Here's a tale of two PC titans: HP and Dell. One executes well every quarter. The other doesn't. Both see big PC upgrade cycles ahead. Both are looking to ride... Continued »
Commercial office buildings are one of the main culprits of the current climate crisis. They consume large amounts of electricity and release excessive carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Adura Technologies has developed a mesh-based lighting system that is reducing costs and consumption inside buildings. The technology consists of wireless radios that plug into florescent light fixtures giving employees more control over their personal lighting space. Adura has also created a dual motion sensing-personal control system that is being used at UC Berkeley that allows students to break the hard-wired connection and control their lighting from their desktop PCs.
I don’t have to design data centers, but I do have to play a knowledgeable wonk on the Web from time to time. With that in mind, I attended two data center presentations at the Gartner IT Symposium to see what I could learn.
My knowledge about the data center essentially boils down to one word: Money. Companies are building new data centers to save money on power and better utilize their computing power. Sure, cloud computing is a factor, but a small one for enterprises at this juncture. These people are building data centers in a big way. The other money point: Vendors are killing each other to be the data center king. Cisco takes on HP. IBM is in there. Oracle too (via Sun). And unfortunately for IT buyers each vendor has a different twist on data center architecture.
Simply put, I’m a data center economics major with a minor in things like raised floors, cooling systems, server racks and other items.
Here’s what I learned:
Companies are only building what they need. A weak economy and green IT initiatives mean that techies are increasingly going to be judged by their data center savings, says David Cappuccio, an analyst at Gartner. An efficient data center design can cut the footprint by 60 percent.
Tiers are being mixed and matched with one data center. Data centers have tiers of availability. Tier 1 is 99.6 percent uptime and Tier 4 is 99.995 percent with Tier 2 and Tier 3 in between. To build a Tier 1 10,000 square-foot facility the cost is $9.94 million. Tier 4 will run you $34.5 million, according to Gartner.
One of the more recent trends is to mix and match tiers within one facility. With this approach, you can segment applications based on the importance to the business.
Everyone has a box for mid-sized and large businesses. IBM, Rackable, Sun, Verari Systems and HP all have trailers (right) that can extend data centers and deploy in 12 to 14 weeks. Cappuccio noted that Microsoft has a large 200-and-more-container deployment at its Chicago data center. Microsoft is also experimenting with wind-powered containers. For mid-sized companies these containers could become an alternative to traditional data centers—slap these boxes on a slab and go.
Pod architecture. Cappuccio noted that previous data center design principles went like this: Build a facility for today, estimate what you’ll need in 20 years, and go. Today, it’s all about pods. With this approach you figure out how much space you need, say 15,000 square feet, and then build out for five to seven years. Then you add pods as you grow. Pods also allow for retrofitting so a data center complex can last 40 to 50 years.
Combine pod architectures with density zones. Cappuccio added that data centers should be designed by density zones. High-density applications (200 watts per square foot) represent 10 percent to 15 percent of a total data center usage. Medium-density apps (150 watts per square foot) account for another 20 percent. The rest is low-density (100 watts per square foot). If you mix and match densities you save money on the build-out. The density zone approach is likely to be used in the majority of new or retrofitted data centers by 2013. Double bonus if you take the pod architecture and use density zones.
The money chart:
Raised floors are passe. Anyone who has been in a traditional data center knows that raised floors, anywhere from 12 to 18 inches to 24 to 48 inches, are the norm. If you design a data center properly you can use a concrete slab for the build out. Building on a slab can be $20 per square foot cheaper than a raised floor.
And once you learn the data center principles all you have to do is evaluate all of these vendor data center visions dancing around. The field: Cisco, Oracle, HP, IBM and VMware. You can toss Dell, Microsoft, Amazon and Google into the mix too. The big takeaways from Gartner’s talk on the vendor data center vision are:
Don’t get locked into anything proprietary;
The tectonic plates between these vendors are still shifting;
Don’t let any one vendor creep to the point where it controls your budget. Data centers aren’t meant to be homogeneous.
That final point is very notable. Most data center players have adjacent products and if you’re not careful your entire enterprise could depend on one big name.
CA next week will unveil an integrated sustainability suite designed to track carbon emissions, environmental assessments, metering and compliance to policies in one dashboard.
CA calls the suite ecoSoftware and will launch it Oct. 26, according to Christopher Thomas, vice president of energy and sustainability. I ran into Thomas at the Gartner IT Symposium where the carbon monitoring software caught my eye.
There are other efforts designed to track carbon emissions. For instance, Hara and SAP have various applications and others use metering to measure sustainability efforts. CA’s effort links the various tracking efforts in one dashboard. If successful, dashboard like these could put some hard return numbers behind sustainability efforts. Tesco, Europe’s retailing giant, is a customer of CA’s ecoSoftware.
The company aims to launch an ecoMeter line to provide baseline measurements for cooling systems, data centers, buildings and other environmental systems and a governance module to link the metrics with the sustainability plan.
CA created the suite from scratch—a notable change given the company’s history of acquiring product lines.
A global consortium of IT professionals announced on Friday new tools and reports to assist data center managers and executives to improve the efficiency of their operations.
At a forum hosted at the New York Stock Exchange by NYSE Euronext, representatives of The Green Grid — a consortium that seeks to improve energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems worldwide — were joined by members of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy to discuss the challenges of data center energy management.
The Green Grid presented the results of a recent assessment of a mid-tier data center operated by the EPA, and said more than $1.1 billion could be saved by greening up the data center:
President Obama predicts there will be 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. But what will the infrastructure look like to run these vehicles? Coulomb Technologies CEO Richard Lowenthal is building new network charging stations for electric vehicles and demonstrates how users will be able to one day plug-in their EVs, swipe a debit card, and pay for electricity on-demand.
