RackForce Blog
Archive for the 'New Technology' Category
May 12th, 2010 [by Doug Alder]
The art of making the right decision at the right time is what sets successful businesses apart from those that fail or simply limp along, and while those decisions are often not apparent there are times when the right decision just stares you right in the face and doesn’t let you go. XPC Web Hosting has been with RackForce for almost 2 years now. They are a fast growing web hosting company and recently needed to add more powerful infrastructure to meet their growing needs. When confronted with the vast array of choices in server offerings on the net they discussed their needs with RackForce’s sales team and realized they were already in the perfect place to grow their business even further, they just needed a new solution, and RackForce had it for them. The new ddsCloud Enterprise was the exact product XPC needed, in fact for a hosting provider it couldn’t be better. ddsCloud Enterprise allows a company to start small and grow as needed with out changing servers, plans or datacenter providers. A company can scale from one to twelve cores on state-of-the-art Nehalem 5560 hexacores, from 1 GB RAM to 192 GB RAM and from 100GB to as many TB as needed by simply requesting more resources. The combination of IBM’s XIV SAN with Cisco UCS blade system all in a 10Gbps Cisco unified Nexus network provides unparalleled performance with the utmost in scalability. Congratulations to Shone and Ryan at XPC Web Hosting for making the right decision at the right time.
No tags for this post.Related posts
April 15th, 2010 [by Doug Alder]
What do
and
and
and Data center 3.0
have in common? RackForce’s new Enterprise cloud is what! The XIV SAN is fast – it uses parallel processing instead of RAID to gain redundancy and speed and by doing so is better able to allocate IOPS across the entire user base. The Cisco UCS blade system is smoking fast with 4 (6 coming soon) core CPUs utilizing Intel Xeon Nehalem E5540 CPUs with each core running at 2.53Ghz connected at 4Gbps via Fiber Channel to the IBM XIV SAN and the whole arrangements inside a data center running Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 – a unified, virtualized 10Gbps fabric. Very hot stuff. If you are looking for an Enterprise class server go check it out and contact me at work (250) 448-2203 or dalder at rackforce dot com
No tags for this post.Related posts
February 12th, 2010 [by Doug Alder]
Going green as a company is the right thing to do, whether for; reasons of caring about the environment; fiduciary responsibility in light of government regulations; for pure marketing reasons, or for any other reason it is still the right thing to do. The problem is how do you go about it?
As you begin formulating a corporate green strategy you will soon realize that a major contributor to your corporate greenhouse gas footprint is your ICT (information Communication Technology) infrastructure. You see that every year your use of ICT grows, in some cases exponentially. How you tackle reducing that carbon footprint will make a huge difference in how green your company is, how much money you save (both now and when carbon taxes/offsets come into play) and just as important, how green your company is seen to be by your customers and the general public. As you dig further you will discover that worldwide ICT accounts for 2% (Gartner Group) of GHG emissions and of that 2%, nearly a quarter of it (Gartner Group) comes from datacenters. That’s .5% of all GHG emissions on the planet are coming from one source – datacenters. That percentage is growing exponentially as more and more people become connected to an ICT infrastructure (think of the change in China where 8 years ago only 59M used the Internet and today it’s 384M (Reuters) and all that data needs to be stored in datacenters.
If you are looking to reduce your corporate carbon footprint you need to look closely at the carbon footprint of the datacenter you currently use, be it your own in-house, or a commercial one. Not all datacenters are created equal. While there are many factors that determine how “clean” or “dirty” a datacenter is the single biggest factor is its source of power. If your datacenter is in a state or province that generates its energy from coal you are at a 5000% disadvantage over someone whose datacenter uses hydro-electric power. Let’s look at two examples of this, West Virginia which is 100% coal powered and British Columbia which is nearly 100% Hydro powered. Due to the size of the original spreadsheet I have had to remove some columns to make it fit but the gist remains.
| State / Province | gCO2eq /Kwh | gCO2eq/Kwh | mTCO2eq /year 40MW Datacenter | CO2 credit cost at $20/mT/yr | yearly cost for 40MW data center at Industrial Power Rates | $ /yr power cost for a 200W server (1.752Mw) | total Data center power and CO2 cost for a 200W server / yr (PUE 3) | total Data center power and CO2 cost for a 200W server / yr (PUE 1.2) |
| WV | 1055 | 1 | 36981 | $7,393,630 | $346,020 | $69 | $540 | $136 |
| BC | 17 | 0.017 | 5956 | $119,136 | $436,238 | $87.25 | $267 | $105 |
*PUE is Power Usage Effectiveness – a ratio of the amount of power in total the datacenter uses to the amount needed to run ICT equipment. The closer to 1 the more efficient the datacenter is.. Most commercial datacenters today are in the 2.5 to 3 range which means they need 2.5 to 3 watts incoming power to operate 1 watt of ICT equipment, very inefficient.
In the table above you can see that in BC the equivalent of 17 grams of CO2 are created for every Kilowatt hour of power generated. In West Virginia it is 1055, that’s 62 times as much! With carbon at $20 per metric ton that makes a huge difference, a $7,274,494.00/yr difference in operating costs for a 40MW datacenter and you can bet that will be passed along to its customers in higher power rates or higher square foot rates. One way or other customers will make up that shortfall while at the same time doing nothing to lower their own carbon footprint. So, how do you solve this problem?
With today’s high speed fiber networks and new lossless Ethernet technologies, the answer is simple; distance truly is irrelevant when you have good network in place so find a datacenter that has a better footprint. Find one powered by hydro-electric only, with a low PUE and a focus on being as green as they can be. I say powered by hydro because to date solar and wind power is not suitable for datacenter due to the varying amounts of power that they produce throughout the day and night. Datacenters need steady, uninterrupted power which those renewable sources cannot at this time provide (more on how they can fit in coming in a future post). Look for a provider that is not only uses green power but is actively seeking ways to produce carbon credits you can use. A double win as it were; lower your overall costs and get salable credits at the same time. Put your ICT infrastructure where it will do you the greenest good.
Beware of the companies that say they buy carbon offsets to cover up for their dirty power as not only is the carbon offset industry ripe with fraudulent operators but there is also a great deal of misleading claims. As an example, REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) schemes where people are paid to not cut down trees are not the same as schemes where trees are planted. REDD does not lower the amount of GG in the atmosphere, it is maintaining the status quo, which we have already determined needs lowering, but they are marketed as such. Even if the offset project is not a fraud there is still the problem that all you are doing is maintaining status quo – if your ITC use creates 200mT of carbon a year you buy 200mT of offsets to cover it. That is the status quo, not green, and this is the single biggest problem with typical offsets, they do nothing to lower atmospheric concentrations of GHCs.
Tags: Carbon footprint, Carbon Offsets, PUE
