Posted by Elizabeth English on Fri, Feb 05, 2010 @ 05:45 PM
Although Epcot has a reputation for being Disney World's most boring park, it has always been my personal favorite, and with a new exhibit featuring a data center, it just got even cooler.
The exhibit is part of a cooperative effort between Disney and IBM involving IBM's Smarter Planet initiative. It's all designed to enhance public awareness of the intricacies of technology in our daily lives and around the world. It has a green focus, and teaches tips about saving energy, like how beneficial it is to actually unplug appliances that aren't in use.
The data center part of the exhibit is an interesting step towards changing the way the public views the data center industry. I can attest to the fact that the average college student doesn't even know what a data center is, and perhaps hasn't even heard of one. Allowing visitors to explore the data center which makes the exhibit happen may not make a huge difference in society's general lack of knowledge about data centers, but it's a sign that a new way of looking at them may be in the works. Instead of being sequestered away in a high-security complex, the modular data center involved is accessible, made educational and fun in the style of Epcot.
It's a remarkable data center in other ways than just in being open to the public, too. It's much more energy-efficient than the average data center, highlighting IBM's focus on green initiatives. On a scale of Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency, it measures 70%, compared with an industry average around 43% and plummeting as low as 28%.
If you haven't been to Disney World, now may well be the time to go.
See the CNET News article for more information, and the Computerworld article.
From an industry perspective, what kind of effect will it have to bring data centers to public attention? Comments??
-Elizabeth English
photo by edanley under flickr creative commons license
Posted by Elizabeth English on Sun, Jan 31, 2010 @ 03:25 PM
Team Silverback, the Green Gorilla, certain tattoos on certain members of Team Silverback... gorillas are quite a theme with us. On our president's birthday, a new gorilla joined our team.
The trouble is, he needs a name.
What's the best name for this gorilla?
-Elizabeth English
Posted by Elizabeth English on Sun, Jan 24, 2010 @ 09:17 PM
Avatar is turning out to be one of the highest-grossing movies ever, and people are really crazy about it. I've read that some viewers are even experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts because of how much more attractive the world in the movie is than the world we live in.
It's unsurprising then that those gorgeous visuals come from Weta 
Digital in New Zealand, the well-known visual effects company responsible for the aesthetic genius of the Lord of the Rings movies. Weta performs its magic using an unusual kind of data center for the data-intensive creation process, with such specifications as 4,000 servers in a 10,000 square foot facility, and 104 TB of RAM. Weta Digital has said that each minute of Avatar is made up of 17.28 GB of data.
It's always interesting to see how data centers fit into novelty markets like movies and video games, and Avatar's success after three years of intense production work at Weta is an example of this kind of unorthodox purpose for them.
Weta Digital is also interesting in terms of cooling - they use water-cooled racks as well as naturally chill New Zealand air, and they keep their data center up at 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Check out ComputerWorld's article for more information.
-Elizabeth English
photo by Sandy Austin under flickr creative commons license
Posted by Elizabeth English on Fri, Jan 22, 2010 @ 09:44 PM
Facebook's amazing growth in an unprecedentedly short time has been a topic of interest to data center enthusiasts for some time. The news that they are building their own custom data centers is another interesting plot point in the story of Facebook, which is definitely one of the phenomenons of our generation.
As we would expect based on Facebook's history, the new data center announced in Oregon boasts some very environmentally-friendly features. Instead of chillers, the new data center will be using evaporated water and that cool, outdoors Oregon air.
Company officials expect to attain greater energy and cost savings than they did when leasing entire third-party data centers for their purposes. The specificity possible in custom-building is an interesting and appealing route for them to take. Public records, although the company has been quiet on the subject, indicate that the cost of constructing the new facility will reach about $188 million.
The Facebook page for the new data center announces that they will hire 35 employees to maintain the facility, at 150% of whatever the regional prevailing rates of pay are, starting in the third quarter of this year.
See The Register's article for more details on this new data center.
Awesome.
-Elizabeth English
photo by Lee Coursey under flickr creative commons license
Posted by Ken Jamaca on Tue, Jan 19, 2010 @ 02:35 PM
This is a break during a migration of a customer's data center. We needed to dispose of the bubble wrap and associated refuse, and we realized a long time ago it is easier to stuff into garbage bags, if it is popped...so now it is a game, and it allows our team to let go during stressful and exciting data center migration projects.
Check us out in all our glory!
Posted by Elizabeth English on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 @ 09:11 PM
Symantec's annual report produced some intriguing and perhaps unexpected results.
Perhaps most interesting to us in the data center migration business is that cloud computing is not high on the list of priorities for the 1,780 respondents to the report's survey questions (respondents from 573 businesses in 26 countries). Concerns like security, 
backup and disaster recovery, and continuous data protection are currently much more highly prioritized in data centers.
As important to nearly everyone asked as these items are, it sounds like disaster recovery plans need some work. Although 80% of respondents said they have confidence in their plan, a third said they haven't updated it in a year, and another third admitted that their plan is undocumented or otherwise needs work.
