Just how Green is Green?

Everybody’s green these days. And every IT vendor is greener than the next — or at least they claim to be. But according to a recent survey by data center specialists Digital Realty Trust, data center managers are developing a certain skepticism about the Green claims of their equipment vendors. In the survey carried out earlier this year only 53% of respondents believe vendors are truly committed to environmental responsibility, compared with nearly 80% last year. There’s a positive message in there, of course; a little less open-ended trust in vendor marketing messages and raised consciousness of the true issues of environmental sustainability will go a long away to making data center operations greener, benefiting all of us.

“One Schneider” has the data center in its sights

Sanef Telecoms is the first company in France to deploy a solution combining products from Schneider Electric and APC. For Etienne Mercier, project manager at Sanef, the latest power and cooling technologies deliver an improved environment and a measureable return on investment. To manage the migration of the data center to a dynamic infrastructure, monitor business activities and deliver new distributed on-demand services Mercier has deployed a new global solution from Schneider Electric baptized “One Schneider”. The objectives of One Schneider are denser, more efficient, more predictable, more secure data centers, delivering modularity, flexibility and ease of administration for the enterprise. Schneider Electric is seeking to develop an effective model covering the design, deployment and operation of the datacenter to deliver integrated, standardized responses for faster deployment and improved energy efficiency.

End-to-end data center optmization
The “One Schneider” offering brings together IT and non-IT skills from Schneider Electric itself and associated companies including APC by Schneider Electric, TAC, Infra plus and Pelco. Their complementary skills and knowledge cover clean rooms, controlled climate environments, power distribution, precision air conditioning, security, facilities management and information systems infrastructure. With the associated services offerings this represents a very comprehensive response to the key issues face by today’s CIOs as they look at how the data center needs to evolve to meet the challenges of the next few years. The innovative approach is more concerned with improving the information systems environment globally rather than seeking “point” improvements at the level of individual components. The key success measures? Reliability, high availability, and energy savings delivered by the overall deployment.

Green IT award for APC InRow technology

APC InRow cooling technology

Forty companies competed in 10 industrial categories for the 2009 Green Enterprise IT Awards at the Uptime Institute’s 4th “Lean, clean, and Green” symposium. InRow cooling technology from APC (Schneider Electric) took the prize in the “Energy Efficient Products” category. The Green Enterprise IT Awards are the Uptime Institute’s response to research showing that for service industries such as the financial sector, healthcare, retail or government, datacenters represent the largest and most concentrated source of energy consumption and the single greatest contributing cause of greenhouse gas emissions. APC’s InRow cooling technology was selected as a winner for its innovation and leadership in driving sustainability initiatives. The judges were particularly impressed with the active response controls and integrated thermal containment of the InRow products. Congratulating APC for what he described as “its pioneering work in reducing energy consumption in data centers,” Kenneth G. Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, said “APC’s successful initiatives serve as a great example to its industry peers of the realistic impact and feasibility of energy efficiency initiatives.”

More about the winners and their judges here…

APC’s InRow® cooling products with active response controls and integrated thermal containment was selected as a winner for its innovation and leadership in driving sustainability initiatives.

SAP adds Sustainability to ERP

“Clear Standards was established with the vision to help global organizations manage their operations with the added dimension of sustainability as a true driver of growth and innovation,” says Betsy Atkins, Chairman and CEO of  enterprise carbon management solutions vendor Clear Standards, Inc. With the acquisition of  Clear Standards, SAP adds a set of tools its widely used ERP suite that will allow enterprises to optimize their sustainability strategies.

For SAP, power management and sustainable development are becoming as important to the enterprise as financial optimization. “It is essential that organizations gain actionable insight into their carbon emissions, water consumption, energy use and other environmental factors so they can lower their environmental impact,” according to SAP AG Co-CEO Léo Apotheker. “Having this ability also correlates to an organization’s efficiency and competitiveness.”

The web-based Clear Standards software allows for the consolidation of all emissions data across the enterprise,  including greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and waste, providing detailed visualization of emissions data. Clear Standards applications will be able to tap into financial and other data stored in solutions such as SAP Business Suite 7 software and the SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management application, allowing businesses to accurately determine and report their total environmental impact for compliance with legal or voluntary sustainability objectives.

XS11-VX8 for reduced datacenter power consumption

It may not be the catchiest name in the world of Green IT, but Dell’s new XS11-VX8 server is a mini revolution, in every sense of the word. Developed by the “skunk works” at the Dell Data Center Solutions Division under the more user-friendly project codename “Fortuna”, the new server is architected around a 64-bit Via Nano CPU and consumes a mere 15W while idle, and under 30W at full load.

But the real surprise is the form factor. Only slightly larger than a 3.5-inch hard drive, Fortuna is a “hot-plug” server with its own dedicated memory, storage, dual 1GbE NICs and support for IPMI 2.0 event monitoring and management. A standard 2U chassis can hold 12 XS11-VX8 servers.

The target market is large web hosting operations, who can use the Xs11-VX8 to more effectively offer dedicated servers for less demanding “single socket” workloads such as web services. The new server replaces, at much higher densities, 1U rack servers or low-end towers that are typically used to fulfill such demands today. Priced at under $400, Dell claims a 34% lower TCO than equivalent “white box” server deployments.

New click comparisons from Google

Back in February we reported on a minor controversy over the energy consumed by running a Google search. Urs Hölzle, Google’s Senior Vice President, Operations, has just posted new figures on the Google blog measuring the CO₂ impact of a range of everyday activities in terms of the equivalent number of Google search operations. The carbon footprint of the PDF version of a daily newspaper, we’re told, is equivalent to 850 Google searches; a glass of orange juice is 1050 searches, and for 10,000 searches you could take the average US car for a five mile drive. If you can manage 3,100,000 search operations, your CO₂ emissions will be comparable to the monthly electricity consumption of an average American household.

Insisting on Google’s green credentials, Hölzle argues that energy consumption in Google’s datacenters is less than half the industry average, and that it’s probable that your own PC will consume more energy in the time it takes to return a search request than that consumed by Google’s own systems in executing the search.

Google’s corporate Efficient Computing page takes up the subject, declaring “Sustainability is good for the environment, but it makes good business sense too”, with a five-step plan to continue improving the company’s environmental responsibility:

1. Minimize electricity used by servers
2. Reduce the energy used by the data center facilities themselves
3. Conserve precious fresh water by using recycled water instead
4. Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves our data centers
5. Engage with our peers to advance smarter energy practices

The final word from Google: “Being “green” is essential to keeping our business competitive. It is this economic advantage that makes our efforts truly sustainable.”

How Green is your web?

More and more web hosting companies are turning to green energy sources. The Green Web Hosting page compares five hosting services for energy sourcing, services offered, pricing, and their commitment to sustainable development and environmental responsibility. Hostgator, for example, at number 2 on the list claims to cover 110% of the energy required by its 5000 servers from wind farms. Super Green Hosting (no. 1) participates in tree planting projects to offset the carbon emissions corresponding to customers’ web site operations. The most committed customers can purchase additional carbon offsets and display a Green badge on their website to demonstrate their Green credentials to their own customers and users.

3PAR and VMware are turning the cloud Green

Coupled with VMware’s cloud offering vSphere 4, 3PAR’s “utility storage” solutions are designed for the roll out of the enterprise cloud. 3PAR positions its solutions as an alternative to traditional rack storage solutions, offering more flexiblity to adapt more rapidly to enterprise needs through a combination of load consolidation and dynamic resource allocation. But what makes the 3PAR technology Greener than other storage solutions? By allocating disk space more efficiently, says 3PAR, over-provisioning as generally practiced in the datacenter can be reduced, reducing power consumption. For Benjamin Woo, IDC Vice President, Enterprise Storage Systems, “Highly virtualized storage is the perfect complement to VMware’s flexibility and ROI”. The partnership between 3PAR and VMware will allow enterprises to optimise the delivery of hosted services based on virtual server deployments taking advantage of the features of 3PAR’s InServ storage servers.

Energy efficiency: a question of control

On January 20th a new generation environmentally-friendly superstore opened its doors in Sens, France. Part of the Intermarché chain of food and household goods retail outlets, the Sens store is aiming to reduce energy consumption and overheads while improving customer comfort thanks to an energy management solution by Johnson Controls, baptised Econeo. “From the beginning we took the decision to use environmentally friendly technologies in building the hypermarket” says Didier Poirot, owner and managing director. “Our main objective was reduced energy consumption. The Johnson Controls solution maximizes our energy efficiency, and we expect to reduce overall energy consumption by 30%.”

The hypermarket uses cooling systems based on recycled CO₂ for a much reduced greenhouse gas impact compared with traditional cooling systems. Heat generated by the refrigeration systems is recovered and recycled to heat the store, in particular the “comfort corridors” separating the chilled/frozen food areas with higher-temperature zones for a more comfortable customer experience.

Sustainable development is part of the DNA at Johnson Controls. A range of technologies and services allowing enterprises to reduce their environmental impact covers redesign of heating and lighting installations, biomass heating solutions, integrated facilities management systems and specialized metering. Johnson Controls is now calling on European companies and the public sector to sign energy performance contracts, with the objective of increasing the energy efficiency of buildings. According to Tom Lowery, the company’s vice president for Europe and Africa, immediate action is required to cut the production of harmful greenhouse gases. “If we care about our planet, we need to act now.”

Grazing goats make Google greener

Wildfires are a recurring risk in the dry sunny climate of Silicon Valley. Businesses and householders are regularly reminded of their duty to trim back undergrowth on their property to limit the fire hazard. Google has taken an innovative, low-carbon approach to the problem at their Mountain View headquarters this year: 200 goats.

Dan Hoffman, Director Real Estate and Workplace Services at Google, explains on his blog “Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats from California Grazing to do the job for us. A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time”.

The next step will be for Google to move into the goats’ milk cheese business. In beta, of course.