Cucusoft iPod to Computer Transfer is an easy to use iPod/iPhone utility designed to help you backup all your files from your iPod, iPhone, iTouch. Recover lost or missing music or backup and restore all of your iPod/iPhone/iTouch content including your favorite songs, videos, photos, Play Lists and more. If you have any iPod/iPhone device, this software is a 'must have' utility to keep your iPod/iPhone safe. Download Trial | Buy ($29.95)
From careful planning to hot or cold aisle containment, there are definitely things you can do to improve the efficiency of your data center cooling. Still, the technology we've got is always open for improvement, and Lawrence Berkeley Labs has just collaborated with Intel to develop and test another exciting step towards cooling efficiency.
Lawrence Berkeley Labs - photo by Derrick Coetzee under flickr creative commons license
This new technology works on the premise that your servers should be able to communicate with your building management system about their cooling needs. Instead of just keeping track of temperatures of air as it returns to the computer room air handler, sensors are used in different places throughout the data center. Getting the servers to communicate with the building management system is a fairly simple affair of using a conversion between protocols. To avoid the common problem of hot spots at the top of server racks, this process uses temperature readings from the top and bottom of racks.
Intel and LBL used computational fluid dynamics to model their ideas and then proceeded to test them successfully in Santa Clara. Now the issue is getting professionals to catch on and feel more comfortable with letting automated processes control something so crucial as data center temperature, as explained by the article at Data Center Knowledge.
This all happened over a week ago, but it's definitely worth sharing in case anyone missed it:
A South African company, The Unlimited, tested out a theory that they could send data faster with carrier pigeons than over South Africa's largest internet service provider's ADSL line. Sure enough, the pigeon made it to its location in a little over two hours, by which time the file it carried in a card on its leg had only finished downloading 4%.
There have been other attempts at transferring data with carrier pigeons, too, although none were so successful as this little bird - whose name is Winston, by the way.
photo by foxypar4 under flickr creative commons license
IP over Avian Carriers, although very funny and a pointed critique on the limitations of the internet, is not without its flaws. Pigeons are messy, I'm just saying. Also they have trouble with, for example, oceans. Still, congratulations Winston for being 96% faster than the internet in South Africa!
As we know, cooling is a huge issue in a big facility full of temperature-sensitive machines constantly producing a whole lot of heat. We can?t just tell them to stop, so what to do? Cooling depletes a lot of resources environmentally and financially - money spent on cooling can actually add up to half of a data center?s annual energy expenditure, and the energy used by data centers is environmentally significant. There is a lot of room for improvement in current data center cooling trends, and companies like Polargy, Wright Line, and Advanced Data Centers, to name a few, are working hard at increasing energy-efficiency in this area. Their approaches, although different, are both centered around the idea of aisle containment, which aims to prevent mixing of hot and cold air.
Polargy has had great success with cold aisle containment. They use a system of soft-wall curtains and rigid panels to control airflow, greatly increasing energy-efficiency. In fact, in a recent case study, Polargy?s innovative cold aisle containment design enabled a 1600 square-foot data center with a 335kW IT load to improve its energy-efficiency enough to save $30,000 annually. Their design is also adaptable for hot aisle containment. Polargy?s website provides a more in-depth account of their work.
Another exciting instance of successful data center cooling creativity is in the collaboration of Wright Line, Advanced Data Centers, and Rumsey Engineers - in this case in heat aisle containment rather than cold. The Independent Containment System is sustainable, vendor-neutral, free-standing, and scalable. All these companies are very serious about being green and it really shows in the success of their product. Refer to their websites, Wright Line, Advanced Data Centers, or Rumsey Engineers for more information about them and products like the ICS.
Team Silverback is proud to announce that our long-time business partner Don Small has accepted the position as Silverback's Chief Operations Officer.
His accomplishments and qualifications include more than 20 years of experience in systems and infrastructure development, data center engineering, and technology industry management. He is highly experienced in data center design and management, technology support and services, IT systems architecture, and software development.
His superb range of skills aside, he is also a great guy to have around, and we are very excited to welcome him to the team!
Who would think that the UK Meteorological Office would be a big polluter? But apparently because of the supercomputer they use to predict climate change, their energy requirements are massive. So what can we do to regulate and minimize the amazing energy consumption required by supercomputers?
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses a supercomputer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar, and its capabilities are truly impressive. It takes up more space than a college basketball court and is rated at 1.64 petaflops. It uses energy equivalent to what a whole town would use, up to 7 megawatts of power. Energy requirements like this can cost tens of millions of dollars, as much of that going to cooling as to actual processing.
photo by rlasell under flickr creative commons license
With technology this complex and demanding, current trends in computer architecture don't really satisfy concerns about staying green and keeping expenses reasonable.
Fortunately, and very interestingly, with the expansion of potential uses for GPUs, NVIDIA has succeeded in greatly reducing the environmental impact and energy consumption of some supercomputers. See HPC Wire's article about greening data centers for more details, but it looks like this idea of high-density computing can really help data centers get greener.
0.00 out of 10 (0 Votes)
