RackForce Blog
Archive for the 'Virtualization' 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.
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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
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October 14th, 2008 [by Doug Alder]
Bill St. Arnaud, the Chief Research Officer and one of the leading network architects for CANARIE1 wrote an excellent article on calculating your baseline GHG emission. Bold emphasis in the article is by me.
In order to get started in carbon trading it is necessary to first establish your baseline, that is what amount of CO2 is your project/organization responsible for generating right now, and how and where is it being generated. Once you know this information you can begin planning for ways to reduce those emissions and thus earn carbon credits, and the best way to do that is to move your ICT infrastructure to a green data center. RackForce’s current K3 datacenter is very green and it’s new datacenter GigaCenter will be one of the greenest on the planet.
Tags: Bill St. Arnaud, CANARIE, carbon offset, CO2, colocation, datacenter, GHG emissions, GigaCenter, Green, ICT, RackForce, VirtualizationHere a couple of excellent web sites explaining the detail process of how to calculate baseline GHG emission data for your network, ICT equipment or cyber-infrastructure. Once you have established a baseline for your current emissions your organization can then explore how to go about reducing its GHG emissions in order to meet carbon neutrality goals either set by your organization or government and ultimately earn carbon offset dollars from various carbon trading exchanges and/or trusts.
Virtualization of networks and computing through clouds or grids using SOA, as well as purchasing green power or moving infrastructure facilities to zero carbon data will be the most likely ways that organizations can reduce their GHG emissions in order to earn carbon offset dollars. But before proceeding with expensive and time consuming baseline GHG measurements, an organization should first determine whether they are ready to move to a world of virtual networks (including virtual routers and switches), virtual servers and cloud applications. If the organization’s “server huggers” are not prepared to let go of their physical computers, routers and switches, then there is no point in proceeding with a baseline assessment.
Networks, ICT and cyber-infrastructure are about the only places in an organization where significant GHG reductions are possible. In most organizations in the service sector (education, health, government, banking, finance, telecom, etc) ICT is, by and far, the largest producer of GHG emissions. Although same savings in GHG emission can be made through video conferencing, tele-commuting, tele-work centers and adjusting building heating and cooling systems, these savings will be marginal compared to the savings that are possible through virtualization and use of green power, or relocating ICT equipment to zero carbon data centers.
The dollar savings in energy costs and potential to earn carbon offset dollars can be the several of millions of dollars per year for a small to medium size organization (50 – 500 people).
You can quickly do your own back of the envelope calculation of the potential dollars (within an order of magnitude) for your organization:
- Each computer server produces 8 tons of CO2 per year
- Each PC or laptop produces 4 tons of CO2 per year
- Each printer or photocopier produces 10 tons of CO2 per year
- Each router produces 20 tons of CO2 per year [commercial datacenter strength routers not your home D-Link style routers, those are about the same as a PC as they use about the same amount of power -DA}
- Each Ethernet switch produces 5 tons of CO2 per year
Carbon offsets are currently trading between $7- $20 per ton, but next year Europe is projected to raise the carbon price from cap and trade to $100 per ton. It is expected that cost of carbon will soon rise to $400 to $1000 per ton over the next few years.
The above numbers assume that all the electrical power used by the organization is generated from coal. However, even if your electrical power is from cleaner sources such as nuclear, gas and oil, it is expected that cap and trade will be push up cost of power from these sources at a slight discount of that power produced from coal. True renewable power such as that produced by windmills, hydro and solar systems may trade at a premium to the market, especially within large urban centers.
Guidelines for Quantifying GHG Reductions from Grid-Connected Electricity Projects
http://www.wri.org/stories/2007/09/guidelines-quantifying-ghg-reductions-grid-connected-electricity-projectsThe Purchase of
http://www.thegreenpowergroup.org/retail.cfm?loc=us
