DOE Funds Green IT Projects

from the saving-energy dept

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced $47 million in funding for 14 projects to promote developing technologies that can improve energy efficiency in IT and telecommunications. These projects are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and will aim to reduce energy use and carbon pollution. The government funding for these efforts will also be matched by over $70 million in private industry investments, raising the total funding to more than $115 million. The three main areas for development will include:

1. Equipment and Software -- for improving servers and networking devices, as well as creating software for optimizing their energy usage.
2. Power Supply Chain -- for minimizing the power loss and heat generation for transmitting electricity.
3. Cooling -- for new ways to cool equipment to work effectively while using less power.

These energy-saving investments target facilities and IT infrastructure that could collectively account for about 120 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year (about 3 percent of all electricity used in the US). Given the projected growth of the IT industry, this economic sector also has the potential to reduce wasted energy significantly and could create benefits beyond its field.

However, what's not clear in this announcement is whether the developed technologies will be released to the public or if the resulting more efficient technologies will be owned entirely by the entities that create them. It's only a somewhat recent trend that arguments have been made to release federally-funded scientific research back to the public so that the rate of progress can be accelerated by open discourse and collaborations. Looking at the list of the grants (pdf), though, it seems likely that only a small fraction of these projects will have published results.

Iceland's Geothermal-Powered Data Center Gets Funding

from the data-center-location-is-always-greener dept

Iceland has been looking to bring large data center investments to its shores for some time now, and it has recently secured funding for a 44-acre data center campus that will be built on the former NATO Command Center in Keflavik, Iceland. The companies behind this data center boast that Iceland has 100% free cooling, renewable energy resources and predictable forecasting of energy pricing. Additionally, Verne Global says this installation will be powered by geo-thermal and hydroelectric resources, and thereby it'll become the industry's first carbon neutral wholesale data center.

But some folks bring up the usual concerns about data center locations -- will it have enough bandwidth, is the local job market flush with proficient IT engineers, where's the back-up if there's an earthquake? Well, it looks like Iceland has plenty of bandwidth, but it also has real earthquake threats -- with a 6.1 earthquake that occurred in 2008 (not to mention a 2004 volcano eruption). So maybe Iceland isn't ideal, but the country presently has more power generation capacity than it can consume by itself domestically -- and the energy in Iceland is "green" in terms of carbon emissions. But will that be enough to attract large data center investments? Would you rely on an Icelandic data center for your business? Would you move to Iceland to oversee a data center?

If Data Centers Are Understaffed, What Does That Mean For Security?

from the seems-like-a-problem dept

While I'm always a little skeptical of the numbers found in vendor surveys, it wouldn't be too surprising to learn that the recent findings that half of all data centers find themselves understaffed are at least close to accurate. About 16% of the total surveyed claimed that their data centers were "extremely understaffed," with another 34% saying they were just somewhat understaffed. Reasons for the understaffing included both the difficulty of finding qualified people for more technologically complex datacenters and general economic cutbacks -- neither of which are particularly surprising.

The bigger question is what impact this will have. Chronic understaffing in a data center could lead to serious security issues, increased downtime (decreased reliability) and certainly decreased responsiveness to problems. With many of the survey respondents also claiming they're hoping to decrease headcount even further, this could become a bigger issue going forward.

The report also claims that the survey's creators were "surprised" to find out that mid-market companies were more likely to experiment with new technologies, as compared to the big companies, but I don't find that surprising at all. Big companies are pretty resistant to change (especially if they have some big IT project that is "working.") Still, if those companies are finding their data centers regularly understaffed, it could create more difficulty in getting getting new projects successfully off the ground. So I'm curious how companies are dealing with these issues and trying to avoid problems with understaffed data centers, while still being able to try out new technologies and services.

Filed Under: data centers, it, security

Should IT Be Run As A Business?

from the yes-and-no dept

Slashdot points us to an article trying to debunk the concept that "IT should be run as a business," with "employees" as customers. Of course, like many catchy phrases, I don't think that many IT departments really followed this concept to the ridiculous logical conclusions. It does have some useful concepts -- such as giving IT folks more reason to actually listen to what employees have to say. But it misses the larger point, that IT is there to serve the business as a whole, and that means making the overall business more efficient, while keeping it secure, and that can sometimes conflict with the views of individual employees.

The argument made in the article, and it makes sense, is that IT really needs to be much more tightly integrated with the overall business, to really understand how to help. When it's viewed as a separate silo or even "business," then the solutions that come out of IT really aren't as helpful as can be. Separately, it also increases the likelihood of outsourcing the IT function, since it can be easily "separated." But by more closely integrating the IT function into actual business processes, not only does IT make itself more indispensable, it can focus on creating actual process improvements and solutions, rather than just taking a list from someone of what they think they need (perhaps without understanding what the technology enables) and delivering it to spec.

Filed Under: business, it, productivity

In A World Of Bottom Up Technology, Should IT Support Your iPhone?

from the they-might-have-to dept

Back when the iPhone first came out, there were all sorts of stories about how it was no good for the enterprise. While it's certainly gotten better, it still does seem like the Blackberry is the enterprise smartphone of choice. Yet, many people really do like using the alternatives, and while the solution for many is to now carry around multiple devices, others are beginning to push for companies to support their own devices (iPhone or others). And this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. These days, many technologies used in the office are coming from "the bottom up," meaning that they're personal technologies (hardware, software or services) that individuals are using/buying on their own first, and then realizing they're so useful, that they start using them at work too.

And that, of course, raises the inevitable question of whether or not the IT department should support those technologies. The easy answer (which I'm sure we'll hear many times over in the comments) is "of course not." But it might not be that simple any more. Ignoring or holding back those technologies entirely may actually harm overall productivity in some cases, and limit what employees can and should be doing. Now, obviously, I recognize the argument that a large part of IT's job is to keep things running and protect the overall setup from problems -- and letting in any technology and supporting it can make that very, very difficult. But it ignores the flipside of IT's role: enabling companies and their employees to be more productive through the use of technology. And, even if IT officially decides to not allow things like the iPhone, as the article above points out, it might not matter much:

Likely scenario: An employee is denied an iPhone (or possibly any company-provided smartphone) and decides to get his own personal iPhone for use at work. This surreptitious infiltration is actually a bigger concern than a handful of managers; at least with them you still get to control the configuration and deployment process. If you don't know that workers are using iPhones in your company, you can't secure them at all. You can't even be certain what data might be stored on them.

And since the iPhone is fairly easy for even novice users to set up -- they can sign onto wireless networks, access intranets, and even gain access to an e-mail server -- it's no stretch to imagine that a lone, unauthorized iPhone could seriously compromise confidential data, as well as access to your network and the services running in it.

So, a flat-out ban isn't going to do the trick, but actively supporting any technology people bring into the workplace is too much to handle and causes too many problems. So where is the middle ground?

Filed Under: iphones, it, support

3D Circuits To Keep Up With Moore's Law

from the exponential-growth dept

The limits of Moore's Law won't start closing in until about 2020-2030, according to reports from Intel researchers, when either silicon-based chips are expected to be made using 10-15 nanometer scale manufacturing processes or chipmakers figure out how to use other elements in the periodic table to control electrons. By using current materials, though, transistors smaller than about 5 nanometers begin to lose their ability to perform reliably due to quantum effects interfering. So while finding more exotic materials to incorporate into chips could help to extend performance, the ultimate demise of Moore's Law as it applies to transistors may be brought on by other revolutionary technologies in computation -- such as optical computing, quantum computing, etc.

That said, Stanford researchers have made some notable progress with nanotube-based 3D circuits which demonstrates the feasibility of using carbon nanotubes for logic circuits. The prototype nanotube chip is still primitive compared to commercial silicon processors, but the newly-developed techniques to process nanotubes are the first that could be scaled beyond a one-of-a-kind demonstration chip. The process used to make this 3D nanotube circuit is compatible with the industrial VLSI (very large scale integration) manufacturing standard, and so the researchers call their method a VLSI-compatible Metallic Nanotube Removal (VMR) process. One of the problems of using nanotube transistors is that the composition of nanotubes often contains undesirable tubes that have metallic behavior. Removing these metallic nanotubes is necessary to avoid short-circuits, and doing so opens up the possibilities for incorporating carbon structures in chips.

