data center

A new study suggests that computer data centers might not be using as much power as previously estimated. It appears that power use is still rising, but at a slower pace than in the past. The report comes from Jonathon Koomey, a Stanford University ... professor that works at the Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory. He's put together figures on the growth of data centre electricity use around the world between 2005 and 2010, which follows on from a previous report he produced for the period from 2000 to 2005. A data center is a facility that houses special computers known as servers. Rather ... (view more)

Fact: Houses get cold in the winter months. Fact: The exhaust from a rack of cloud servers carries an average temperature between 104-122F. Microsoft is proposing that the racks (called "Data Furnaces") would be hot enough to replace the entire ... heating system of a home or office. Internet properties like Facebook and Google have already come up with large-scale solutions to combat unwanted exhaust, pumping steady streams of hot air into the skies of chilly cities around the U.S. But this act serves to rid the surrounding area of this waste without putting it to good use as Microsoft has since ... (view more)

Yahoo has announced the opening of a new data center that uses wind power to drastically improve its electric efficiency. The technology used is based on chicken coops and fowl smells. Data Centers Power Hungry for Electricity Data centers, which ... process information on a huge scale, are a huge problem when it comes to energy efficiency. That's because, as you'll probably have experienced by using a notebook computer on your lap or touching the case of a desktop computer after prolonged use, processors build up a lot of heat as they work. It also takes a lot of energy running fans to keep ... (view more)

Microsoft has acquired another all-star executive from one of its rivals. This time it's former Yahoo vice president of operations Kevin Timmons, who will now take control of Microsoft's Data Service organization within the company's wider Global ... Foundation Services (GFS) division. The hiring is part of Microsoft's plan to construct a cloud computing network complete with efficient data centers. When with Yahoo, Timmons headed that company's data center strategy and pushed hard to increase the PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness metric. The PUE metric is used to measure energy efficiency -- it ... (view more)