Google getting greener

Google announced that they will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars in developing renewable energy as part of a plan to clean up the environment. The project, “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal,” has the goal of looking for a green energy alternative to coal. This is going to help Google’s image as they continue to become a greener company. Google also hopes to license any technology that comes out of this project and it will be probably be another source of revenue for the company. The company is hiring engineers and looking for investment financing for solar technologies. Google is currently one of the biggest energy customers in the Silicon Valley and it hopes to run its data centers one day with the new technology. With all the money that Google is making, it is good to see that the company continues to do things that will benefit everyone. At the rate this company is growing, they could very well take the lead in coming out with some breakthrough green technology.

via Reuters

Add comment November 27th, 2007 Alex

WD Caviar Hard Drive

Wester Digital recently released their eco-friendly GreenPower hard drives. The new hard drives have an average power savings of 4-5 watts over the competitor hard drives which equates to reducing CO2 emissions by up to 60 kilograms per drive per year. This is equivalent to taking your car off the road for 14 days each year. Cutting the power costs of a computer can make a difference in your electricity bill and although you should not really leave your computer on all the time, at least it will make you feel better that you are using energy efficient hard drives. Thanks to Heather Skinner, the PR Manager at WD, I was able to test it out personally. The 1TB hard drive is definitely very sweet. The capacity will allow for plenty of data storage and allow you to save tons of photos, music, movies, and other files. It is the same size as my NAS(network attached storage) and is now my backup device for my backup NAS storage! I do not have detailed benchmarks because I do not test computer equipment professionally, but from my personal usage, it has been performing pretty smoothly. Read/Write speed is pretty fast since it is a SATA hard drive and the disk noise is pretty minimal. It is pretty hard to build a green computer since you have to balance power and cooling with efficiency and reliability in making sure your computer is operating optimally. Using Western Digital’s Caviar GreenPower hard drives is definitely one component that will contribute to making your computer as green as it can be.

The three features of the hard drive are:

IntelliPower™ – A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each GreenPower drive model, WD uses a different and invariable RPM. Throughout the product line, RPM ranges between 5400 and 7200.

IntelliPark™ – Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.

IntelliSeek™ – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

You can read more about the hard drives at WesternDigital.com.

Add comment November 12th, 2007 Alex

Carbon Neutral Hosting Solutions

Here is a summary of some web hosting providers that are taking an active approach in being green. It is taken from VirtualHosting.com and written by Christina Laun and shows the involvement that each company is taking to reduce their carbon emissions.

