UPS Is Delivered Green Award

By David Hamilton, theWHIR.com

September 2, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Data center research organization the Uptime Institute (uptimeinstitute.org) has given the United Parcel Service’s (ups.com) Windward data center a Green Enterprise IT Award based on the facility’s energy conservation measures including natural cooling.

Located in Alpharetta, Georgia, the Windward UPS facility won the “Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (Power and Cooling) Overhead” category in the inaugural Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT Awards to be awarded every year.

According to a report from TMCnet (tmcnet.com), UPS’s energy efficient data center includes two centrifugal chillers providing 2,000 tons of cooling and two absorption chillers providing an additional 800 tons each. More importantly, the center boasts a 650,000-gallon thermal storage tank thatdissipates heat cost effectively and provides 20 hours of emergency cooling. (more…)

Tags: cooling, data center, energy efficiency, UPS, Uptime Institute

Data Centers Big Polluters, says Study

May 6, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Data centers produce higher gas emissions than the countries of Argentina and the Netherlands and are projected to surpass the airline industry as carbon emitters by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Company (mckinsey.com).

The study uses data from the Uptime Institute, a research and advisory organization for data center users, was released at the Green Enterprise Computing Symposium in Orlando, Florida and predominantly focuses on the cost and energy saving opportunities being “squandered” today in corporate and government data centers.

According to reports in the New York Times, William Forrest, the lead McKinsey consultant on the report, says that the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold by 2020 and that the greenhouse gas impact of data centers is “not yet counted and likely to be very significant.”

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Tags: cooling, data center, government, research, The Green Grid, Uptime Institute, virtualization

Building the Green Data Center

By Wayne Epperson

There are a few reasons for building green, and fortunately for the environment, the business bottom line runs pretty parallel to the interests of the environment – cutting back on cooling and energy consumption means dollars saved

Environmentally conscious is a preferred business standard these days. And there is a wealth of data – appealing to both the sympathetic and the business-minded – making the case for companies to go green. In most businesses, however, the bottom line for green energy initiatives is the same as ever – reducing costs and improving earnings.

Fortunately for the environment, the bottom line for business runs pretty parallel to the bottom line for the planet in the hosting business, where power-hungry data centers account for a sizable chunk of operating expenses. If those operators can lower electricity consumption and costs while increasing efficiency – voila, they’ve joined the green revolution.

The best way for a hosting provider to go green would be to build their data center from the ground up with efficiency first on the list of directives. But if the data center already exists, it doesn’t make fiscal sense to tear it down, just to build a green one. In practical terms, there are a number of steps hosts can take to retrofit their existing operations to simultaneously reduce both their carbon footprint and operating expenses.

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Tags: AFCOM, AISO, cooling, data center, EPA, renewable energy, solar, The Planet, trade show, Uptime Institute, virtualization