IBM has announced new System x and BladeCenter servers, which are based on a new server design that the company claims will boost application performance while reducing energy costs in data centres.

The EX5 servers take a step away from traditional x86 server architecture in which processors and memory are locked together. The new server architecture decouples memory from the processors into separate units, according to IBM. That could help the memory and processor scale separately for faster application performance, while slashing down on storage and energy costs.

Marelich Mechanical and EMCOR Services Integrated Solutions have been awarded contracts for the installation of mechanical systems in a new data centre for Terremark Worldwide, a global provider of IT infrastructure services in Santa Clara, California.

TelecityGroup, a provider of premium network independent data centres, has announced plans to build approximately 4000 sq m of data centre capacity with 6 megawatts (MW) of customer power in Frankfurt. The additional data floors will meet growing customer demand as Frankfurt becomes increasingly important as a European and German hub for internet and network intensive business requirements.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that its SV2 International Business Exchange data centre has earned the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification from the US Green Building Council.

The latest accreditation extends Equinix’s global leadership in operating energy efficient data centres, and builds on the company’s history of innovative programs designed to help enterprises reduce their carbon footprint.

Data centre operator Corporate Colocation has announced it recently built a new green data centre in Los Angeles that cuts energy consumption and reduces energy costs. Corporate Colocation hired engineers to design a free cooling system within the facility that would filter the cool Los Angeles air and use it to cool the data centre.

The system takes the hot air from the servers and distributes it from the hot aisles in the data centre. On days when it is too hot for free cooling the mechanical coolers kicks in.

Source: The WHIR

Three giant electrical generators were lifted into place Friday at the Yahoo! data centre, as the work continues toward an early summer opening for the US$150 million project. The diesel-powered generators are only backups in case electric power from the regular utility grid goes out, said Jeff LaMartina, service manager for Cummins Northeast in Cheektowaga, which supplied the generators.

Australia's Federal and State Government departments have joined forces to find a better measure for measuring the efficiency of data centres across Australia. The NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW), which is acting as a clearing house for the Federal Department of Water, Heritage and the Arts (DWHA), released a tender to augment existing building efficiency metrics system NABERS with a version specific to data centres.

Data centres can go green without installing hardware, according to Sentilla which announced a meter-free monitoring capability recently.

A national survey of over 100 senior IT professionals found that there are three factors driving demand in the UK data centre market sector - security, power and price. The survey, conducted by Telehouse, also showed that most organisations questioned were looking to expand their data centre requirements adding to the current capacity crunch and putting more pressure on UK data centre providers.

On the eve of the first F1 practice session of the year, the Renault F1 Team have announced a major sponsorship deal with technology company Hewlett-Packard. The new agreement means the R30 cars will run with significant HP branding adorning the bodywork.

The team will also obtain access to HP technology in order to further develop simulation technologies on the back of HP High Performance Computing servers. Additionally HP will help the team to reduce its carbon footprint, by implementing 'greener' data centres, and utilising low-energy-consumption workstations.

The Bloom box is a fuel cell that generates and delivers local electricity about twice as efficiently as the grid. It uses natural gas or bio-fuels to create electricity. Energy created by the Bloom box reduces carbon emissions in half or is completely carbon neutral with bio-fuels. Pairing the Bloom box with Alternative Energy sources creates predictable, viable and clean reliable energy.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has pledged to spend US$100 million over the next two years to improve energy efficiency at data centres and manufacturers across the state.

NYSERDA has already awarded US$2 million each to three companies to help these data centers and manufacturers seek out energy savings. One of the firms is Clough Harbour & Associates of Albany.

Source: Times Union

Thanks to x86 server virtualization and its follow-on technologies, the state-of-the-art enterprise data centre looks vastly different than it did even a year ago. And moving from old school to next-generation isn't just about hardware and software – it's a call for a new way of thinking about the data centre, as well.

Corporate America has made some painful adjustments over the past year, but for data centre managers, the pressure to contain costs has always been unrelenting - it's impossible to maintain a low profile when your area of responsibility consumes the bulk of the IT budget. This year in particular, though, we're really feeling the heat, and not just from overloaded racks. Just 30% of the 370 respondents to the latest InformationWeek Analytics data centre survey say they'll see larger budgets for 2010 compared with 2009, yet half expect resource demands to increase.

Location: London

Salary: £65k = Excellent Benefits b Bonus

The client is an international construction consultancy providing tailored solutions to clients investing in construction, property and infrastructure. They are now looking to recruit a Senior M&E Surveyor within their London M&E team. Experience of working within the Commercial and Investment Banking sectors specialising in Trading Floors, Infrastructure Upgrades and Data Centres is essential.

NEC India, a retail specialty technology provider, is setting up a cloud computing infrastructure in its Bangalore office. Confirming the development, David Arambhan, head retail solutions, India and Middle East said, “Our upcoming cloud computing initiative will help retailers, in both organised and unorganised sector, to adapt technologies for conducting their business operations through our cloud computing offerings.” The service will be available from April, 2010.

eHosting DataFort, the managed IT services provider, has announced a unique partnership with Double-Take Software to offer a comprehensive packaged solution for data and server protection in a hosted data centre across the GCC region.

A volcano that has been dormant for almost 200 years has erupted in Iceland. Authorities evacuated hundreds of people after a volcano erupted beside a glacier in southern Iceland, Iceland's civil protection agency said on Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The last time the volcano erupted was in the 1820s.

Multnomah County, incorporated in 1854, covers approximately 466 square miles. It’s the smallest Oregon county in area, but the largest in population. The Multnomah County data centre is in the basement of the Penumbra Kelly Building at 4747 E. Burnside St. in Portland. The facility is approximately 2,800 sq ft and houses US$2.5 million to US$3 million of critical telecommunications and computing infrastructure that supports the county’s networks and business applications.

A Weybridge business has been named Europe's most energy efficient data centre. The facility, located at The Heights, is operated by global oil exploration surveyor Petroleum Geo-Services and was developed by data centre solutions provider Keysource. The a/data centre uses a new approach to cooling that when fully deployed will cut annual power consumption by 15.8 million kW-h and reduce emissions by 6.8 million kilograms of CO2 per year.

The National Australia Bank is laying claim to the title of first organisation in the country to use tri-generation (trigen) power in its data centre. An ambitious project was launched in 2008 to supply power and cooling to its primary Melbourne data centre on site using trigen and remove half of its energy dependency from the grid.

Datapipe, a g provider of managed hosting and IT services, has announced a significant expansion of its green initiatives. Through a strategic relationship with Constellation NewEnergy, Datapipe's Somerset One data centre, located in New Jersey, will now run on 100% renewable electricity. Datapipe will utilize Green-e Energy certified renewable energy certificates through Constellation NewEnergy's NewMix Wind energy solution to match electricity consumption at its data center, while maintaining its diverse and redundant connections to the main power grid.

Federspiel Controls has been awarded a grant from the US Department of Energy under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to cut data centre energy usage by more than 25%. The project will fund the installation of the company’s enterprise energy management systems at twelve State of California, Department of General Services data centres across the state.

United Parcel Service will make about US$1 billion in technology investments this year to improve the efficiency of its operations, with the goal of cutting billions more from its costs over the long term, company executives have said. One of its main goals is to improve the speed and efficiency of its delivery operations. To achieve that, UPS is equipping its vans with sensors that allow it to collect data about things like fuel consumption, chosen routes and how much time its engines spend idling,.

CLP Power Hong Kong Limited has won the 2010 Gartner Green Data Centre Award for Asia Pacific, voted for by delegates at the Gartner Infrastructure, Operation and Data Centre Summit in Sydney last week. The two finalists were Insurance Australia Group Limited (IAG) and Reliance Communications.

It gets cold in Green Bay, WI - very cold. Yet until recently all that natural cooling was wasted at Associated Bank. So when the time came to expand the data centre and upgrade the cooling systems Associated Bank installed a glycol-based "free cooling" system at its two data centres. Glycol is akin to the antifreeze in a car. During the winter, pumps move the glycol around, allowing the outside air to cool the liquid, which in turn cools the data centre. The compressor, a costly energy drain, stays off.

IT executives are growing overly comfortable with PUE at a time when a growing chorus of voices are warning against its enshrinement as the standard for energy use. At the moment, the EPA is firmly in PUE's corner. The agency is on the verge of releasing a Portfolio Manager tool that will be used to gauge individual data centres' qualifications under the Energy Star program.

The value added services of Ufone are still affected all over the country and would take time to be fully resumed as fire broke out in one of the Ufone data centres. However, the SMS services and voice message service have been made fully operational, while the Blackberry service has also been restored, the official spokesperson of Ufone Moazzam Ali Khan told The Nation.

Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, announced that technology will fuel a new breed of next-gen data centres. Specifically, its ConnectX-2 family of adapters leverages TSMC’s PowerTrim service to achieve best in class power performance of 4.5W for dual 10GbE ports.

Citigroup approaches sustainable technology as it would a CRM project - the more holistic and cross functional the better. "In 2007-2008, green IT was thought by many people to mean reducing data centre power consumption," says Michelle Erickson, the bank's sustainable technology director. "We prefer the term 'sustainable IT' as we have a larger vision than just cutting power usage."