Cloud Computing
Energy efficient Data Center ≠ Green Data Center
“Many IT companies are simply choosing to attach their modern information factories to some of the dirtiest sources of electricity, supplied by some of the dirtiest utilities on the planet” says Greenpeace. In their latest report ‘How green is your cloud?’, Greenpeace has criticized the cloud computing industry saying that cloud providers “are all rapidly expanding without [...]
Prepare for the Zettabyte Data Wave: right sizing and managing your data center
Lately two interesting and complementary reports from Cisco and Oracle came available with figures and trends associated cloud computing and data centers. By the end of 2015 global datacenter IP traffic will reach 4.8 zettabytes (Cisco). By the way a zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes. The Oracle report reveals that many businesses appear [...]
Green Cloud Computing. Which way to go?
What is the right cloud architecture to create a green and sustainable cloud? Should we consolidate to huge mega data centers or is there another way to go? The analogy Currently data centers are constructed on the intersection of the electrical energy infrastructure and the network (data) infrastructure. Considering the current electrical energy infrastructure, for [...]
Iceland green data center initiatives
Data center operators want to cut energy usage and energy costs. The Nordic countries, with their cool temperatures, cool water and an electricity generation that is nearly entirely from renewable sources are starting all kinds of initiatives to answer this needs. In an experimental phase we have the tidal power generation at the Orkney Islands, in [...]
Datacenter Dynamics Amsterdam 2011 grand final: sustainability and cloud computing
This week I attended (and was chair of one of the tracks) of the DatacenterDynamics conference in Amsterdam. This year the conference program set up was along three themes, Design, Build & Operate, Outsourcing Decisions and IT Optimization. During the day a wide range of cases and technologies were presented. And at the end of the [...]
Amazon post mortem on Dublin DC outage reconfirms domino theory
As promised Amazon released a post mortem report on the data center outage in Dublin. It reconfirmed the domino theory: if one availability zone come under the influence of errors and outages, then other availability zone would follow in a domino effect. Amazon stated, as mentioned in an earlier blog entry about the Dublin outage, that the [...]
Texas escaped rolling blackouts: Data centers and the power grid interdependency
In Texas, a state with data centers of several notable IT companies, including WordPress.Com, Cisco, Rackspace and Host Gator, the power grid company ERCOT have been working around the clock to keep the electricity flowing, and to avoid rolling blackouts as power demand reaches record levels. According to The Wallstreet Journal for the second year [...]
Data centers, reducing energy usage by heating and distribution
In delivering computer process power and storage capacity there are apparently two opposite approaches, the cloud computing mega data center “bigger is better” and the local nano data center “small is beautiful”. The current “bigger is better” model of cloud computing leads, although shifted from customer to supplier, still to enormous capital expenditures, problems in [...]
Amazon and Microsoft in Dublin down, resiliency of cloud computing
A lightning strike in Dublin, Ireland, has caused downtime for many sites using Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, as well as users of Microsoft’s BPOS. Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility service and left it unable to start its generators, resulting [...]
Cure against Data Center sprawl: consolidation and cloud computing.
Last year Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said at a policy forum that in the past decade, the number of data centers operated by the U.S. government has skyrocketed from 432 to more than 1,200. Kundra stated that “Now, when you think about these data centers, one of the most troubling aspects about the data [...]