1. Rackspace:
   Rackspace is one of the UK’s leading web hosting providers. Because of their leadership, they are taking the initiative to become carbon neutral. Rackspace has opted to offset its energy usage by partnering with The International Tree Foundation, a charity that plants and preserves trees all over the world. For every server that Rackspace uses, a tree will be planted. At the current rate, this amounts to 200-300 new servers and trees a month. Rackspace has also vowed to help limit the amount of paperwork and direct mail they print and send.
2. WebHostingBuzz:
   WebHostingBuzz has, like Rackspace, formed a partnership with the International Tree Foundation to help offset the carbon dioxide emissions of the electricity they use. They are providing funds to a number of tree plantation projects worldwide.
3. Sustainable Hosting:
   Sustainable Hosting takes pride in being an environmentally responsible hosting company. Sustainable Hosting is powered in part by wind generated electricity, a renewable and more preferable source of energy than those that rely on fossil fuels. Presently, Sustainable Hosting purchases 23,364 kilowatt hours of wind energy each year. According to their calculations, this adds up to 32,521 pounds of CO₂ that have been prevented from entering the atmosphere, an amount that would take over 12 acres of trees to offset.
4. Coreix:
   Coreix is a UK-based hosting center that has taken steps to offset their carbon footprint. Coreix has partnered with the World Land Trust, a conservation charity, to help carry out the plans for their offset. On their behalf, the World Land Trust will work to repair degraded forests in Ecuador. This allows Coreix to not only take CO₂ out of the atmosphere, but also provide more habitat for wildlife.
5. DreamHost:
   DreamHost has not only taken into consideration the energy they use running their servers, but also the gas they use driving to work and the paper they use in their office to calculate how to offset their carbon emissions. While DreamHost doesn’t have the option to be directly powered by the wind or sun, they have opted to purchase what are called “Renewable Energy Credits.” The proceeds from thesecredits go towards funding renewable energy projects. Additionally, DreamHost is purchasing more energy efficient servers and processors.
6. HostPapa:
   HostPapa offsets their carbon emissions by purchasing green, renewable wind and sun energy to power their data center, servers, office and computers. This doesn’t mean they are powered directly by these sources, but that their total energy usage is offset by power from these sources being pumped back into the larger power grid when it otherwise would have had to have come from a less green source. They estimate that they have prevented over 10,000 pounds of CO ₂ from entering the environment by making this simple investment in cleaner technology.
7. TigerTech:
   TigerTech is a Northern California hosting company that has chosen to offset its carbon output in a variety of ways. TigerTech only purchases products with the EnergyStar rating, uses fluorescent lights, and encourages its employees to conserve energy by turning off anything not in use. Additionally, TigerTech makes a donation each year to the CarbonFund, a renewable energy program, to offset the electricity that they use. This money is used to fund zero-emission energy programs.
8. Iron Mountain:
   Iron Mountain is one of few solar powered web hosts. They have teamed up with solar energy company Value Solar to make their data center entirely powered by the sun. You can be sure that any energy they use will be coming from a clean and renewable source.
9. AISO:
   AISO.Net was the first 100% solar powered hosting company and have been since 2001. They are also currently the only 100% solar powered web host using solar panels to power both the data center, servers and offices. They’ve also designed their offices with solar tubes to use outside light during the day and have invested in servers that use less than half of the energy required by a normal server.
10. Ilisys:
    Ilisys is based in Australia, the largest producer of greenhouse gases among developed nations. They’ve taken steps to start reducing their contribution. Ilisys gets its energy from renewable wind and solar power sources in Australia. They also donate to the CarbonNeutral program. Carbon Neutral plants trees on their behalf to help offset any additional CO₂ emissions produced by car and air travel.
11. AcornHost:
    AcornHost is another web hosting company that helps offset the emissions by purchasing green certificates. These allow renewable energy to make up a larger part of the total energy used by the larger power grid, and help invest in new innovations in renewable energy technology.

Add comment September 26th, 2007 Alex

Fujitsu fuel cell

News.com displayed a gallery of the Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) hydrogen fuel cell that was unveiled last week. The 200 kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell in Sunnyvale, CA will provide electricity, cooling and heat to the buildings and is 50 percent efficient. The unit heats methane with steam to create hydrogen and the hydrogen is then passed through a proton exchange membrane (PEM) which ceates a reaction that produces electricity. The hot water from the reaction is also piped through the building to create heat. Fujitsu hopes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to below 1990 levels by 2010.

via News.com

Add comment September 25th, 2007 Alex

New Recommendation for Data Center Configurations

Data centers play a big part in energy use and PG&E has confirmed that changes made to data center configurations can reduce the energy use of cooling systems by up to 45%. Since data centers and server rooms usually need to be kept at around 68-77F, one third of the energy used in a data center is to provide cooling for the servers. In a typical data center configuration, hot and cold aisles are setup where the fronts of the servers are facing each other in one aisle while the backs of the servers are facing each other in the next aisle over. Based on two studies done in 2006, PG&E claims that this configuration is not the most ideal and results in inefficient cooling with these problems:

• Widely varying temperatures in the cold aisles which create cold spots on the servers. The result: servers near the bottom of racks tend to overcool while servers in the upper reaches may over heat. This can reduce the service life of the servers on top.
• Recirculation creates hot spots that can damage the servers.
• Excessive fan airflow and consumption results in inefficient cooling.
• Chiller efficiency is reduced because of lower required cold temperature and larger airflow through the exchangers.

PG&E has proposed a new recommended configuration that can drastically reduce hot and cold air mixing by completely enclosing the cold aisles. As a result, this can lead to:

• Increased server reliability because hot spots are suppressed
• Energy savings up to 15% for the chiller
• Energy savings up to 67% for the CRAH
• 20% more free cooling hours for data centers that use outside air between 50F and 65F to supply their chillers.

Doing this can lead to a 10-15% in energy consumption. It can be done in an easy and inexpensive way by just sealing up the cold aisle, but the image shown on the report looks like a very ugly setup and is very unconvincing to do. It also does not like it is very convenient to get into when you need to do some maintenance on the servers. This idea however, is very useful and data center technology can use this data as it is constantly evolving to try to maximize cooling and energy consumption.

Thanks to John Mejia of PG&E for providing this information. More reports can be found on the Emerging Technologies Coordination Council.

Add comment August 10th, 2007 Alex