How to Support Your IT Innovators: I just can’t help making connections between this Harvard Buinsess article and this piece from The Chief Happiness Officer: How NOT to lead geeks.
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European Free Cooling Tool from The Green Grid is available since October 01, 2009. You can alternatively consult the European Fresh Air Cooling Low Res Map (high-res for members only) or report your PUE but keep in minds that its evolution is still under work.
The Data Bunker Boomlet: Data Center Knowledge has a list of bunker data centers. Royal Pingdom features two of the listed in this article: 8 ways to make data centers less boring. As The Bunker is announcing a second facility in London area, this is a trend to follow. Not mentioned in the list, Telehouse Europe will open its third site Telehouse 3 : Magny (pdf) soon in Paris area (map) in a former secure military place.
NYT : Data Center Overload: Great New York Times article coming with a slideshow on datacenter evolution, from the wtf? to usage, cost and strategy/impact for industry (Karl Marx involved). For any architect, the “Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.” is priceless.
Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC)’s Clustercomputer JUROPA: Sun’s Marc Hamilton has a series of posts (1, 2, 3)on the where Sun is providing two systems : Constellation high performance computing and Lustre storage system. Architecture is presented and pictured into details up to cabling and cooling.
NASA’s Nebula (Sun Lustre used for storage) is worth a look as well.
Nevertheless, the story does not tell if it’s green or not.
Cisco’s blog post A More Granular Approach To DC Cooling, is mentioning two tools:
Data Center Assurance Program: Behind the wording, are standing very useful and strong documents like the DCAP System Assurance Guide 4.0 (PDF – 21 MB) and some Datacenter designs guides:
- Data Center Infrastructure Design Guide 2.5 (PDF – 3MB)
- Security and Virtualization in the Data Center
Depending of your needs, these documents can be too technical or too application oriented (solution for one vendor). I haven’t find Unified Computing System related content there.
Second, the Cisco Power Calculator (requires CCO login) enables sizing and checking PoE configurations.
Installing Ubuntu LTS for a LAMP in VMware Workstation: Nothing new, I just needed to have this under the hand.
VMware Tools Installation Guide Operating System Specific Packages: note to myself. I am following the traditional way of vmware-install.pl and haven’t tried yet that. It seems longer but safer using packages made by VMware that you don’t have to compile yourself.
How a Good Metric Could Drive Bad Behaviors: through three issues commonly reported, this post pictured one more time the limitations of The Green Grid’s PUE and the need to make it a real metric : something easily measureable, with an expressed unit (it is actually a ratio more than a metric without it). I already discussed that but it is always good to repeat. The Green Grid is working on guidelines and improvements, through the “proxies“.
