How to cut your Data Center Power Bill
Today we are going to look at practical changes that we can all make to our data centres that will improve cooling efficiency, to enable us to install more equipment in the same space or reduce our...
View ArticleFeeds and Twitter
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a protocol and method for delivering frequently changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs (such as The Hot Aisle) and other online publishers syndicate...
View ArticleHeat Exchanger
This photograph shows an Intercooler unit in the basement of the I.Net data center in Milan.
View ArticleA Load of Hot Air
This photograph shows a technique used to remove hot air from a high density area in a Data Center in Milan.
View ArticleIs there a DIY approach to Green Data Centers?
IT Infrastructure specialist Richardson Eyres recently issued a press release to help drum up some consulting business in the Retail market but make some generally applicable and interesting points...
View ArticleAn Alternative to VDI and Thin Clients
My friend, the inventor and green innovator, Peter Hopton from VeryPC has a unique view on how to be environmentally responsible whilst deploying PCs into an office environment and he is presenting his...
View ArticleFire Detection Best Practice
Today we are going to look at how fire detection systems can be used in Data Centers to prevent catastrophic loss and damage; we will focus on Very Early Smoke Detection Systems, (VESDA – Very Early...
View ArticleHot Aisle Containment and Fire Protection
Recently we have been writing a lot about how hot-aisle/cold aisle containment. It is important to be aware this strategy, fire detection and protection requires special attention. A recent article in...
View ArticleWhy haven’t Cisco killed off Brocade?
I met up with the Mike Klayko the CEO of Brocade last week in the restaurant of the St Regis Hotel in New York (famous for creating the best burgers, bar none, in the city) for an exclusive Hot Aisle...
View ArticleA Green Data Center Approach and Design
I wrote about Elean Park Data Center some time ago on The Hot Aisle where we looked at the use of absorption chillers that use the waste heat from a biomass power station and gas generation plant on...
View ArticleMicrosoft to Open $500M Data Center in Chicago
Chicago Business News reports that Microsoft plans to open another massive data center, in Northlake near Chicago in 2009 that will be central to the software giant’s war with Google Inc. for Internet...
View ArticleData Center in a Tent?
I read a very interesting article from fellow blogger Christian Belady, who is Principal Power and Cooling Architect at Microsoft. Christian decided to take the PUE challenge and see if he could build...
View ArticleWhy your humidification plant is wasting electricity
Our atmosphere (the air around us) is made up of gasses consisting of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), carbon dioxide (0.3%) and water in the form of vapor (humidity). The amount of water in the...
View ArticleFresh Air Cooling revisited
I picked up a really interesting website from KyotoCooling that has a very interesting new approach to low energy cooling systems. The firm takes it’s name from the Kyoto Conference where our...
View ArticleIs it a Data Center or Santa’s Grotto?
The Pionen White Mountains underground data center has fog, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and …. …… was also designed to withstand a near hit from a Soviet nuclear weapon....
View ArticleInterxion Opens Fifth Amsterdam Data Centre
Interxion, a European operator of carrier-neutral data centres, announced today that the first 1,200 m2 of its new 7,000 m2 Amsterdam data centre—its fifth Amsterdam-area centre—is now operational. 70%...
View ArticleGreen IT Job Board Launches on The Hot Aisle
Taking social responsibility seriously is a core value at The Hot Aisle so starting today we are launching a new FREE service to advertise IT Jobs with a Environmental component. If you are an employer...
View ArticleCaltech adopts Hot Aisle Containment
The California Institute of Technology – also known as Caltech — is installing monitors and developing metrics to determine the efficiencies and savings of Hot Aisle Containment enclosures recently...
View ArticleGoogle Claim average DC Cooling and Power overhead at 16% for Q4
Last quarter, Google posted information about the efficiency of Google data centers and promised to update this information every quarter. They have now kept that promise and published the collected...
View ArticleDoes it matter where we build our data center?
I met with David Wright from Verari yesterday and we were talking about high density computing and power particularly about Verari’s data center in a container product. That got us to talking about...
View ArticleVerari Systems Wins major Green Enterprise IT Award
I was delighted to hear today that my friends, David Wright (CEO) and David Driggers (CTO) at Verari Systems have been recognized for their great work on driving Data Center energy efficiency. For some...
View ArticleDefying the laws of Physics – being dumb in the data center
We are all trying to fix the unfixable in the Data Centre. How do we get more cooling capacity from sites we built a decade ago for low power density applications? One of the biggest problems is that...
