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FYI.
Facebook will be keynoting tomorrow at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. The company will talk about Open Compute as it hits its one-year anniversary this week.You can view via live web stream for free at the following link. They go on at 9:15 a.m.
A friend tipped me off on Apple's fuel cell projects on Saturday, but I've been busy and couldn't get to the post until today.
There is news on the fuel cells following Apple's news on solar powering 20MW.
ArsTechnica has a post pointing to other information.
Apple building fuel cells to help power N. Carolina data center
By Jacqui Cheng | Published about 2 hours agoApple plans to build a massive fuel cell facility in North Carolina to accompany the data center that powers iCloud. The company revealed its plans as part of a filing with the North Carolina Utilities Commission and was first reported by the Greensboro News & Observer, which noted over the weekend that the project will be the "national's largest such project not built by an electric utility company."
If you look at the official filing you can see a bit more details.
GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher speculates that the fuel cells are Bloom Energy.
Apple didn’t name the fuel cell supplier in the filing, but the fact that it will use 200 kW fuel cells points the finger even more solidly at the Valley’s Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy sells both 100 kW (ES-5400) and 200 kW (the ES-5700) fuel cells. UTC, another fuel cell maker, only sells a 400 kW fuel cell.
I wrote last month that it looked like Bloom Energy is the supplier for Apple’s fuel cells. This local report states that Bloom Energy is indeed the supplier for Apple’s fuel cell farm, but doesn’t say where it got that info. That local report also says that Apple “will extract hydrogen from natural gas supplied by Piedmont Natural Gas,” and then “will arrange to produce landfill methane gas or some other biogas to offset its natural gas use.”
I wrote about Mike Manos's post on Attacking the Cruft and how the best part I liked was the Power Hogs.
What I like is the the Power Hog part.
Power Hog – An effort to audit our data center facilities, equipment, and the like looking for inefficient servers, installations, and /or technology and migrating them to new more efficient platforms or our AOL Cloud infrastructure. You knew you were in trouble when you had a trophy of a bronze pig appear on your desk or office and that you were marked.
I took a picture from Pike Place Market's infamous brass pig and put it in my post as a placeholder.
Within 30 minutes Mike sent me a picture of the "AOL Power Hog" With the call to action "The Cloud is Calling…Help Save Our Bacon."
Do you have a Power Hog in your data center? One way to get them to move on to a diet is give them this trophy.
Maybe data centers need a the wall of shame. The top 10 power hogs.
Who would you nominate? Your HR system? The latest acquisition? The executive pet project that has grown and grown?
Mike Manos has a post on eliminating the cruft in data center.
Attacking the Cruft
March 28, 2012 by mmanos
Today the Uptime Institute announced that AOL won the Server Roundup Award. The achievement has gotten some press already (At Computerworld, PCWorld, and related sites) and I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of my teams. One of the more personal transitions and journeys I have made since my experience scaling the Microsoft environments from tens of thousands of servers to hundreds of thousands of servers has been truly understanding the complexity facing a problem most larger established IT departments have been dealing with for years. In some respects, scaling infrastructure, while incredibly challenging and hard, is in large part a uni-directional problem space. You are faced with growth and more growth followed by even more growth. All sorts of interesting things break when you get to big scale. Processes, methodologies, technologies, all quickly fall to the wayside as you climb ever up the ladder of scale.
What I like is the the Power Hog part.
Power Hog – An effort to audit our data center facilities, equipment, and the like looking for inefficient servers, installations, and /or technology and migrating them to new more efficient platforms or our AOL Cloud infrastructure. You knew you were in trouble when you had a trophy of a bronze pig appear on your desk or office and that you were marked.
Many data centers have video cameras taking on site filming the construction project. I've seen plenty, but normally these videos are only for the project team.
If you want to see a project, here is a Microsoft MSN data center video that shouldn't probably be posted. Check it out before before it gets pulled down. It is only 2 minutes.
