GigaOM » Green Grid

Facebook: water efficiency at Prineville is good, but not good enough

Barb Darrow — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:09:01 +0000

Facebook has made a lot of the fact that its Prineville, Ore. data center will be a model of energy and resource efficiency. Now it has some numbers — well, one number — to show how stingy it’s being with water.

A year after adding water metering to its Prineville 1 data center, the company claims a WUE (water usage efficiency) rating of 0.22 liters per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) for that building. WUE is one of several metrics formulated by The Green Grid to show just how efficient a data center really is. Since the goal is to save water, the ideal WUE value — the ratio of annual water usage to the amount of energy consumed by IT equipment — is zero.

While it is touted as an annual figure, Facebook will report its number quarterly, according to the Open Compute Project blog.

According to the post:

We think that 0.22 L/kWh is a great result, but it should be noted that the WUE concept is fairly new and, to our knowledge, no one else has publicly reported WUE yet. We hope that other companies will soon start measuring and reporting WUE so we can begin setting benchmarks for the metric and working together to find new ways to improve.

While many data centers use water to cool data center equipment, Prineville 1 features a mechanical system with a penthouse that “utilizes 100 percent outside air economization with a direct evaporative cooling and humidification (ECH) misting system. This design allows us to achieve a strong WUE,” according to the post.

The WUE rating does not factor in water used by people — for bathroom or office plumbing — but Facebook says it uses reclaimed water where possible (as well as waterless urinals) to minimize that usage. The company said WUE data for the second Prineville will come out next year when that building goes online and it will also produce WUE metrics for its Forest City, N.C. data center.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user IntelFreePress

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Want a green cloud? Learn the metrics

Jeff St. John — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:00:45 +0000

Last week’s Verdantix and AT&T report on the energy and carbon emission savings to come from cloud computing is the latest in a long line of studies stating the obvious: Shifting computing from inefficient, dispersed data centers to highly efficient, centralized cloud data centers should save [...]

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Green Grid Guiding Firms to Data Center 2.0

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:54:55 +0000

Making data centers more energy efficient in a recession is a clear-cut decision for IT managers: cut power, save money, gain green PR. And the Green Grid organization, a trade group dedicated to reducing energy consumption of data centers, wants to help out. On Wednesday at the group’s second annual forum, it plans to launch an extensive multiyear guide, as well as a new metric, that can aid companies looking to design and operate energy-efficient data centers.

Larry Vertal, director of the Green Grid and senior strategist at AMD, told us that the guides, dubbed “Data Centers 2.0,” will focus on how to build out data centers while ensuring that the energy consumption of the individual components are tracked in real time. Real-time monitoring can ensure that the whole center is working as efficiently as possible. The organization, which created the industry standard Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric that is found by dividing “total facility power” by “IT equipment power,” will also be highlighting a newer metric called data center productivity, or DCP, which will focus on how much useful work is being done as energy is consumed.

Ultimately the Green Grid is a technical organization and is interested in offering its members repeatable metrics and open standards as a baseline for competition. Basically companies can compare their data centers and brag about efficiency or strive to work harder to keep up with the data center Joneses. Any company that owns data centers or sells data center gear is quickly moving to make computing more efficient, so these tools will be useful. In recent weeks Sun, GE, and Google have all highlighted their energy efficiency data center efforts.

For investors, tracking all the parts of data centers require a lot of software and wireless networks, so key an eye on companies selling this type of gear. Energy management startup Sentilla announced recently that it has raised $7.5 million in a second round of funding from Onset Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures, and just this week is launching a sensor and software system for data center gear.

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Can Power Grid Be Hacked?

Edit Staff — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:29:26 +0000

A smarter network doesn’t necessarily mean a safer network, or so goes the thinking when it comes to the new intelligent power grid. It is seen as an increased security risk. It has been rumored that Chinese paramilitary hackers have taken tried to take down parts of the U.S. power grid and caused blackouts. Former CIA director-turn-venture-capitalist James Woolsey asked a panel of energy experts at the Google/Brookings plug-in electric vehicle conference in Washington this month what is being done to address this threat. We wanted to know too so we asked some smart grid startups. The threat is real, they say, and the solution is IP. Continue reading at Earth2Tech and watch the video.

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SideShow on Windows Mobile finally becomes a reality

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:44:38 +0000

The oh-so-obvious solution to use a Windows Mobile handheld as a Sideshow device has finally poked its head out of the rabbit hole, courtesy of a Microsoft Developers Preview. And by preview, I mean pre-preview if the version number of 0.01 means anything. The app supports both Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices, but solely on Bluetooth and on devices that use the Microsoft Bluetooth stack. Since Sideshow is a Vista feature, you won’t be using an XP computer with it either.

From what I can see, it has the same look and feel of the MSN Direct service that Microsoft rolled out a short while ago: it appears to be very "paneled" when showing information from your PC on your WinMo device. You can pick it up right here if you’ve got the ~~guts~~ machine for it. I’ve got Vista on my Samsung Q1UP, so I’ll see if I can get this working with my Dash that run Windows Mobile 6.

Update: this installed without a hitch for me, but of course, your mileage may vary. Standard SideShow gadgets in Vista are for your Inbox, Calendar, and Windows Media Player. I downloaded the Weatherbug gadget, told the UMPC to add it to my SideShow device, and it was instantly on my Dash via the Bluetooth connection. Worth a look, but I’ll have to kick the tires to see how useful I find it. Regardless: what took so long for this to happen?

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The Quest for Green Data Centers

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:10:42 +0000

Last week, several important players in the computing industry got together at the Green Grid Technical Forum to continue trying to come up with metrics that measure how efficiently a data center operates, essentially how “green” it is. This is apparently harder than it looks due to a wide variety of factors, from the weather where a data center is located to the type of equipment it uses, even the type of compute work the data center does.

