Sustainable Technology

Xcel Energy creates a call-to-action for Information Technology managers to make data center energy efficiency a priority, by offering cash rebates energy studies and efficiency improvements. The company will support investment in more efficient servers, virtualization software to drive utilization rates, air flow and cooling optimization, etc. …

… “Xcel Energy will fund a portion of the study and pay rebates as projects are completed. An approved third-party vendor will conduct an on-site energy evaluation and make recommendations on energy savings, help outline a business case for energy-efficiency investments and detail how to best run the data center at peak efficiency. ” …

Via Xcel Energy: Data Center Efficiency program

Netronome has launched its Network Flow Processor product family which enables a unified computing architecture. The products are designed to provide high performance and market-beating power efficiency, while leveraging general Intel processors. …

… “High-Performance: Powered by 40 multi-threaded programmable networking cores running at 1.4GHz, the NFP delivers over 56 billion instructions per second with 320 hardware threads that optimize memory utilization – allowing for 1800 instructions per packet at 30 million packets per second. This enables 20Gbps of L2-L7 deep packet processing with line-rate security and I/O virtualization for millions of simultaneous flows. Power Efficiency: Operating at only 15 to 35 watts, the NFP-32xx revolutionizes green computing by delivering more than four times the power efficiency of its closest competitor. ” …

Via Netronome: Network Flow Processors (PDF)

VMware touts the impact of server virtualization on green IT. …

… “VMware virtual infrastructure helps enterprises and governments reduce their energy costs and consumption by as much as 80 percent. Most desktops and servers today are in use only eight to 15 percent of the time they are turned on, yet they consume 60 to 90 percent of the normal workload power even when idle. VMware vSphere has advanced resource and memory management features that will enable consolidation ratios of 15:1 or more and dynamically power off unneeded servers, which increase hardware utilization to as much as 85 percent.

Every server retired from a datacenter saves an estimated four tons of CO2 emissions, equivalent to taking 1.5 cars off the road or planting 55 trees. Similar opportunities for savings are available for desktop PCs, which can be consolidated on servers in the datacenter using VMware View. VMware vSphere 4 is expected to be generally available during the second quarter of 2009. ” …

Via VMware: Go Green

Citrix NetScaler Web 2.0 Push technology uses publish-and-subscribe semantics to offload processing requirements from the server, creating a dynamic user experience. …

… “These new capabilities allow NetScaler to free up backend servers from inefficient connection management tasks, thus shrinking the number of servers needed. This reduced server footprint in the datacenter improves server utilization and allows a smaller set of servers to accomplish the same business tasks, cutting server costs by up to 90 percent by decreasing power, cooling and operational overhead. ” …

Via Citrix: NetScaler Web 2.0

Use data center benchmarking to identify opportunities to improve energy-efficiency. Uptime Institute offers insights into energy efficiencies. …

… “This calculation multiplies the efficiency of one’s technology by the efficiency of the physical facility. Uptime calculates IT efficiency by multiplying a data center’s IT asset utilization rate by the energy efficiency of the servers. ” …

Via Computerworld: Benchmark data center energy costs

Options for green data centers are discussed, with ideas ranging from the cooling configuration to increasing utilization maximizing the return of each kilowatt of power. …

… “Well, that’s the challenge for Stewart and other engineers. One solution: using a hot aisle-cold aisle system to help control A.C. costs. ” …

Via PBS Nightly Business Report: Cost of Data Centers

Sun Microsystems has positioned a set of professional services aimed at designing or retrofitting data centers to maximize energy efficiency and space utilization, while reducing power consumption and operating costs. …

… “Analysts are now saying that IT infrastructure power usage will soon cost more than the hardware itself, and enterprise datacenters are running out of space and power while cooling and energy costs are rising. More than ever, enterprises need to plan and build datacenters that will accommodate these and future IT needs. ” …

Via Sun Microsystems: Professional Services For Phases Of Datacenter Management: Strategy, Design And Build

IBM tool creates analysis of data center temperature gradients. …

Software technique to mining logs for understanding utilization rates, power usage, and data center temperature gradient to increase energy efficiency. …

… “Simple yet powerful searches let you correlate physical server utilization with power consumption and temperature within different parts of the datacenter so that you can identify and address inefficiencies. ” …

Via Splunk: Green Datacenter

Developing your plan for greening the data center? Understand your energy efficiency improvement by establishing the baseline measurement systems now. Expect benefits to go beyond energy and look for increased asset utilization and intangible improvements. …

… “Measure first, green second. Measure your data center’s energy consumption before enacting any green or energy efficient projects. One hundred percent accuracy isn’t required … ” …

Via Forrester Research: IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals