Green Notes

Wired Real Estate Group , a data center planning and procurement firm, has launched a free colocation and data center search listing service to support the firm’s Brokerage Practice. With the new data center listing service, firms can now easily identify new retail, wholesale and shell data center sites, including mapping of street locations. The service is free, with no advertising or registration. The service was conceived to help IT organizations identify new colocation and data center real estate availability .Investment in data center real estate has slowed due to debt financing leading to limited colocation and data center supply growth. But because of changes in computing power, regulatory compliance, and network costs, demand for colocation and data center real estate has remained strong. Wired’s search and listing service is intended to create efficiency by allowing colocation and data center users to search, map, and qualify sites directly. For listing your data center with the WiredRE, send an email to “listings@wiredre.com”>. For more information about Green Rack’s co-location service, contact our sales team at 408-213-8144/ sales@GreenRackSystems.com

The US Green Building Council ‘s LEED rating system was conceived to encourage companies to build environmentally sustainable, energy efficient buildings. LEED is a point based system that awards points for energy use, materials,location , water use and indoor air quality. A building that successfully meets their standards in all these five requirements, will be certified. But, data centers pose unique challenges when it comes to implementing sustainable design practices. In many instances, proposed practices in LEED design are in direct conflict with accepted data center norms. For example, LEED awards points to constructions that make maximum use of natural light as we save on electricity bills dedicated to lighting. But a typical data center saturated with machinery and housing very little personnel might not need too many windows. Also since energy efficiency is the most crucial and relevant problemn when it comes to data centers, the other LEED categories like materials and location might not have to play as big a role as in an ordinary commercial building.In fact during summer months , they could heat up the centers that already pay too much for their constant cooling mechanisms. So even though LEED has been certifying data centers, there remains a common grouse that it does not adequately address their unique design considerations leading to inadequate assessment.

To address these concerns, USGBC is considering customizing existing LEED rating systems to evaluate not only green data centers but also specific tools that can be utilized to assess them. USGBC is working closely with The Green Grid, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ,California Energy Commission and ASHRAE to finalize the technical benchmarks and formal guidelines most appropriate to verify facility standards. All adaptations to the rating system would be incorporated into evaluating new construction as well as existing buildings. Data centers are becoming a valuable real estate commodity due to high demand for computing. Once the LEED certifications are set in place for these centers, there will certainly be a clear jump in market value for LEED certified data centers just like one has witnessed the past few years in the case of other LEED certified commercial buildings. For consultation about how to make your data centers more energy efficient to meet accepted industry standards like the LEED rating system and thereby increase the intrinsic market value of your facility, please contact Green Rack Systems at 408-213-8144/

sales@GreenRackSystems.com

In recent times, there has been little that has created the kind of buzz and momentum in the server industry segment as Virtualization. With good reason too! Virtualization has almost single handedly changed the way small to medium businesses conduct their operations. The concept is pretty logical, really and makes a whole lot of common sense when you think about it. Simply put, Virtualization is the method of having several operating systems function within just one server. Each operating system could be performing totally independent unrelated tasks without compromising on the quality of the computing. That is, both the data processing and storage is done within one server as opposed to a traditional system where the network is distributed in an elaborate design comprising of several servers and workstations all attached to their own separate hardware components. In a virtual environment all the physical resources such as additional servers, PCs, storage, hard drives, processors, mother boards etc are totally eliminated. Not only are we saving big time in hardware investment, we are also avoiding excess maintenance costs .With increased server density, we are better able to pinpoint the precise location of hardware failure thereby aiding quicker disaster recovery and reduced unplanned downtime all leading to scalable , more manageable . Employee productivity therefore increases as no one is waiting around endlessly for network issues to be resolved. Consolidation also improves data security significantly. In the context of eco-friendliness, fewer servers mean lesser green house gas emissions. So we are able to contribute towards a cleaner environment. It is sometimes surprising to many that only about 30 percent of the total power used in a server is consumed by the processor itself. The rest goes towards appeasing the cooling systems, memory and power supply. Streamlining the network results in a drastic reduction in power consumption putting green back in your pocket where it rightly belongs. With all the money saved, organizations will be able to reallocate and reprioritize funds to focus on increasing their competitive advantage in the marketplace. For effective virtualization solutions and cost effective green computing consultation, contact our expert team at sales@GreenRackSystems.com / 408-213-8144