View ArticleUK Site wins US Award as leading Energy Efficient Data Center
You may remember that The Hot Aisle covered the Elean Data Center in earlier articles about A green Data Center design and Absorption Chillers. The Elean Data Center, near Cambridge, has won a...
View ArticleWhy legacy thinking costs performance, reliability and cash
I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and...
View ArticleIBM claim that water cooled servers are the future of IT at scale
I am old enough to remember the 1960’s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in...
View ArticleFujitsu offer nice Dynamic Cube Blade Server
Fujitsu just announced a new blade server system using a custom designed motherboard optimized for the form factor of the chassis so that they have been able to fit 18 blades with two CPUs each into a...
View ArticleData Center Scale Computing
Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with...
View ArticleEnterprise Data Migration Software
Next week I am in Marthas Vineyard visiting with my friend, colleague and fellow blogger Steve Duplessie of Enterprise Strategy Group. For a few weeks Steve has been telling me about an Enterprise...
View ArticleVerari win Qualcomm Deal
Containerized data center provides flexibility to balance capital expenditures and operating expenses while rapidly meeting needs for incremental, scalable capacity delivering Total Value of Ownership...
View ArticleStanding in the cold aisle
Here is a photograph of my ESG colleague Taya Wyss and Cesar Orosco from NetApp in Sunnyvale standing in a smart cold aisle containment system. This is an aftermarket fitting in a relatively old data...
View ArticleBack to the future for the z11 Mainframe
I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was...
View ArticleVerari FOREST populated with Cisco UCS and Nexus
Anyone following the news will have seen that Verari and Cisco are working closely together on developing the highest density UCS deployment so far. My friend Dan Gatti at Verari just sent over the...
View ArticleZero emission datacenters
I met with Dr. Bruno Michel who is IBM’s, Zurich based, advanced thermal packaging manager yesterday. We spoke about IBM’s view of cooling technology in the 5 to 10 year horizon and what I heard was...
View ArticleWhere does the power go?
From the coal or oil delivered to the power station all the way through to the energy that drives our business applications the efficiency story is woeful.
View ArticleInnovation obsoletes the data centre
Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution. The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all...
View ArticleData Centre Dilemmas
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London. The panel was made up of: Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy...
View ArticleNew pictures of Iceotope Liquid Cooled Blades
Iceotope Unveils First Modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Blade Server Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server...
View ArticleEven Dilbert knows…
…that cooling data centres using refrigeration is madder than a box of frogs. Maybe he could have suggested, fresh air cooling or the new Iceotope liquid cooling solution and kept his job whilst...
View ArticleHow do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?
Recently The Hot Aisle conducted an online survey asking the question – “How do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?” As usual we got a very large response to the survey...
View ArticleCute retrofit air containment solution launched
Last week I met with my friend Steve Sole of Nubis who wanted to tell me about the work they have been doing in data centers around improving energy efficiency. Nubis make demountable Aisle Containment...
View ArticleKnowledge is Power
Back in 2008, Steve O’Donnell wrote an article here on The Hot Aisle explaining one of the challenges he set his team during his time at BT, the difficult task of getting Asset Management right. To...
View ArticleData Center Predictions for 2010
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling,...
View ArticleWhy storage will inevitably migrate to flash and trash
If you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes: Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular...
View ArticleLive Efficient Data Centre Summit Webcast 21st April
Data Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to...
View ArticleIs there an option other than Semtex to fix my Data Centre?
There are a lot of them around, Data Centres. A few of them are designed and operated very well and deliver great Power Usage Efficiency. Some could do a bit better, perhaps an airside economiser or...
View ArticleSo you think you understand your data center?
Yesterday Chris Leahy (my Technical Facilities Manager) and I were agonising over why we had low plenum pressure in our Data Center and why we were seeing symptoms of hot air trapped in the roof void....
View ArticleTechnology Predictions for 2012
Around this time, I usually pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. I am interested in the Data Center (around power, cooling, reliability and economics), IT Security...
View ArticleThe science of managing air handling units in a Data Center
Looks are deceiving, and in the data center they can be confusing. If you are doing a good job your Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) might get worse! Energy consumption in the data center is the result of...
View ArticleInfrastructure Management White Paper
I just finished writing an interesting white paper on Data Center Infrastructure Management for Rackwise Inc. DCIM is not all about cost, although we would be remiss not to take the significant cost...
View ArticleData Center Infrastructure Management – the time has come
My friends at Rackwise (RACK.OB),have just won another DCIM deal with Sandia National Laboratories to install and deploy Rackwise in Sandia’s multiple data centers located at its principal facilities....
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