Architect Eric Corey Freed wants every building to be a ‘green’ building. Inspired by his childhood idol Frank Lloyd Wright, Freed’s goal is to renovate existing homes and structures to be more sustainable through architectural design, advancements in renewable energy, and the use of recycled metals and glass, and unique woods such as bamboo.
The theme of the opening keynote at VMWorld 2009 was centered around two ideas: reducing complexity and offering freedom.
In its quest to shift from a virtualization company to the tech industry’s cloud infrastructure giant, VMWorld CEO Paul Maritz on Tuesday touched on a number of topics - including new tools, a strategy for reaching small and medium businesses and a Web-based “express” version for light workloads.
Of course, the bigger message surrounds saving money and operating more efficiently through virtualization. In his opening remarks, Maritz spoke of the need to transform IT spending. The majority of IT spending goes into things that don’t benefit the company’s growth. Instead, he said, it goes into keeping the lights on, the train running, the plumbing flowing or (enter your favorite analogy here.)
That way of doing business has to be inverted if the industry expects to keep growing, he said. And virtualization is “one of the few technologies, maybe the only one that can provide that evolutionary path to that transformation,” Maritz said.
NASA scientist Jonathan Trent is developing a smarter way to turn algae into oil. He’s created plastic osmotic containers that will float below the surface of the ocean, grow algae, and then help it bloom into oil. He says the new method is more beneficial because algae can grow in a larger area and doesn’t compete with agricultural land.
Will algae fuel the car of tomorrow? Harrison Dillon, CTO of Solazyme is growing strains of algae to produce various kinds of renewable oils. He hopes that over the next few years, people will start consuming algae derived products like gasoline, household cleaners, and makeup without ever realizing it.
The electric Chevrolet Volt is expected to get at least 230 miles per gallon in city driving. That adds up to about $2.75 for electricity per 100 miles.
General Motors outlined the miles per gallon figures Tuesday. The Volt is expected to start production in late 2010 as a 2011 model. However, there are a few caveats:
The Volt can travel up to 40 miles on a single electricity charge;
Its overall range will be 300 miles with its fuel engine;
GM recommends that you plug in the Volt at least once a day;
Gas free mileage will depend on cargo, distance, air conditioning use and number of people in the car.
That latter point is huge. What happens when it’s summer, 90 degrees and humid and you have a car pool going? When the battery hits a minimum level, the Volt will switch to extended-range mode. In this mode, the Volt’s fuel engine produces electricity.
I can see the Volt sparking a lot of initial interest, but there are a few consumer hurdles to clear. Range will matter in day to day driving conditions too. And the price tag will matter most of all.
The Volt is expected to push the $40,000 mark, according to various press reports.
When’s the best time to run the dishwasher or do your laundry? With traditional power grids consumers can never be sure, but a smart grid can answer that question and more. SmartPlanet correspondent Sumi Das talks to Silver Spring Networks CTO Raj Vaswani about the benefits of a networked system, starting with a less expensive electricity bill.
Say goodbye to the utility man coming by your house and reading your meter to calculate your energy usage. Raj Vaswani, CTO of Silver Spring Networks and his team are developing new technologies that will network meters to the grid. The new smart meters allow your utility company to read and measure your energy use remotely and will soon help consumers monitor and control how much energy they consume. Via SmartPlanet.
How does solar conversion work now and how do we want it to work in the future? Paul Altivisatos, interim director for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at UC Berkeley, explains how a solar cell works and how the solar energy of the future, via a solar fuel generator that converts energy the same way plants do, can become more efficient. He says that rather than looking for what’s next, he looks to the end result–an ideal usage for materials.
At the Intersolar Conference in San Francisco, Scott Stephens, Photovoltaic Specialist for the U.S. Department of Energy, explains why he’s optimistic about the future. He expects the market to stabilize and manufacturing to begin to consolidate. In addition, he says, the DOE is always searching for solar technology that improves on efficiency, scalability, and durability.
When the world is caught in a global economic downturn, exactly how does one build a business around the fabrication of high-performance, luxury computers?
I spoke with Chris Morley, chief technical officer of Maingear Computers, to find out. When it comes to external circumstances, Morley says success is all about working with the hand you’re dealt — and remembering to play your strengths.
ZDNet: How do you position luxury, high-performance electronics in economy? What’s your strategy?
Chris Morley: Luxury goods have a flexible demand curve. Our ASPs (average selling prices) have actually shot up, and we’ve actually have had some pretty darn good months. This economy has taught us that we need to focus on our core competencies: focusing on the best experience and customer service that we can provide.
We are standing in a field with few others. Demand isn’t going away, but companies that are playing this field are leaving, falling off, or just flat out giving up. While business was very good before this economic downturn, we’re asking how can we increase our brand awareness, how we can expand.
The past year we have done very well with the ePhex, which is our Halo [desktop] product. Reviewers, I hope, will take note that a killer review really makes a difference. If you love their product, have nice things to say about it!
At Greentech Media’s Green Building Summit in Menlo Park, Calif., Cascadia Capital CEO Michael Butler discusses three subsectors of the green-building industry that recently began receiving the most capital from the stimulus plan and private sectors.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Everyone has a box for mid-sized and large businesses. IBM, Rackable, Sun, Verari Systems and HP all have trailers (right) that can extend data centers and deploy in 12 to 14 weeks. Cappuccio noted that Microsoft has a large 200-and-more-container deployment at its Chicago data center. Microsoft is also experimenting with wind-powered containers. For mid-sized companies these containers could become an alternative to traditional data centers—slap these boxes on a slab and go.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his 
