GreenITStrategy.com

A few people I know and have worked with are presenting at the upcoming Data Centre Green Tech Conference in Melbourne on 26th February.  The conference focuses on all the green aspects of green IT including energy efficiency and CPU utilisation, data centre energy and efficiency metrics, training green technologists, plus a case study and a moderated panel on data centre efficiencies.

I was speaking with the guys from Connection Research last week and they are currently developing the new NABERS rating for data centres in Australia and will be presenting on this at the conference. Would be worthwhile if anyone is interested in measuring beyond Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).

One company that has fascinated me since I heard of them is Elliptical Mobile Solutions.  They build these amazing self-propelled, self-contained racks on wheels which can store 44TB of data and are completely water tight and and airtight.

Within 1 hour they can unplug this data-centre-on-wheels, relocate it and have it running again.  And apart from being water and air tight, it is shock resistant and has a closed-loop air conditioning unit and can run on batteries for up to 12 hours.  If anyone is interested in this technology, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and I'll get you in touch with Simon Rohrich, the company co-founder.

The Green Grid has released a quick cooling calculator to help US data centre and facilities managers determine how much "free" cooling is available to data centres using water-side economisers.  However when using this calculator, remember nothing in this world is free:  water is also a limited resource so there is a need to balance each environmental effect from a 'green' implementation.

For more water related blog posts and stories, checkout: http://www.greenm3.com/water/

And for more free Green Grid resources, check out: http://www.thegreengrid.org/library-and-tools.aspx

Posting a quick one today while I am sitting at home with the flu (urgghhhh - its not the swine flu though!).  I hope you are all feeling better than I am at this point and if any of this doesn't make sense I hope you'll forgive me.

Daniel Costello, Director of Data Center Services at Microsoft, has posted an interesting 2-part entry on the Global Foundation Services (GFS) Team Blog - starting with how they defined the challenges of their extensive data center deployment, and continuing today with a post focussing on how the engineers went about challenging the status quo.

Excerpt:

"Often the application of technology involves as much innovation as the technology itself. Rather than reinvent the wheel we looked at our industry's journey thus far. We started by questioning everything up to and including the roof and the very definition of a data center. With a lot of prior art in modularization, some of which has already been applied to the IT industry, we saw a good fit. The military has been deploying portable ground stations with IT servers and communications equipment for decades. And for some time now telecom companies have deployed pre-manufactured buildings which are then assembled on site as central offices.

As part of our design project we met to discuss the modular solution space with a group of folks from our Infrastructure Services team within GFS , including members of our hardware, data center operations, development, engineering, risk management, and security teams, as well as our internal product groups. (The original Gen 4.0 team from the two-day session is 100 percent intact and still working at Microsoft, by the way.) We knew we could modularize the server room, which we now call Server PACs. The challenge became how to modularize the entire facility. So we created other PACs: Generator PACS, Medium Voltage Switchgear PACs, UPS PACs, etc. Next, we developed the system electrical one-line diagrams and mechanical schematics for our four data center classes."

Full article here..http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters/