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Follow UsCurrently, 2% of all energy utilized in the world is thanks to datacenters.
This is equivalent to the total energy consumed by the airline industry
globally. Server capacity on the other hand, is expected to grow 6 times of what
it was in 2000 by 2010. Consequently, storage capacities are set to grow 69
times to accommodate the growth in servers. This directly relates, despite all
advances in the data centre industry, to a doubling of energy utilization every
five years, and for the records, energy costs have gone up by 10% last year in
the US. What is more shocking is the fact that the technology density of
datacenters is growing at 20 times every 10 years, which means you should
ideally have a datacenter which perform 20 times as well as your current
datacenter in the next 10 years. This almost impossible proposition is worsened
by the fact that 78% of all datacenters globally have not been upgraded, scaled
up or enhanced ever since they were deployed, and are more than 7 years old. The
only way out is to either ensure that your next data centre is green or change
the business dynamics to suit the changing trend in datacenter deployment-which
lowers the lifetime significantly and even provides datacenters on demand.
A green roadmap
As an ideal start, IBM announced in India recently, the launch of Project
Big Green 2.0, its global initiative to help enterprises build energy and power
efficient technology infrastructures that can meet growing business requirements
while realizing rapid financial benefits from such investments. Last year,
during phase 1 of Project Big Green, IBM invested USD 1 billion to promote the
concept of energy efficiency. This year, the project takes off from the point
that a higher percentage of IT businesses are seeing power and cooling as the
biggest challenges in datacenter mgmt (22% more than 17% last year).
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| IBM Site and Facilities Services Portable Modular Data Center |
Datacenter in a box
Besides server optimization and integration services for VMware server
virtualization, an updated SAN volume controller and IBM Tivoli enhancements,
the project sees the launch of a new concept in datacenters — on demand and
personalized datacenter in a box. Aimed at large format events, that need a
sudden spurt of computing power, IBM's Portable Modular Datacenter saves space,
energy and is self sufficient for its running power. In other words, it provides
the complete physical infrastructure including power and cooling systems and
remote monitoring. The datacenter can be shipped and deployed into any
environment and can support multiple technology vendors. Ideal for Indian
markets that are devoid of real estate, these boxes claim to brave extreme
climatic conditions, making it ideal to be deployed at remote locations as well.
Scaling up enterprise models
If your business requirements are such that it requires higher turnkeys over
an extended period of time with regular upgrading, Scalable Modular Datacenters
are ideal for you, with 500-2,500 sq ft, at a minimum of 15% improved energy
efficiency, 20% lower price points and a deployment time of 8 to 10 weeks. This
is a pay-as-you-grow model and adding additional stacks does not require too
much time of downtime of existing systems. The Enterprise Modular Datacenter, on
the other hand, promises an attractive energy efficiency of 66%, and an open
architecture which includes multi-vendor support and service. This is ideal for
time intensive and high availability operations.
| Seeing business sense in green |
An electrical engineering company suffers loss, and decides to go green. It has seen benefits at various levels-from changing the air conditioner to deploying a pay-as-you-expand datacenter architecture Bharat Bijlee is a As the company grew, it has the challenge to Bharat Bijli in association with Netsol, had |
An online green meeting room
In order to collaboratively walk the path of energy efficiency in
datacenters, a global consortium called The Green Grid was created last year,
with members ranging from Dell to Microsoft to HP, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and
Wipro Technologies being one of the most recent additions. The central aim of
the consortium is to 'advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business
computing ecosystems'.
The Green Grid is focused on defining meaningful, user-centric models and
metrics, developing standards, measurement methods, processes and new
technologies to improve data center performance against the defined metrics, and
promoting the adoption of energy efficient standards, processes, measurements
and technologies. The Green Grid has recently embarked on a mission to
qualitatively analyze and collate the various green initiatives directed towards
more efficient and eco-friendly datacenter design and management, across its 20
odd partner members.
Futuristic cooling blueprints
Scientists, in collaboration with IBM have also developed a method to cool
computer chips that have circuits and components stacked on top of each other
with tiny rivers of water, an advance that promises to significantly reduce
energy consumed by data centers. A few weeks back, Researchers, in collaboration
with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, demonstrated a prototype that
integrates the cooling system into the three dimensional chips by piping water
directly between each layer in the stack. These so-called 3D chip stacks --
which take chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side-by-side on a
silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another-presents one of the
most path-breaking approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted
limits, while simultaneously reducing the energy consumed by data centers.