Tag Archive for 'datacenter'

More info please IBM…

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on January 8, 2009
in datacenter
. 0 Comments

IBM Green Data Center in Second Life

Speaking of data centers, I was delighted to read this morning of a partnership between IBM and Indian bank Kotak.

According to the release, IBM is helping the bank consolidate its server rooms into one data center and Kotak will save:

over US$1.2 million in operational efficiency and reduced energy costs over the next five years

I’d like to see some of the calcs behind those data - $1.2m over five years sounds low to me unless it is a modest data center.

Intriguingly, the release refers to:

a chilled water-based cooling and an automatic floor pressurization system

If that is water cooled servers (as opposed to water cooled air handling units) then this is nice. I’d love to know what an ” automatic floor pressurization system” system is. Anyone know? My guess is that it is something for maintaining underfloor airflow integrity but if it is that, then it sounds like traditional air cooled servers, not water cooled :-(

Hello? Anyone from IBM have any more info on this?

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RackSpace’s customers ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 1, 2008
in Uncategorized and datacenter
. 1 Comment

Premium
Photo Credit ignescent_infidel

Jon Brodkin wrote a piece in ComputerWorld UK about a survey of RackSpace’s customers which seems to suggest that they ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products. John goes on to extrapolate that they:

found some results suggesting businesses are losing interest in green technology.

There are a number of problems with this assumption. First off you have to realise that Rackspace don’t do co-lo. Rackspace only do managed hosting. So, if I am an IT manager I can’t put my equipment, no matter how energy-efficient, in a RackSpace Data Center, I have to use their equipment. What is not clear from the piece John wrote is what was the ‘premium’ the RackSpace customers were being asked to pay.

Again, if I am an IT manager, I can choose to buy, for example Dell’s PowerEdge™ Energy Smart 2950 III (SV22952), which is cheaper but slightly less powerful than their standard PowerEdge™ 2950 (SV22951). Realistically, the only reason I am going to do this is if it is going to save me money.

As James said previously - the wrong people are paying the electricity bill in companies currently (no pun):

IT doesn’t pay for its electricity. No, seriously, go to your FM manager or IT manager and ask who pays to power your IT properties. The vast majority of IT systems get a free ride on electricity bills, which is one reason its taken so long to fully consider IT carbon costs.

When that changes (and it will) watch IT managers suddenly become extremely interested in the energy ratings of their servers.

Going back to the RackSpace survey, fundamentally I think Rackspace are taking the wrong approach. What they should be doing is increasing prices to their customers across the board to reflect their own increased energy bill - except for those customers who chose to be hosted on energy efficient servers. If RackSpace took that route, suddenly you’d see a an about-face in the number of their customers who are apparently losing interest in green technology!!!

[Disclosure: I am co-founder a director of Cork Internet eXchange (CIX) an energy efficient data center based in Cork, Ireland. CIX charges all customers separately for their electricity usage.]

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