The Green Grid, a nonprofit organisation designed to improve energy efficiency for datacentres and corporate computing, announced on Monday its first board of directors.
Virtualisation is the key technology for creating less power-hungry datacentres, according to numerous speakers at the Energy Logic symposium in Sydney.
According to one IBM exec, an avatar in Second Life now consumes more energy than a person in Brazil.
Banking group Citi is on the verge of completing a major sustainable-datacentre project, but has admitted that the power requirements of its IT equipment are continuing to rise by 12.5 percent per year.
Google can brag about having the biggest corporate installation of solar power. But for them, it's just the beginning of their renewable energy plans.
Datacentres are by their nature somewhat sterile and antiseptic places, but many of them hide a dirty little secret: cables so tangled they make the plots of Days Of Our Lives look logical by comparison.
It's nice that Google says it has put an effort into making its datacentres more energy efficient, but the search giant's pledges won't mean much until it discloses just how many of the beasties it's actually running.
Google's plans for greener datacentres are being promoted with great fervour, but its calls for greater environmental accountability have some definite limitations.
Being green, in terms of IT and datacentres, only very superficially has anything to do with saving the environment. In reality it is about cold, hard cash and how to spend less of it.
IT has become one of the biggest consumers of energy in the modern society. So much so that at AGL Energy, "we ran out of capacity in the building for electricity", according to former CIO Cesare Tizi.
Why would a super-efficient Australian datacentre produce more carbon emissions than an equivalent sized, yet hopelessly inefficient and power-hungry datacentre in Germany?
Over the past few years, the amount of electricity required to power a server in a datacentre has more than doubled. In this special report, we look at why many datacentres today are facing a power and cooling crisis.
It seems going virtual can create some very real returns. Not only does virtualisation cut down on wasted CPU, disk and memory capacity, it also allows for more rapid deployment of applications and reduces power usage.
Even firms that generate electricity can suffer in the current power and cooling crisis. Cesare Tizi, ZDNet Australia CIO of the Year 2007, and former CIO of AGL, admits that the datacentres of Australia's largest energy firm were as vulnerable as those belonging to any other company. He also explains why "going green" could help both your bottom line and the environment.
Software vendor CA plans to move its Melbourne-based antivirus labs to a new facility after exhausting the space and energy resources at its current location -- by consuming as much power as an average metal-welding factory.
Most PCs are equipped with power management functions, but people turn them off. Turn them on, says Simon Mingay, research VP, Gartner. Savings can be achieved in datacentres also. Most companies run test and development centres constantly, but some are changing their ways.
Many datacentres and organisations are wasting energy on equipment that is plugged in but not in use. This is poor asset management, says Simon Mingay, research VP, Gartner. Energy consumption can be reduced by between five to 10 percent without investing a single cent, he says.
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