Also interesting is that mid-size data centers seem to be the most happening ones out there - they're most likely to implement new technologies. Apparently this was Symantec's first time including small and mid-sized data centers in the survey, and doing so provided some very interesting data.
Popular objectives for 2010 included reducing costs, improving responsiveness, and improving service levels.
Check out articles at The San Francisco Chronicle or Web Pro News for more information.
-Elizabeth English
photo by neospire under flickr creative commons license - see www.neospire.net
Posted by Elizabeth English on Wed, Jan 06, 2010 @ 07:28 PM
In an article from the Register about government financial contribution to energy efficiency research, the Obama administration's Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, mentions his call for "a new industrial revolution."
What his department is doing about the situation is giving $47 million to fund research to improve energy efficiency. They've given a number of different companies portions of the money - big companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard, as well as smaller organizations like Yahoo and Columbia University. They're focusing on three areas of improvement: cooling (of course), reworking systems and software, and re-engineering power supply chains in data centers.
Several interesting experiments are taking place, like the passive-cooling data center Yahoo is building in New York, with power conveniently provided hydroelectrically by Niagara Falls.
It's good to see something cool that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is doing for us.
-Elizabeth English
photo by Day Trips Canada (www.day-trips.ca/) under flickr creative commons license
Posted by Elizabeth English on Thu, Dec 31, 2009 @ 02:56 PM
Here as the year draws to a close, things are definitely taking a 
more hopeful note. Judging by consumer reports over the holiday season, as well as how busy we've been, it looks like the economy is finally looking up and the first year of the next decade should be a much better year than 2009.
Not that 2009 wasn't exciting in its way... politically it surely was, and here at Silverback Migration Solutions we may not have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but we got a lot done. Among the many things we were proud to be a part of, there was the data center move we did for Shopzilla, the media coverage of which you can find here, as well as the migration work we did for Convexity, also detailed on our Press page. We also made www.USDATACENTERLIST.com a reality, and have been focusing more and more on green technology and practices.
We're looking forward to carrying the drive and success we managed even during this crazy year in the history of global economy into an even brighter future!
Wishing everyone an awesome 2010,
Elizabeth English
Posted by Elizabeth English on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 @ 07:39 PM
The year is drawing to a close and things are changing in the data 
center world. The green revolution is taking a firmer hold by the day and the advent of cloud computing is bound to have long-lasting repercussions. As data centers draw more and more media attention for the amount of energy they require, innovation in providing them with that power is increasing in exciting ways... but what will be next?
It's clear that the cloud is becoming more and more important and widespread. But what does its future hold? The prevailing opinion seems to be that it has a lot of potential, but is underdeveloped. We'll see what new developments 2010 brings on that front.
Also exciting is what new energy-efficient cooling solutions IT professionals will develop in the coming months. We've introduced the Green Gorilla to keep an eye out for this kind of development, as he will continue to do this coming year. From using outside air to cool servers to hot-aisle/cold-aisle containment, data center energy efficiency is becoming more and more attainable. We look forward to the new technology the new decade will bring.
-Elizabeth English
photo by s w ellis under flickr creative commons license
Posted by Elizabeth English on Thu, Dec 24, 2009 @ 12:17 PM
Last week the experimental data center in a cave got a lot of attention, and with good reason. Utilization of creative space like that is a really great step in the right direction, and all the natural cooling available in a limestone cave is a very sci-fi way to deal with the ever-present problem of data center cooling. But that's not the only exciting and innovative data center story to come up lately.
Another experimental data center has been set up in Italy to work
on improving energy efficiency, using new technologies and gauging how they compare to "legacy systems." Learn more from Data Center Dynamics' article. One of the participants in that study is Politecnico di Milano, a university in Milan. Unsurprisingly, universities are responsible for a lot of data center research.
It's been coming up a lot lately even though the news came out months ago: Notre Dame's idea of heating a greenhouse with the 
waste heat from an on-campus data center, now containerized near the greenhouse. The historic greenhouse was in serious danger of being shut down because of all the energy required to heat it, and what with the constant struggle to deal with all the heat produced in a data center, this seems like a pretty ingenious symbiosis which Notre Dame has achieved. The article from SearchDataCenter also talks about data centers which have been used to heat offices and swimming pools. Also recently in the news was the data center under construction underneath a cathedral in Finland, the waste heat of which is going to be used to heat homes in the area.
At Syracuse University, they're using what IBM has described as the greenest data center constructed so far. Although it isn't using any particularly new technologies, its trick is combining the most efficient systems around for maximum results. Check out the details at Server Technology.
One last thing is UC Berkeley (my school!) has a one-meeting class on Green IT Project Management: Data Center Energy Efficiency through its Extension program. It kind of goes to show how prevalent concerns about green IT are getting.
-Elizabeth English
photo I by rdesai under flickr creative commons license
photo II by matti matilla under flickr creative commons license