SingTel Building Green Data Center

Among the flood of “green” services and projects news arriving in the days surrounding Earth Day, which took place on April 22, was the news that Singapore Telecommunications (singtel.com) plans to build a multimillion-dollar data center according to local eco-friendly building specifications.

The Kim Chuan Telecommunications Centre 2 will be SingTel’s fifth facility of this type in the country. The new 150,000 square foot building will increase the company’s total capacity in Singapore to more than 500,000 square feet.

The KCTC-2 facility will be built to meet recent revisions in the Singapore Building and Construction Authority’s “Green Mark” initiative, a rating system for evaluating the environmental impact and eco-friendly design features of a facility. The facility, expected to be complete in early 2010, will be focused on high-efficiency computing, using blade servers and adhering to Singapores’s iN2015 initiative.

The facility will also meet Tier 4 specifications, which allow more than no more than 24 minutes of downtime per year, and require a redundant backbone connection.

Tags: blade server, data center

Web Hosting’s Green Movement

By Dennis McCafferty

There’s a shift going on in the hosting world, toward eco-friendly business - as a community of industry associations, government organizations and other would-be policy makers work to define “green” hosting

It may not be easy being green – but it could be worth the effort.

That’s the picture painted by recent activity in the hosting industry: Environmental policy advocates and government leaders are working with industry executives to explore virtualization and other practices as ways of reducing dependence on the energy-sapping equipment now fueling data centers.

In New York, one hosting company is using hybrid vehicles to transport servers, among other efforts.

And in San Antonio, Rackspace, another host, isn’t only turning to virtualization as a way to reduce consumption – it’s launching a comprehensive, company-to-customer series of green initiatives, including supporting wind turbine farms in the US.

“Why are we doing this?” says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “Because the environment right now is in a very dangerous state. Internet and data-center infrastructure are growing at a very fast pace, and we’re going to ruin the planet if we don’t do anything about it. As a large data-center operator, our customers expect us to take the initiative to do the right thing. But there are self-serving reasons as well. We save on energy costs and equipment costs to our customers by doing this, and that puts us in a better financial situation.”

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Tags: AMD, blade server, cooling, data center, Dell, EPA, government, HP, IBM, Intel, LimeLeap, Logicworks, Rackable Systems, Rackspace, renewable energy, solar, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems, TerraPass, The Green Grid, virtualization, VMware