But members of the Green Grid, founded last year, are still trying. The only problem is, they’re not really getting anywhere. After a year of working on metrics, the group announced a single formula to measure efficiency. The results were anticlimactic to say the least.

The metric, called data-center infrastructure efficiency, or DCiE, is essentially a measure of the power consumed by the data center divided by the power consumed by IT. As metrics go, it’s too broad to be really useful. The operators of data centers have a couple of problems that stretch beyond simply measuring the power needed to run servers or to cool the data center.

Data centers can’t rip out and replace all of the existing equipment, so any efficiency gains from greener servers will come slowly. Additionally, the vendors of that equipment don’t really have a good set of measurements of how green the equipment is. Sure, individual chips may be listed as low power, but that’s only one component of a box. Add to that the processing power required by software (is clean code, green?), and you begin to see the magnitude of the problem facing the poor data center operator.

If the industry manages to create climate-neutral data centers, as Hosting.com announced earlier this week (I’m still not sure how), the demand for computing services still makes it difficult for data centers to ever stop consuming so much of the nation’s energy. Right now, current estimates range from .06 percent to as much as 2 percent. Since I don’t see anyone cutting back on computing, work on data center efficiency needs to continue. Measuring the progress might have to come later.

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Don't Want to Shell Out for MS Office? Get a Free Alternative

Samuel Dean — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:00:05 +0000

Among free productivity application suites that can save you from shelling out money for Microsoft’s Office suite, GoogleDocs and OpenOffice tend to get all the attention. Lately, though, I’ve been experimenting with some alternatives, and they’re more than good enough to use in place of Microsoft’s applications. ThinkFree Office, in particular, is worth a look.

ThinkFree Office’s applications are usable online and offline, and you can use them on Windows, Mac or Linux machines, or even thin-client and mobile devices. The core applications are a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation graphics program. However, there’s more to the suite than that.

One of the great features of ThinkFree Office is that it makes it easy to collaborate on documents online with others. You can publish your documents online, search through them online, and choose to share them with others. You also get 1GB of online storage for your documents for free.

The applications in ThinkFree Office have interfaces that are very closely tied to the interfaces in Microsoft’s productivity applications. That means that if you’re used to products such as Word and Excel, you won’t face a big learning curve. Even if you already own and use Microsoft Office, you may appreciate the collaboration features that ThinkFree offers.

If you’re willing to pay a modest amount for a suite of software applications that can compete with Microsoft Office, Software 602 PC Suite is a great choice. It has emerged as the winner in numerous comparisons of alternative suites. You can try it for free and if you like it it’s $39.95. I’ve used it extensively and have also used the Microsoft Office suite extensively.

It’s remarkable how true to the standard interfaces in products like Word and Excel the applications in Software 602’s PC Suite stay. Files you produce are also completely compatible with the Microsoft productivity applications, although if you attempt to do things like import spreadsheets with lots of graphics in to Software 602’s spreadsheet, the graphics can get mucked up.

Software 602’s suite used to be completely free, and I wish that model had been sustainable. The fact that it’s forty bucks now, though, points to the fact that the folks at Software 602 have a suite that became good enough to charge for.

Do you have any good tips on alternatives to Microsoft Office?

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Revver CEO Starr Steps Back

Liz Gannes — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 04:59:57 +0000

Revver, which has seen the departure of many of its prominent founders, employees, and content producers, tonight announced its final remaining founder, Steven Starr, will be stepping back from his CEO role and assuming the position of chairman of the startup’s board of directors.

The company is substituting COO Kevin Wells in the CEO role, effective tomorrow. That marks the completion of Wells’ ascendancy, following a late start at the two-year-old company. He joined last fall in conjunction with the departure of founders Ian Clarke, Oliver Luckett, and other members of the staff.

Revver was perhaps most notable prior to Wells’ involvement, when it was the pioneer of revenue-share arrangements with video creators. Its innovation of paying users has been highly influential.

“Steven and I are squarely focused on developing Revver’s core strengths, making sure it remains the new media network of choice for future generations of content creators,” said Wells in a statement.

Recently, Revver lost its position as the preferred provider of popular video programs Ze Frank’s The Show, Ask a Ninja, and Invisible Engine. It also lost popular community advocate Micki Krimmel.

Along the way, Revver was involved in acquisition talks that fell through. The company raised about $13 million from Comcast Interactive Capital, Turner Broadcasting, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Richards, and William Randolph Hearst III, with its last infusion coming nearly a year ago.

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In defense of the cable guys

Om Malik — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 15:03:51 +0000

Yesterday, I did a quick summation of a report from ABI research on how broadband gateways were good for DSL guys. Well that innocous looking post got attention from some serious heavy weights, who corrected me, and said that the ABI analyst was completely off base. Since I did not really have an opinion on the topic, I am going to go with these folks. First David Isenberg, a broadband guru if there was any, cuts through the crap and writes:

bq. I think this analyst has spent too much time in a coffeehouse in amsterdam. Certainly in the US, the cable operators have embraced the retail model to a much greater extent than the ‘BOCs. Can you go to Best Buy and purchase DSL service today? Nope. And several of the largest cable operators, Comcast and Cox have formal home networking services with an integrated gateway. I don’t see that from Verizon, BellSouth or other DSL providers. Sounds like the Cable guys get it to me.

David, you have scored a touchdown! Boris Mann agrees with David and writes,”Telcos have consistently failed to see the opportunity around CPE in the home.” Please if you disagree with me, them, or anyone, post away.

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