Tag Archive | Energy costs
Japan Power Grid crisis: countdown for shutdown
Hokkaido Electric Power Company has started with the shut down of reactor N0. 3 of the Tomari atomic power plant. By Sunday, the unit of 912 MW will officially come offline. Although the shut down is due for its regular maintenance checkup this is a dramatic event for Japan. It is the last of Japan’s [...]
Power grid crisis: Japanese data centers hit again?
It looks like the feared scenario of last year, that all of Japan’s nuclear power plants would be offline within about one year, is becoming true. Currently only two of 54 reactors are still operating. Tokyo Electric’s last active reactor is set to go into maintenance on March 26, while Hokkaido Electric’s Tomari No. 3 [...]
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 [...]
Data Centers and Mount Sustainability
This year Ray Anderson, often called the “greenest CEO in America” has passed away. Mr. Anderson was the founder of Interface, one of the world’s largest producer of commercial carpet tiles. After 20 years, running his business in compliance with government regulations, he read in 1994 Paul Hawken’s book “The Ecology of Commerce,” which gave [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Lefdal mines: green mineral went out green data center goes in
According to a press release of the Norwegian government, IBM and Lefdal mines have agreed on a memorandum of understanding to develop Lefdal Mine in Nordfjord, Sogn og Fjordane as one of the largest and leading centers for green data storage in Europe. “Lefdal mines is one of several in Norway, which has strongly committed [...]
The Greening of IT: Successes, Failures, and the Future?
The Uptime Institute uploaded an interesting discussion. It is the keynote panel discussion from Uptime Institute Symposium 2011, were George Goodman (Climate Savers Computing Initiative), Jon Haas (The Green Grid), KC Mares (Silicon Valley Leadership Group), Bruce Myatt (Critical Facilities Round Table), and Pitt Turner (Uptime Institute) join Andy Lawrence (The 451 Group) to discuss [...]
Will ISO Energy Management Standard ISO 50001 make the difference?
On schedule, the new international ISO standard about energy management, ISO 50001, is now available on the ISO Website www.iso.org. ISO 50001 will establish a framework to manage energy for industrial plants; commercial, institutional, or governmental facilities; or entire organizations. Targeting broad applicability across national economic sectors, according to ISO it is estimated that the standard could [...]
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 [...]
