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July 7th, 2009 [by Doug Alder]

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In May of this year GigaCenter will open its doors for tours for prospective customers and customers can begin moving their equipment in June 2009. The design is scalable, we are starting with 30,000 sq. ft. and that will scale easily to over 100,000 sq. ft. This helps preserve the green footprint as less space needs HVAC. Internally the design is modular with up to 32 “GigaVaults” which are completely self-contained datacenter suites with it’s own power, cooling, networking etc. Each GigaVault can hold up to 12 x 42 u racks. Racks can be loaded to 1,000 watts per sq. ft. (note that with in-row cooling two 42u racks of in-row cooling would be required for 10 42u racks at 1000w/sq. ft.) As our president and chief visionary Tim Dufour recently said to us:

We have a design that provides the ultimate in flexibility, scalability, and maximum efficiency (Green). The beauty of the in-row cooling is that it allows us to build at virtually any density per vault. We have cold-aisle containment but can also provide hot-aisle containment to accommodate gas-based fire suppression systems. We have monster racks with additional rack space above that can be used for secure internal use (switches etc.) or customer purposes. Extra security can be provided with heavy diamond mesh over the top of the vault. Any version of an in rack ePDU can be provided as per customer requirements, 10 Gbps networking both LAN and WAN, low cost Internet, and the list goes on. I don’t think anyone on the planet can provide this kind of flexibility.

This is just the start folks, lots more to come stay tuned! If you are in need of colocation space and would like a tour of GigaCenter please contact myself Doug Alder (dalder at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (250)448-2203), Jay Robinson (jrobinson at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (250) 717-2340 ext:2303) or Paul Amodea (pamodea at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (604)535-5769 ) to set up an appointment. You had better hurry though as phase I is rapidly selling out and if you miss out on phase I then you’ll have to wait for phase II.

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Posted in Data Centre, General, Green Technology, New Ideas, New Products, New Technology | No Comments »

Greening your IT – A Corporate Roadmap

November 19th, 2008 [by Doug Alder]

ICT (Information Communications Technology) is fast becoming one of the leading causes of global warming due to the enormous amount of power consumed in the production and use of ICT devices and services. Finding ways to reduce that power usage is the key to greening your IT.

These are tough economic times and for a CIO/CTO to justify changes to the CEO he or she needs to stress the economic rewards, not the technical or green aspects, for making radical changes to the company’s ICT infrastructure. As big and important an issue, not to mention being trés cool, as going green is these days, a company’s bottom line and cash flow trump it every time

Across the industry servers utilize only between 10 and 20% of their capacity. Often the same can be said for other gear, such as storage, switches and desktops/laptops (such as do your employees have both a laptop and a desktop computer – if so why?). Making better use of this infrastructure is the first step in gaining efficiency in your ICT and by doing so reduce your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)and increase your ROI (Return on Investment).

Often in a corporate structure the answer to putting a new piece of software into use has been to dedicate a server strictly for that program. Not only is this a waste of computing resources, it is a waste of the company’s money. That server will be drawing power and require cooling 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sitting mostly unproductive and draining money from the corporate bottom line to keep it running. Read the rest of this entry »