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Data Center Powered By The Wind
December 21st, 2009 : Rich Miller
The 131-foot tall wind turbine at Other World Computing in Woodstock, Illinois.
A small lSP and hosting company in Illinois may be the first data center operator in the U.S. to power its facility entirely with wind power from an on-site turbine. On Oct. 19, Other World Computing (OWC) began using a 131-foot tall wind turbine to provide all the electric power for its building in Woodstock, Illinois, which includes the company’s headquarters and a data center supporting its web hosting and ISP services.
There are other data center operators that use utility power that is sourced from wind generation. But this is the first example we’ve seen of a working data center with on-site wind generation that can produce enough power to support its entire facility. That’s partly due to the fact that OWC has a small data center, which can be supported by a single wind turbine, limiting the initial investment required to commit fully to wind power. The company has also invested in other energy efficiency measures for its facility, reducing its overall electricity needs.
OWC is one of several examples of data centers seeking to go “all in” on wind energy for their data center. Here’s a look at other data center projects focused on wind energy:
- Green House Data in Cheyenne, Wyoming operates a 10,000 square foot data center that is powered entirely through renewable wind energy from its local utility. The company useselectricity provided by Cheyenne, Light, Fuel and Power, which has partnered with Tierra Energy on a 30-megawatt wind generation site in Cheyenne. Green House Data plans to build several wind turbines on site in the next several years, and says it facility is the largest wind-powered public data center in the nation.
- The Microsoft Virtual Earth service operates out of a data center container housed at a Microsoft facility in Boulder, Colo. The container is “100 percent wind powered” through offsets purchased from Boulder-based Renewable Choice Energy. While not powered directly by ,wind turbines, Microsoft has tapped into a major advantage of containers: they can easily be placed near renewable energy sources, allowing companies to chase green power to meet carbon reduction goals.
- Texas startup Baryonyx plans to build a data center powered by energy from huge “wind farms” in the Texas panhandle and the Gulf of Mexico. In the first phase of the project, Baryonyx plans to build a 28,000 square foot data center in Stratford, Texas which will be powered by 100 wind turbines built on the adjacent land that will generate up to 150 megawatts of power.
OWC, which also operates an online catalog of iPod, and iPhone products, uses utility power when the wind dies down, and also has generators on site. The company’s Vestas V39-500 wind turbine, which arrived in September, can provide 500 kilowatts of power. That’s plenty to support the 37,000 square foot facility, which already employs a geothermal cooling system. OWC estimates that the turbine will generate 1.25 million kilowatt hours of power per year, more than twice the amount OWC needs for its operations.
The tower is 131 feet high with the blades extending the turbine’s total height to 194 feet. The blade housing can rotate 360 degrees so it can turn facing into winds up to 150 mph. During extreme winds, the blades automatically go “flat” with the narrowest point into the wind and in essence, shut the turbine down until it senses safe operational wind speeds.
The turbine cost about $1.25 million, and will take between 10 and 14 years to recover the cost, according to OWC.
“I made the decision to 100 percent self fund this project because of the conservational benefits as well as the future cost of energy,” said Larry O’Connor, CEO, Other World Computing, in the press release. “With the kilowatt hour rate in the Chicago market up 24.3percent since 1999, it only makes sense to use technology to lower our usage and costs related to traditional power sources.”
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Can Cheap Water Lure Data Center Projects?
December 15th, 2009 : Rich MillerMilwaukee is trying to reel in some data center projects, and is using cheap water as its hook. At a time when data centers are paying closer attention to the amount of water they use in their cooling systems, the large water requirements of these facilities is also being viewed as a site location differentiator.
Data centers are now on the radar screen of economic development officials in Milwaukee, which is using its water supply as a tool to try and attract large employers. The city recently launched a program known as WAVE (Water Attracting Valued Employers) that offers volume discounts on water for companies that locate operations in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee attorney Barry Grossman suggested “server farms” as a potential prospect for Milwaukee’s water-driven municipal marketing, noting the industry’s high water usage profile during a forum on water-related economic and legal issues sponsored by Marquette University’s law school. See the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for more on the story.
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Inside IBM’s Green Data Center Testbed
December 8th, 2009 : Rich Miller
Which energy efficiency technologies work together to produce the best combined savings? IBM and Syracuse University will gather data on this question in an innovative new facility that combines on-site power distribution using microturbines, absorption chillers, the reuse of waste heat in nearby buildings, DC power distribution, and rear-door liquid cooling for each cabinet. Check out our a photo tour providing a detailed look at the technologies and equipment powering the Syracuse facility.
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A Tale of Two Data Center Industries?
December 8th, 2009 : Rich Miller
You’ve probably heard it many times before: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The benefits of monitoring energy usage in the data center are well-established, and have been highlighted at virtually every industry event for the past two years. So why are so many companies still not monitoring their facilities and using one of the emerging data center metrics to track their progress?Christian Belady of Microsoft discusses this question today at the MS DataCenters blog, picking up on some Gartner data we reported last week. Christian has been actively involved in industry conversations on efficiency, and has some thoughts about the low numbers for adoption of data center metrics.
“Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that maybe the respondents should have been weighted by their relative data center sizes,” he writes. “I would argue that any company where a bulk of their costs are driven by their IT operations (which by the way are likely to be huge operations such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, etc.) are further to the left on the graph because it has such a large impact on profitability. Similarly, those who have either small operations or their IT costs are low relative to other costs are further to the right. So in essence, we have a polarization of the data center industry: the Leftists and the Rightists.”
