing additional carbon usage associated with the packaging and transporting of servers, equipment and supplies. It also provides a plug-and-play infrastructure to enable the rapid deployment and refresh of servers both today and in the future. In terms of efficiency, many traditional datacenters operate with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 2 or higher. Through thoughtful and efficient design, cooling strategies, and site selection, Microsoft has been able to reduce the PUE of its latest datacenters to operate in a range between 1.05 and 1.15. The eventual PUE range for UNEP will depend on the ambient weather conditions, computing capacity and IT services deployed.

Earth2Tech points out that the leading green data center companies - Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo will be at Green:NET 2011 where I'll be as well.

At Green:Net, Microsoft’s Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard will talk about the company’s green data center designs and its connected cities projects. We’ll also be featuring a discussion at Green:Net between Google’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl and Yahoo’s Director, Climate and Energy Strategy, Christina Page, about green data center tech, and Greenpeace will release new data on clean power and the cloud.

Attending SNW, Storage Network World in Santa Clara, April 4 - 7, 2011 Santa Clara

A storage friend said he was heading to SNW next week. I said I'll be in SJ, he said the conference is in Santa Clara.  So, I checked out the site and it looked pretty interesting.  So, now I am attending, and I'll know one person there, but I am sure I'll run into other people given it is is Silicon Valley.

Experience the World's Largest Storage, Data Center and IT Infrastructure Conference

Join us for SNW where we bring together top information technology executives, leading product and service providers and key industry influencers for the world’s largest conference focused on managing information infrastructure.

Produced by Computerworld and co-owned by Computerworld and SNIA (The Storage Networking Industry Association), SNW features more than 120 educational sessions and presentations by top IT management experts covering today’s hottest IT topics — from cloud computing to energy efficient data centers to virtualization to storage -- and so much more.

Top Keynote speakers are.

Steve Wozniak
Co-founder,
Apple Computer
and Chief Scientist, Fusion-io

Tom Kelley
General Manager
IDEO

Randy Mott
Executive Vice President
and CIO
HP

What also caught my eye is #1 of 15 listed tracks is energy efficiency.

Choose from 15 Topical Tracks:
Speakers for Spring Include:
Venue Information:

1. Energy Efficiency
2. Data Management
3. Data Security
4. The Converged Network
5. Backup and Archiving
6. Virtualization
7. Data Center
8. Cloud Storage
9. Storage Management
10. Solid State Storage
11. Data Protection
12. Cloud Computing
13. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
14. Professional Development
15. Deduplication

Wind Farms have environmental impact, like bat population

Wind and Solar are championed by many as better for the environment, but almost any change in power generation has an environmental impact somewhere.  Bird migration is many times mentioned when discussing wind turbines, but other animals are affected like bats.  Most people don’t like bats, but they are an important part of the ecosystem.  Times writes on the economic costs of losing bats.

The Economic Cost of Losing Bats

Posted by BRYAN WALSH Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 2:09 pm

6 Comments • Related Topics: wildlife , agriculture, bats, crops, disease, extinction, insects, pests, science, white-nose syndrome, wildlife

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service / Bloomberg / Getty

It can be hard to feel much sympathy for bats. Like snakes or spiders or sharks or bunnies (OK, maybe the last one is just me), there's something primordially alarming about bats, something that activates the lizard part of the brain and shutters empathy. Bats aren't actually "flying rodents," but you likely won't see them on the next endangered species poster.

Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/03/31/the-economic-cost-of-losing-bats/#ixzz1IHp03F2Z

One point mentioned in the article is the effect on Wind Turbines on the bat population.

It's not just WNS that is striking down bats. Wind turbines are apparently killing migratory bats as well—by 2020, an estimated 33,000 to 111,000 bats are predicted to be killed by turbines in the mid-Atlantic Highlands alone. The authors in the Science paper worry that as wind power ramps up in the U.S., more bats will end up pureed by the blades.

Looking at a map it's pretty obvious why Google picks Kansas City for high-speed project, midpoint between 2 DCs

I worked with one city that was bidding for the Google high speed internet project, and today Google announced they picked Kansas City, Kansas.

Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas

3/30/2011 09:00:00 AM

As part of our overall goal to make the web better for users, last year we announced a new project: to provide a community with Internet access more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have today. The response was overwhelming—nearly 1,100 cities felt theneed for speed—and we were thrilled by the enthusiasm we saw across the country for better and faster web connections. Thank you to every community and individual that submitted a response, joined a rally, starred in a YouTube video or otherwise participated.
After a careful review, today we’re very happy to announce that we will build our ultra high-speed network in Kansas City, Kansas. We’ve signed a development agreement with the city, and we’ll be working closely with local organizations, businesses and universities to bring a next-generation web experience to the community.

One of the points I made to the city I was working with is the proximity to Google data centers.  Well look what happens when you plot Kansas City (B)vs. the two local Google data centers in Council Bluffs, IA (A) and Pryor, OK (C).

How can you argue with the logic for network placement at the midpoint between two Google data centers?  Maybe when some of the loser cities look at this map, they'll realize it is hard to argue with the logical placement.

Update 4:15PM: We’ve heard from some communities that they’re disappointed not to have been selected for our initial build. So just to reiterate what I've said many times in interviews: we're so thrilled by the interest we've generated—today is the start, not the end the project. And over the coming months, we'll be talking to other interested cities about the possibility of us bringing ultra high-speed broadband to their communities.

HP targets large data center workloads with future server design, think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon

This is month old news, but I missed it so I figured many of you did too.

HP's corporate blog has a post on future server design for where data centers are going for the big guys.

HP nanotechnology research looks to sustain HP server market leadership for the long run

by ETHAN BAULEY (Ethan_Bauley) a month ago - last edited a month ago

(Update: read the 2/28/11 The New York Times story "Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks" for more on this subject)

“What will future computer systems look like?” asks HP Labs distinguished technologistParthasarathy Ranganathan in a cover story for Computer magazine, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society.

In his article [PDF], Ranganathan suggests computer science is at what he calls an ‘inflection point,’ one that will provoke a radical rethink of traditional computer system design.

In the PDF, there are mentions of the big guys in data centers  - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Amazon.

Recent data-centric workloads have been characterized by
numerous commercially deployed innovations in the software
stack—for example, Google’s BigTable and MapReduce, Amazon’s
Dynamo, Yahoo’s PNUTS, Microsoft’s Dryad, Facebook’s Memcached,
and LinkedIn’s Voldemort. Indeed, according to a recent
presentation, the software stack behind the very successful Google
search engine was significantly rearchitected four times in the past
seven years to achieve better performance at increased
scale.
The growing importance of this class of workloads,
their focus on large-scale distributed systems with
ever-increasing memory use, the potential inadequacy
of existing architectural approaches, and the
relative openness to software-level innovations in the
emerging workloads offer an opportunity for a corresponding
clean-slate architecture design targeted at
data-centric computing.

The HP server designed was covered in the NYTimes.

Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks

By JOHN MARKOFF

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard researchers have proposed a fundamental rethinking of the modern computer for the coming era of nanoelectronics — a marriage of memory and computing power that could drastically limit the energy used by computers.

Enlarge This Image

Noah Berger for The New York Times

BIG NEW IDEA Parthasarathy Ranganathan and his prototype of a data center.

Today the microprocessor is in the center of the computing universe, and information is moved, at heavy energy cost, first to be used in computation and then stored. The new approach would be to marry processing to memory to cut down transportation of data and reduce energy use.

Note the last mention of "reduce energy use."  Green data center ideas are no longer as rare as they used to be.