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5 fun data center facts from the Uptime Institute

Barb Darrow — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:53:48 +0000

It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. That’s not true for the majority of the 1,100 owners and operators that responded to the second annual survey. Here are my top five fun facts from the new survey.

1. Public cloud is big, private cloud is bigger. This year, 25 percent of respondents said they’re adopting public cloud, up from 16 percent last year. And 49 percent are deploying private clouds, up from 35 percent last year.

2. Data center budgets are on the rise. More than half (55 percent) of organizations responding said their budgets increased in 2012 over last year, compared to 52 percent who said that last year. And 32 percent said their data center budgets will rise more than 10 percent in 2012.

3. Asia is hot, hot, hot for data centers. An impressive 55 percent of Asian companies responding said their budgets are up more than 10 percent this year.

4. Data centers are running out of headroom. Nearly one third (30 percent) of those responding said their companies will run out of capacity in at least one of their sites this calendar year. Among the Asian respondents, a whopping 86 percent said they’d built a site “recently” but 35 percent said they are running into capacity constraints in their existing sites.

5. Energy efficiency is key, kinda. More than half of this year’s respondents cited saving energy as a major priority but most of those do not put financial incentives in place to achieve that goal. It was unclear from the report if those numbers are up, down or sideways from last year. Reported Power Usage Effectiveness ratings (PUE is the common measure of data center energy efficiency) stayed about the same — between 1.8 to 1.9 — year over year. A quarter of respondents said they collect carbon emissions data and 34 percent do the same for water usage.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user IntelFreePress.

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Facebook, eBay win awards for data center efficiency

Derrick Harris — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:55:10 +0000

Facebook and eBay are among the winners of this year’s Green Enterprise IT Awards, which the Uptime Institute doles out for advancements in the world of energy-efficient data centers.

Dell and eBay took home the award for “Modular Data Center Deployment” for its Project Mercury data center in downtown Phoenix. That data center, which I profiled earlier this month, makes use of standardized racks of gear on the floor and of high-powered but high-efficiency data center modules on the roof. It currently has two Dell modules and two HP units in place, but is looking to add seven more as its computing needs ramp up. Because they’re so efficient, the entire facility’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating, which gauges the percentage of power used for tasks other than computing, falls with each new module.

Facebook, for its part, won the award for “Audacious Idea,” a category that didn’t even have another finalist, for its Open Compute Project. That’s probably rightly so. The project began with Facebook open sourcing its designs for both servers and entire data centers, and now features an industry-led foundation aimed at bringing some of these highly efficient principles and practices into mainstream enterprises.

The awards will be presented on May 14 during a session and the Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif.

There’s still a long way left to go in 2012, but there are already some innovative data center designs underway that could result in awards at next year’s event. EBay has plans to outdo Project Mercury with a modular data in Salt Lake City called Project Quicksilver. Facebook is building a presumably green facility in Sweden, in the same region where Google takes advantage of seawater to cool its Finnish data center. And speaking of Google, it has built a system in its Douglas County, Ga., data center that’s cooled in part by wastewater from nearby towns.

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Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:55 +0000

Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Power is a problem. Cloud is the answer

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:00:02 +0000

The majority of data center operators are relying on server virtualization, hot and cold aisle containment, and power-monitoring software as means to make their operations more energy-efficient, according to an industry survey. Still, a mere 58 percent of data center operators feel like reducing energy consumption is a worthwhile goal, according to the data shared Thursday by the Uptime Institute.

The Uptime Institute, a group that measures data center performance and efficiency, surveyed 525 data center owners and operators to discover several worthwhile sentiments about power consumption, cloud computing and even server consolidation. Some of this data was released at an event it held in May, but they sent me the consolidated results Thursday. Expect to see some of these numbers in PowerPoint slides at an event (such as our own Structure 2011 event in two weeks) near you given how influential Uptime’s data tends to be.

Spending is one the rise, with 52 percent of respondents saying their data center budget increased in 2011, and 27 percent saying it increased by more than 10 percent.
Operators are running out of room and electricity, with 36 percent saying their data center facility would run out of power, cooling and/or space in 2011-2012.
Expect new data center construction to continue, as 40 percent plan build a new data center, while 62 percent said they would handle demand for more data center facilities by consolidating servers.
Some may go straight to the cloud, with one in five planning to move IT workloads to the cloud and almost three-fourths currently considering cloud computing for their data center needs. However, only 5 percent of respondents are considering or implementing public cloud computing over the next 12 months, while 42 percent are considering or implementing a private cloud, and 27 percent are looking at hybrid methods.
Flexibility wins, with 61 percent choosing the cloud for agility compared with 25 percent looking to reduce costs. A mere 9 percent are looking at the cloud because they are running out of capacity.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Torkildr.

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Daily Sprout

Josie Garthwaite — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:30:07 +0000

Stimulus Sweepstakes: — The stimulus package may revive the fortunes of OptiSolar, Abengoa and other renewable energy companies stalled by the financial crisis, but the clock is ticking. — Fortune’s Green Wombat

Getting Smart with Biofuels: Key policy reforms can accelerate the transition to cellulosic feedstocks for biofuels and give them an important role in curbing climate change, according to a new report from the Sierra Club and Worldwatch Institute. — Press Release

U.S. to Get the Whip: RTEV’s Wheego Electric Cars plans to launch a U.S. dealer network. To start, it wants 50 dealers selling the Whip, a low-speed neighborhood electric vehicle. — AutoblogGreen

Mighty Microbes: Researchers at MIT think bacteria can help build better biofuels, clean up the atmosphere, and make biodegradable plastics and textiles. — MIT News

And the Winners Are: The Uptime Institute has named the corporations that made the cut for this year’s Global Green 100 list, which highlights energy efficiency achievements by major data center operators. Among the honorees: Accenture, Apple, Dell, Google, Halliburton and Mitsubishi Motors. — Press Release

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IT Needs an Urge to Conserve

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:00:55 +0000

Today’s data centers consume 0.5 percent of the world’s energy but are about as energy efficient as a poorly maintained Hummer is fuel efficient. But getting data centers to run more like a Prius is going to take a lot of work in areas that range from equipment design to the physical layout of the data center. IT shops need to get smarter about managing their equipment to fully utilize servers and storage assets as well.

A recent survey performed by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. for the Uptime Institute lays out a clear picture of what IT managers and CIOs can do to make computing less of a drain on the resources of both companies and the Earth. The survey concludes that the cost of managing a data center is rising to the point where it’s affecting the operations of companies’ core businesses.

The report dismisses the idea that new technology and equipment are needed, saying instead that conservation could be used to double energy efficiency in the next four years and halt the growth of greenhouse gases caused by data centers. It also suggests a few key things to bring costs and energy usage into line. Suggestions include making sure data centers increase the utilization of their servers from an average of 6 percent through the use of virtualization. Improving efficiency by decommissioning older servers is also recommended.

Another way to conserve costs and energy is to assign responsibility for conservation to the CIO and to get executives involved in making decisions about data centers and IT. Finally, the report calls for an industry-wide efficiency metric for data centers, although as we’ve previously argued, getting such a metric in place will be a challenge. Doing these things should both decrease energy use but also increase the bottom line, which makes conservation a green solution indeed.

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Here comes Ubuntu Mobile

James Kendrick — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:24:12 +0000

One thing that the Asus EEE PC has shown us is that Linux makes a great OS for getting online and using limited resources very nicely. Dwight Silverman pointed me today to Ubuntu Mobile which looks to make any mobile PC online friendly and ready to hit the road. Ubuntu Mobile is an open-source project that brings all of the online activities we love to do right to our fingertips. It’s a touch friendly OS so that is a literal description. From the Ubuntu Mobile web site:

Ubuntu Mobile is an Ubuntu edition that targets an exciting new class of computers called Mobile Internet Devices.
UbuntuMobile, based on the world’s most popular Linux distribution, and MIDhardware from OEMs and ODMs, are redefining what can be done in mobilecomputing.

Ubuntu Mobile, a fully open source project, gives full Internet,with no compromise. Custom options may include licensed codecs andpopular third-party applications.

Full Web 2.0/AJAX fidelity, with custom options of Adobe Flash®, Java, and more

Outstanding media playback so you can enjoy videos, music and photos with superior quality and easy navigation

A suite of applications that work seamlessly to meet every need of a digital parent, student or anyone who is on-the-go

Facebook®, MySpace®, YouTube®, Dailymotion®, 3D games, GPS, maps,in short, the full Web 2.0 experience delivered into your hands as acompact and powerful device that’s easy and fun to use

The product of Canonical collaboration with Intel® and the opensource community, Ubuntu Mobile is the software that makes it allpossible.

Head over to the web site and see how complete this flavor of Ubuntu is for mobile PCs.

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AllThingsD Talks With Joost’s Volpi

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:53:50 +0000

Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital has nabbed a video interview with Joost CEO Mike Volpi.

Check it out as he talks about why he went to Joost, working with Hollywood, and answers a question we’ve asked here: What is a hit for Joost?

Watch part one here, then jump over to AllThingsD for part two.

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Phone companies scamming millions from consumers

Om Malik — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 12:06:12 +0000

Hidden inside this CNN piece about cell phone company surcharges was a nano-expose of T-Mobile’s most recent quarter. Catherine Zeta Jones’ wily charms were not the only reason Germans were able to attract more customers in the last quarter and perform better than everyone else in the mobile phone business. Actually, the real reason why the “wireless company’s revenues were up $1 per customer compared with the previous quarter. That was because T-Mobile, for the first time, counted as revenues two fees it tacks onto customer bills. Without those surcharges, the average revenue per customer would have dropped. The surcharges certainly make T-Mobile more attractive to investors — they added $58 million in revenue during the quarter.” These are not government mandated taxes, but instead these are just a way phone company quietly add a buck-or-two to your bill, and try and recoup normal business expenses such as “property taxes and the cost of posting their rates on the Web.” Companies’ advertised rates don’t include extra fees. For a company like Verizon, this means about $173 million a year. Read the article for the complete lowdown.

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