Will this split continue if carbon regulation alters the price of energy and the cost of inefficiency? Read The Polarization of the Data Center Industry for more.
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Mission West Targets Oregon for Data Centers
December 7th, 2009 : Rich MillerMission West Properties, a major player in Silicon Valley real estate, is planning two major data center projects in Oregon, citing the state as one of the country’s most attractive areas for data center development. Mission West (MSW) is a major public real estate investment trust (REIT) headed by billionaire investor Carl Berg, who said he believes the data sector is poised for major growth.
“As a result of cloud computing, we believe the demand for Web hosting will increase dramatically in the next two to three years,” Berg recently told The Registry.
One of the properties is in Ontario, Oregon, where CDH Consulting is seeking to buy 66 acres of land to build a major data center. CDH, which is headed by industry veteran Chris Hardin, is partnering with Mission West on the project. The Ontario City Council is expected to vote tonight on the proposed $1.3 million land sale, according to local media.
The second site has not been publicly identified. One possibility: Local officials in Prineville, Oregon have been in discussions with a site selection company representing a ”well known, well funded company” planning a major data center.
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In Santa Clara, ‘Green’ Speeds Toward Platinum
November 24th, 2009 : Rich Miller
1201 Comstock is one of the Digital Realty data centers in Santa Clara, Calif. that has received a LEED Platinum certification.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – An unassuming industrial park near San Jose Airport is hardly where you’d expect to find some of the greenest acres in the data center industry. The Santa Clara, Calif., campus operated by Digital Realty Trust is home to three data centers with a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.
Digital Realty, the largest data center operator in the U.S., has used its Santa Clara operation to refine an energy efficient design using fresh-air cooling, which has made the site a magnet for some of the fastest-growing companies in the digital economy.
Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have their servers housed here. NVIDIA, which is seeking to harness its GPU technology to power cloud and high performance computing, has leased an entire data center here as well.
Clients Like LEED Data Centers
The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard is not designed with data centers in mind, and is just one of several indicators of the energy efficiency of a data center, along with Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). But there are signs that the LEED designation is growing in importance for data center tenants, who like the standard as a benchmark for corporate social responsibility.Where LEED certification was once seen as a difficult hurdle for mission-critical sites, companies like Digital Realty are demonstrating the ability to build data centers to the very highest levels of the specification, and do so with remarkable speed. The two LEED Platinum facilities at the Santa Clara campus were completed in less than eight months, far less than the 18 to 24 months typically required for an enterprise data center project.
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Progress on $1.5 Billion Scotland Data Center
November 20th, 2009 : Rich Miller
This farmland near Lockerbie, Scotland could become one of the world's largest data center developments. Construction is slated to begin next year on a $1.5 billion project by Lockerbie Data Centres.
A massive $1.5 billion data center project near Lockerbie, Scotland is a step closer to reality after receiving the blessing of local planning officials. Lockerbie Data Centres Ltd. proposed building the £950 million project, which it says may generate a total of £3.5 billion in investment in the region.
Planning officials at the local Dumfries and Galloway Council have recommended the company’s application be approved by the town council, which will meet Nov. 25 to discuss the project. The developers hope this will lay the groundwork for construction to begin in mid-2010 and opening for business in late 2011.
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The Business Value of Green Data Centers
November 19th, 2009 : Kevin NormandeauToday, policy and business leaders are reaching a consensus that industry must address rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly in the data center. Leading enterprises are now turning to the practical challenge of determining how, how much, and at what cost to reduce emissions. In a recent white paper from IDC many companies are learning that their data center offers a means to both abate GHG and reduce costs with the right incremental capital investments.
The process of improving information technology and data center efficiency not only reduces GHG emissions but also reduces cost for the enterprise. This means that the savings or business value derived from improvements far outstrips the incremental capital costs of “greening” the datacenter. Green IT means business improvement. Firms that rank highest among the “Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World,” such as Amazon, Toyota, and Nike, have realized that focusing on limiting energy calories in the datacenter and elsewhere pays profitability dividends on the financial side. IDC research indicates that companies reducing their metric tons of carbon per datacenter workload by a factor of 55% also incurred 35% less cost per user session on a server.
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Red Sky: Supercomputing and Efficiency Meet
November 17th, 2009 : Rich MillerThe new Red Sky supercomputer as Sandia National Laboratories just debuted as the 10th fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list, with a sustained performance of 429.9 teraflops. Red Sky consists of 68 cabinets of Sun Constellation gear, with up to 96 nodes and 678 cores per rack. Each cabinet can each require up to 32 kilowatts of energy at full load.
But the system is notable not just for its power, but for its energy efficiency. Red Sky has an estimated Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.035. That’s not a typo - a claimed PUE of 1.035. How is this possible? Red Sky uses the Sun Cooling Door (also known as Project Glacier) designed jointly by Sun Microsystems and Emerson Network Power, which was demonstrated at the SC08 show. The Sun Cooling Door 5600 attaches to the back of cabinets and uses an inert refrigerant gas called R134. The unit is supported by a Liebert XD pumping unit. The passive design that doesn’t require additional fans to circulate air, saving on energy used to power the fans.
Here’s a time-lapse video of the assembly of Red Sky (link via Marc Hamilton). This video runs about 5 minutes.
For more coverage of information about supercomputing, check out our High Performance Computing Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.
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