Data Center

Green IT Topic Center

News and in-depth coverage on green IT issues

Shell Oil targets hybrid cloud as fix for energy-saving, agile IT

To address soaring data storage and major power consumption issues, Shell Oil has turned to the public cloud to become more agile in deploying application and development services.
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U.S. to use climate to help cool exascale systems

In a picturesque spot overlooking San Francisco Bay, the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab is building a new computing center that will one day house exascale systems.

Greenpeace scorecard documents greener enterprise offerings

Technology companies are not just making their products less carbon-intensive; they are also increasingly designing products to improve energy efficiency in the industries that they serve, according to the latest in a series of Greenpeace ratings of the sector's energy practices.

China racing to expand data center capacity

China is in the midst of an unprecedented data center construction boom that's providing business opportunities for U.S. companies and could see China emerge with one of the most advanced computing infrastructures in the world.

Google invests in more renewable energy production capacity

Google has paid $94 million for a stake in four photovoltaic power generation projects around Sacramento, California, bringing its total investment in renewable energy generation this year to $880 million, it announced Tuesday.

Facebook-led foundation pushes for open data center tech

Facebook and several of its high-tech partners are rethinking how companies can handle big data with low-cost computing centers.

Test Aims to Disprove Data Center Dogma

In an experiment that began in January, decommissioned Trinity Health servers, networking gear and storage systems have been running outdoors in a simple shed without failure. Takeaway: IT equipment appears to be a lot tougher than conventional wisdom says. Insider (registration required)

Intel runs PC on CPU powered by solar cell

Intel on Thursday showed an experimental low-power processor the size of a postage stamp that could run PCs on solar power.

Apple offers to talk with Chinese environmental group

Apple has requested a Chinese environmental group to hold talks on a report that accuses the company's suppliers of polluting the environment and endangering the lives of residents.

RFID boosts residential recycling in South Carolina county

RFID tags attached to residential recycling carts have helped one South Carolina county more than double the pounds of plastics, paper and glass being recycled there.

In Search of an Energy Yardstick

We take a comprehensive look at the new green-IT metrics for measuring data center efficiency and productivity from The Green Grid and other industry groups. Insider, registration required.

KPMG: Aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 25%

KPMG has made the use of green technologies a key component of its efforts to optimize its investments in IT, including a data center transformation that is expected to save about 15% in energy costs.

The top Green-IT organizations: Hard-wired to be green

Computerworld's top Green-IT organizations for 2011 have woven energy-saving initiatives into the very fabric of their IT strategies

JM Family: Eliminates more than 1,400 physical servers

JM Family first started to virtualize its data center servers in 2006, and since then, it has eliminated more than 1,400 physical servers and has avoided using more than 5.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.

Prudential Financial: Moving to a virtual environment

Prudential's green-IT initiatives include using alternative energy sources to help power its data centers. In a project expected to be completed this year, solar panels are being installed at its Roseland, N.J., data center.

Northrop Grumman: Virtualizing 3,000 servers

Northrop Grumman's "greeNG" sustainability program aims to reduce the firm's greenhouse gas emissions, manage automatically its desktop power and migrate some 100 server rooms and data centers to just three enterprise data centers.

State Street: Cut storage use by 50%

State Street is using compression and deduplication technologies to reduce stored data, tackling a multiyear virtualization program and implementing processing on demand, an infrastructure as a service that provides on-demand capacity.

Raytheon: Boosted data center temperatures

Raytheon's IT team took cues from the company's initiatives for data center energy efficiency and applied the same steps to other areas, focusing on its networking and telecommunications infrastructure during the past year.

Nixon Peabody: Switched to VMware ESX servers

Nixon Peabody's IT department centralized its data centers, consolidated its storage assets and virtualized its servers. Its work cut power consumption by approximately 30%.

Citigroup: Desktop standardization cuts energy costs

As part of a data center transformation project, Citigroup's newly constructed data center uses 800 kilowatts less power than conventionally designed data centers for the same footprint, for a 30% reduction in energy costs.