Wikipedia Adds European Data Center

The creators of Wikipedia will add about 50 servers in a new European traffic hub in a “green” data center in Amsterdam, the company said today. The Wikimedia Foundation has signed a contract with EvoSwitch, which will donate more than 300,000 euros (about $415,000) of in-kind support in bandwidth and hosting services.

The Wikipedia site is hosted on about 300 servers in a primary data center in Tampa, Fla. The 50 servers at the EvoSwitch data center in Amsterdam will provide content storage and delivery. Amsterdam is one of the world’s most important network hubs, with hundreds of European networks exchanging traffic in the city’s data centers.

“We’re very pleased with EvoSwitch’s professional and well secured data center environment, which includes a highly cost-efficient infrastructure in a location that is of great strategic importance to us,” said Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer for the Foundation. “We will be using the Amsterdam site for caching in particular, aiming to reduce the response time of our project websites in Europe. EvoSwitch will also be a good location for backing up content that is stored at our Florida data center. Finally, we will be relocating European publishing projects to EvoSwitch, such as Toolserver.org – a project of the German Wikimedia chapter.

Manos: Prepare for Data Center Regulation

Is data center regulation inevitable? Mike Manos of Digital Realty Trust is back from a visit to England, where he held a customer discussion about the Carbon Reduction Commitment (PDF), the UK’s version of cap-and-trade legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“While not specifically aimed at data centers (it’s aimed at everyone) you can see that by its definition data centers will be significantly affected,” Mike writes. The CRC mechanism is expected to “go live” in April 2010, and include all organizations that consume more than 6,000 MWh in 2008.

“One of the items that came out during the roundtable discussions was how generally disconnected government regulators are to the complexities of the data center,” Manos writes.”They want to view Data Centers as big bad energy using boxes that are all the same, when the differences in what is achievable from small data centers to mega-scale facilities are great. Achieving PUEs of 1.2x might be achievable for large scale Internet firms who control the entire stack from physical cabling to application development. Banks and financial insitutions are mandated to redundancy requirements which force them to maintain scores of 2.0. ”

LEED Gold for Digital Realty Santa Clara Site

Digital Realty Trust (DLR) has earned a LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) for its 1500 Space Park facility in Santa Clara, Calif., the company said Monday. In 2007 Digital Realty became the first developer to earn a Gold Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for a data center back for a Chicago facility.

Digital Realty did not identify the tenant in the LEED Gold facility. But it appears to be Yahoo (YHOO), which said that it had signed a lease with Digital Realty for a Turn-Key data center that was on track for Gold LEED certification. The Santa Clara facility was certified using the LEED for Commercial Interior (LEED-CI) program.

“The LEED-CI certification for 1500 Space Park recognizes our holistic approach to making efficiency and sustainability key factors in the way we design, build and operate our facilities,” said Jim Smith, CTO of Digital Realty Trust. “”We use LEED guidelines as a best practice for our entire portfolio of datacenters, and have 10 additional datacenter projects currently in the LEED certification process, a sign of our commitment to energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.”

James Hamilton on Improving PUE

James Hamilton of Amazon has a worthwhile blog post looking at some of the controversies surrounding Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which has emerged as the leading metric for data center energy efficiency. The growing number of facilities announcing low PUE numbers has prompted scrutiny about how PUE is being measured, along with pockets of cynicism about facilities and systems being designed to “game” the standard.

The PUE metric, which has been popularized by The Green Grid, compares a facility’s total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost in distribution and conversion. An average PUE of 2.0 indicates that the IT equipment uses about 50 percent of the power to the building. A number of data center operators, including Google, have announced PUE readings of 1.2 or below for their data centers.

Hamilton identifies some of the areas of contention around PUE, and then proposes a new standard called tPUE (Total Power Usage Efficiency) that refines PUE with standard processes for measuring total facility power and “productive” IT equipment power.

The Geography of Green Job Growth

Energy efficiency and “green” data centers are frequent topics here at Data Center Knowledge. A new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts presents an interesting snapshot of the clean energy economy, which Pew says grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs between 1998 and 2007. The report includes a state-by-state breakdown of where the most green jobs are being created. Leading the way are California and Texas, which are also major data center markets.

“The clean energy economy is poised for explosive growth,” said Lori Grange of the Pew Center on the States. “These jobs are driving economic growth and environmental sustainability at a time when America needs both. There is a potential competitive advantage for federal and state policy leaders who act now to spur jobs, businesses and investments in the clean energy sector.”

Reclaiming Wasted Cooling Capacity

In a new white paper, OpenGate Data Systems shows how reclaiming wasted cooling capacity - which results from hot air leakage and cool air bypass - is possible with an intelligently managed cooling distribution system.

Deployment of high density equipment into data center infrastructure is now a common occurrence, yet many data centers are not adequately equipped to handle the additional cooling requirements resulting from these deployments. This is resulting in undesirable conditions such as recirculation or mixing of hot and cool air, poorly controlled humidity and costly wasted cooling capacity.

This paper defines cooling oversupply, provides examples for quantifying cool air bypass and hot air recirculation, and assigns principles to evaluate high-density rack performance and cooling efficiency benefits which are gained from Unity CoolingTM - the raising of supply air temperature and supplying only the cooling required by the IT load. Click here to download this whitepaper on reclaiming wasted cooling.

Inside Allstate’s New Data Center

Allstate Insurance Co. recently completed a 50,000 square foot data center in Rochelle, Ill., a western suburb of Chicago. The company has put together a video providing a tour of the facility, highlighting some of the energy-efficiency measures and offering a brief look at the equipment area. This video runs about 2 minutes.

Check out our Green Data Center Channel for more on this topic. For additional video, visit our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

IBM, Syracuse Team on ‘Green’ Testbed

An artist rendering of the exterior of a new data center IBM will build and equip at Syracuse University.

A new data center at Syracuse University will serve as a testbed for energy efficient data center design, backed by technology from IBM and financial support from the state of New York. The $12.4 million, 6,000-square-foot data center will combine multiple energy-saving technologies, including on-site power generation, DC power distribution, chillers and cabinets equipped with water-cooled rear-door heat exchangers.

Syracuse University will use the data center for its IT equipment, and also provide detailed analysis of its energy efficiency. IBM will supply $5 million in electrical co-generation equipment and servers, and use the facility to showcase its “green” data center technology. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is contributing $2 million to the project.

The new facility, which is scheduled to be completed late this year, will be powered by a microturbine engine fueled by natural gas, which will generate all electricity for the center and provide cooling for the computer servers. The heat generated by the microturbine will power an absorption chiller unit, which will convert the heat into chilled water to cool the data center’s servers.

The chilled water will be piped into IBM’s “Cool Blue” rear-door heat exchangers attached to each cabinet. IBM and Syracuse say they will implement a precision cooling system that reduces energy use by targeting only the servers that require cooling resources, rather than delivering cooling to all servers as in most data centers. Computer-controlled sensors will be used to monitor thermal conditions in the data center and direct cooling.