According to recent studies the annual energy consumption of servers in the US is of the same order of magnitude as television sets. Europe fares slightly better, being that servers there are the second largest energy consumer among IT equipment following TVs. Energy costs for the operation of servers are expected to exceed costs for hardware by 2015. Considering the enormous global impact this has on our carbon footprint, governments across the globe have been working closely with the industry the past several years to put forth a scalable energy performance rating system for data centers. Together they have proposed several radical measures to improve server efficiency such as eliminating redundant servers, embracing energy efficient models, enabling power management on 100% of applicable servers, server consolidation etc

The project Efficient Servers conducted within the European Union programme Intelligent Energy Europe is focused on the high saving potentials due to efficient server technology and promoting the market for energy efficient servers. The project believes that by the use of highly efficient server systems, energy and cost savings between 20 and 70% can be achieved in the hardware and infrastructure. It advocates technical measures such as energy efficient hardware- and software components as well as a total consolidation or virtualisation of the server system. By active implementation of these methods, Efficient Server solutions offer the benefits of
• Significant cost reduction due to reduction of electricity consumption
• Lower service costs
• Reduced energy consumption and costs in the server infrastructure

In the United States, in a land mark move towards the cause of server energy management, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently launched its ENERGY STAR for Enterprise Servers certification. EPA has more than 15-year history of promoting energy efficiency in IT equipment as well as commercial buildings. Through the ENERGY STAR program, EPA certifies a wide array of IT products, including personal computers, imaging equipment, printers, and monitors.This proposed server Energy star ratings will include all non-blade servers with one to four processors and at least one hard drive to apply for Energy Star certification as highly energy efficient devices. According to their website, Energy Star for Servers will measure three main categories of performance: managing power supply performance, functioning in a virtualized environment, and energy benchmarks for measuring and reporting server energy use.Blade servers are not yet covered under this first version of the specification, nor are servers with no installed hard drives .The EPA is apparently still in the process of formulating a method for assessing traditional servers. You can find further details at http://EnergyStar.gov.

Green Rack Systems is fully committed to the cause of global initiatives in eco-friendly servers and welcomes the EPA‘s Energy Star ratings system in the server market.

Truly speaking, depending on the efficiency of your data center, the “U” in UPS could stand for either “uninterruptible” or “underperforming”. Our goal of course is the former. Just like in home renovations, where we want to conserve energy by recycling and reprioritizing existing materials as opposed to completely demolishing the old set up, in data centers too we want to first assess what is at hand before blindly tossing them out. A logical place to start is definitely your power supplies. Power supplies simply put are devices that power computers and servers. They convert AC power from electric utilities into DC power used in most electronics. A standard data center has power supply devices running amok between networks, switches, servers, firewalls and the works. Every time power is transported from one place to another, there is an inevitable loss of energy both within the Data center network and en route from the energy plants. It is quite astonishing that even today most power supply devices have an energy efficiency of only about 50-60% , leaving you to pay for almost half of the unused power.
In 2007, a new specification for desktop computers was introduced that mandated standards requiring 80% or greater power supply efficiency to gain an Energy Star approved stamp. This 80% efficiency has been the standard advocated by 80 PLUS, an electric utility-funded incentive program that promotes the integration of more energy-efficient power supplies into desktop computers and servers. Their website states that “the 80 PLUS performance specification requires power supplies in computers and servers to be 80% or greater energy efficient at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load with a true power factor of 0.9 or greater. This makes an 80 PLUS certified power supply substantially more efficient than typical power supplies.” So ensuring that each power component in your system is optimized would mean increased productivity for your entire data center. For more information on optimizing your data center efficiency, please contact us at sales@GreenRackSystems.com / 408-213-8144 .