Posted 11/09/09 at 06:49:06 AM by Paul Lilly

Fujitsu announced it is currently scoping out areas of Western Sydney, Australia hoping to find a location with enough power to build and run a new data center, TheWhir.com reports.

The IT services provider is already constructing new data centers in Perth and Melbourne, both of which address the lack of data center space in Australia. But one thing Fujitsu has found is that existing data centers in the country lack the necessary power to host boatloads of blade-based servers.

In addition to finding a location with the proper power requirements, Fujitsu wants an area with cooler temperatures in order to deploy new free cooling power reduction designs, just as it is currently doing in Perth and Melbourne.

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Posted 11/09/09 at 06:48:43 AM by Paul Lilly

IBM continues to focus on going green and is now hard at work developing technology that could lead to zero-emission data centers, according to a report at eWeek.com.

Bruno Michel, the guy in charge of Advanced Thermal Packaging at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, said he and his team have put their heads together trying to figure out new ways of reducing emissions and waste in data centers. Among the ideas being tossed around are chip stacking and liquid cooling.

"High-performance liquid cooling allows data centers to operate with coolant temperatures above the free cooling limit in all climates, eliminating the need to chillers and allowing the thermal energy to be reused in cold climates," Michel said.

According to Michel, his team has been able to remove 85 percent the heat load from high-performance compute nodes at a temperature of 60C.

As data centers continue to consume more energy, expect more companies to devote increasing amounts of R&D into reducing emissions.

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Posted 10/26/09 at 08:17:01 AM by Paul Lilly

Tilera today announced its new TILE-GX line of processors, including the TILE-Gx100, the world's first 100-core CPU. According to Tilera, the 100-core part offers the highest performance of any processor on the planet by at least a factor of four.

"The launch of the TILE-Gx family, including the world's first 100-core microprocessor, ushers in a new era of many-core processing. We believe this next generation of high-core count, ultra high-performance chips will open completely new computing possibilities," said Omid Tahernia, Tilera's CEO.

While the 100-core part is not meant to run Crysis (so please don't ask) or any other desktop application, it does offer 10 times the performance per watt as Intel's fastest Nehalem-based server chips. Assuming Tilera can convince customers to switch from Intel and Texas Instruments, The TILE-Gx100 will likely end up in data centers powering cell phone network equipment and cloud computing ventures.

Tilera says its 100-core chip will start shipping in Q4 of this year.

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Posted 10/01/09 at 01:05:51 PM by Paul Lilly

According to Microsoft, its $550 million Chicago data center is one of the largest data centers in the world to make use of shipping containers, and Phase one of the data center opened on Wednesday. The idea of running servers inside a standard shipping container is a relatively new one. In short, the container arrives from the manufacturer with around 2,000 ready to run machines, and goes straight from the delivery truck to the data center floor. In as little as 8 hours, the new servers can be online.

"The online world is unpredictable. With new feature sets coming out continually, new products we haven't even thought of, we have to make these investments scale beyond what we know of today," says Kevin Timmons, general manager of Microsoft data center operations. "A big part of our job is to provide the business with options."

Microsoft is playing catch-up to Google in the server space and in addition to the newly opened Chicago data center, the Redmond company also celebrated the grand opening of its "chiller-free" Dublin data center. It also has data centers in Quincy, WA and San Antonio.

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Posted 09/20/08 at 04:11:40 PM by Justin Kerr

Google is home to many of the world’s smartest and most creative engineers and its newest plan once again proves they aren’t afraid to pioneer. To sum up Google’s idea in a few words, they plan to take the collective knowledge of mankind and send it out to sea, literally. The search giant is home to countless computer systems which crunch the millions of search terms thrown at it each minute and finding ways to keep costs down is always a challenge. Google hopes that by housing these computers on massive ships out in the ocean it will allow them to use sea water to both cool and power the electronics. Google’s commitment to the environment is commendable and even though data centers currently only represent a small portion of our total power consumption, the Mckinsey consulting firm predicts that by 2020 the carbon footprint of server farms will overtake the entire airline industry. In addition to energy savings, Google also stands to benefit from the tax exempt status that comes from operating in international waters. The high cost of operating data centers has pushed other companies to look for creative ways to save money as well. In fact, both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are rumored to be looking at similarly bizarre options, though none have yet been confirmed.

Let me just say this; if Google plans to take the cloud and cast it out to sea, I hope my Google Doc’s can survive a hurricane.

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Posted 07/17/08 at 12:41:14 PM by Mark Edward Soper

eWeek reports that NBC will provide 2,900 hours of live TV coverage, shattering the 2,562 hours of combined US TV coverage for all previous summer Olympics games. According to NBCOlympics.com, though, the number is even higher (3,600 hours) when all NBC Universal networks and NBCOlympics.com are taken into account.

To learn how NBC's doing it, and how you can watch it on your PC or mobile device, catch us after the jump.

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