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Computer Data Centers
Going Green
Going Green: Computer Data Centers
A new and innovative computer data center is under construction, a computer data center that's supposed to cut energy use by half.
IBM Vice President of Systems and Technology, Vijay Lund explains that for every dollar of energy that's used in a data center about half is wasted.
“It prevents wastage that I talked about. There's a tremendous amount of waste, about half the energy in a data center is wasted. Annually that's about two billion dollars, so there's a lot of savings there. Efficiently using computers and technology we can lower electric bills or energy bills for data centers,” said Lund.
IBM will supply the equipment, design and support services for the new data center at Syracuse University and that includes an electrical generation system powered by natural gas-fueled micro turbines to run the computers and provide cooling for the computer servers.
“This is critical. This is what IBM came to us and said one of the major questions their customers are asking is how much energy will it take to operate this system. Companies are spending; data intensive companies like insurance companies and banks are spending an awful lot of money on energy,” said Eric Spina, SU Vice Chancellor.
SU Vice Chancellor and Provost, Eric Spina said the university will manage and analyze the performance of the data center to maximize its efficiency. IBM will use the data center to showcase the technology.
Although the system is now geared toward large, institutional users, someday it might have more widespread applications.
Because we're deploying newer forms of energy to power data centers, called micro turbines, the output of the micro-turbines will be used for power, cooling and heating in buildings for free so this can be good for residential use as well.
Construction if the $12.4-million computer data center is supposed to be completed before the end of the year.