Obviously, nanotube manipulation and synthesis techniques will have to be much better to start competing with commercial silicon processor performance. But creating 3D circuit designs using molecular materials could result in extremely high-density connections with improved speed and energy efficiency.

Hacking Surpassing Human Error For Data Breaches?

from the is-that-good-or-bad? dept

A couple years ago, we noted that the old claim that "insiders" were the biggest data breach threat was no longer true, as other threats were becoming a much bigger deal. While that study seemed to use very different methodology, a new study is out that agrees that insiders are a much smaller threat, but notes that outside hacking surpassed "human error" as the cause of data breaches in 2009. While it's good that human error issues are decreasing as a percentage, is it worrisome that outside hack attacks are now becoming such a major problem? The good news in the data is that there were supposedly fewer reported attacks in 2009 (by a pretty large amount) compared to 2008 -- so one possible reading of the data is that people have been effective in preventing things like human error breaches much more often, which is what allowed outside hack attacks to take the lead on a percentage basis. However, with recent stories of things like China's hack attack on Google it seems like we'll be hearing more and more stories about these sorts of attacks for one important reason: in many (certainly not all) cases, they can be quite effective.

Filed Under: data breaches, hacking, human error, insiders

Data Centers Trading In Energy Markets

from the energy-ain't-cheap dept

Earlier this month, Google filed a request to trade in the electricity market with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Given Google's enormous power requirements for its data centers, it shouldn't be too surprising that the company would want to have a bit more control over its energy consumption. Other energy-intensive companies, such as Safeway and Alcoa, already have FERC approval to trade in electricity. The benefits for these other firms include: greater power reliability, costs savings against energy price volatility, and flexibility to sell back excess energy to the grid. So it's not a stretch to think that Google would have similar benefits -- but there's the added speculation that Google might take greater advantage of energy-trading capabilities given the vast amount of information that the search giant processes every day.

So at what point should a data center start to consider jumping into the energy-trading markets? Using Google as a model, the search giant seems to be planning for a future where one of its data centers could consume about 1,000 Gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. A back of the envelope calculation on Google's energy use per query puts its current usage in the range of hundreds of Gigawatt-hours of energy used in a year (give or take an order of magnitude) -- which is just for its search engine, not its YouTube, Gmail or other web services. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of data centers do not have this kind of power requirement, but collectively, many large data centers could see their energy usage growing where more and more data center operations might want to become energy traders as well. Will we see more data centers with a license to trade electricity? Do you think such a trend could create Enron-like trouble? Let us know in the comments.

A Peek Into The Tonight Show's Data Center

from the funniest-data-centers dept

We've looked at a few cool data centers that bring us speedy search results and crunch Avatar data. With the late night talk show gossip flying around between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien's contract dispute, it looks like the Tonight Show data center is also getting some attention. The Tonight Show's systems engineer, Matthew Cooper, is presented in a short video where he talks a little bit about what he does in a very simple way. (In less than 7 words, Cooper says his job is "I like Mac computers.") Interestingly, they make it sound like there's no off-site backup for all of the video data that they store and process for the show. I guess if NBC isn't planning to keep the Tonight Show around for much longer, then maintaining an off-site location isn't exactly a high priority for them.

As The UK Actively Seeks To Lure Entrepreneurs, Why Does The US Still Make It So Difficult?

from the innovation-going-elsewhere dept

Reuters has a short article detailing how the UK has been successful in luring a growing number of foreign entrepreneurs to open up shop (or even move their companies to the UK). While there are still plenty of foreign entrepreneurs starting or moving companies to the US, it's got little to do with the US government -- which often makes it quite difficult for foreign entrepreneurs to relocate here. While, thanks in large part to Brad Feld's activism, there is finally some movement on a startup visa concept, the US government still takes a rather hostile view towards foreign entrepreneurs and foreign startups. With other countries actively courting and welcoming them -- and backing it up with some infrastructural changes, this should be seen as a serious problem for US innovation. Of course there's a lot more to this issue, and there are certainly institutional reasons why the US has long had a strong startup culture, but we shouldn't merely assume that we can just rest on our laurels, especially as others are ramping up their efforts to attract hot startups.

Filed Under: entrepreneurship, immigration, innovation, uk, us