Blogs

CSIA CleanTech Innovation Award

Posted Fri, 06/12/2009 - 16:36 by geekism

And the winner is...

 

Today I was forwarded an email about Sun winning and Apex award from the Colorado Technology Association (CSIA) for our Broomfield, Colorado Datacenter project.  I love it when you win an award you didn't even know you were in the running for.  :-)  Sun is a founding corporate sponsor of the CSIA organization (through StorageTek). Kristin Russell, the Sun IT Operations VP, is currently on the board of directors.  We recently hosted an Eco Innovation Summit at our Broomfield Campus which I had the privilege to speak at along with Dr. Carl Koval, Faculty Director, Colorado University Energy Initiative and Robert Noun, Executive Director, Communications and External Affairs, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Testing continues for Knurr Cool Therm

Posted Fri, 06/12/2009 - 10:25 by brian.day

Testing continues for the Knurr CoolTherm rack.  Several metering issues arose during the first week and a half of testing that have been identified and mostly resolved.  The last issue (flow meter reporting) is being resolved today (6/12).  We expect to continue with official testing next week and are targeting Friday (6/19) or Monday (6/22) to complete the CoolTherm test.   Given our experience with Chill Off 1, we expected the first test to take the longest to get set up as we work through the various issues with connecting and testing all of the components.&nbsp

Do You Feel The Chill?

Posted Wed, 06/10/2009 - 14:54 by geekism

On May 29th, 2009 we officially started the chill off 2 testing!  It has been a long time coming with many technical, financial, and resource barriers we had to overcome.  Imagine trying to organize a band of volunteers who's day jobs and schedules keep them extremely busy in this high tech industry.  We're about 12 weeks behind, but we believe we will be able to make it up with overnight and weekend testing.  Brian Day and team have been driving very hard to ensure that we meet the deadlines for processing and packaging of the results for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) Energy Summit scheduled for October 16, 2009 in Silicon Valley.

You can see the first Chill Off testing episode on the Data Center Pulse YouTube Channel (embedded below).  I interviewed Hieko Ebermann, the Global Product Manager for Thermal Products with Knuerr, an Emerson Company, about their CoolTherm product (pdf).  This fully contained solution provides dynamically controlled cooling up to 35kW/rack. Heiko flew in from Dresden, Germany to make sure that everything was in place and operating as expected.  Knuerr are the first vendor in the test.

Make sure to watch the High Definition Video version.  You will be ale to select the HD button after hitting play below.

 

 

As usual, stay tuned for updates through the official Chill Off webpage and blog hosted on Data Center Pulse.  We sincerely appreciate the support and collaboration from all involved in this very important Data Center Test. 

We will be posting entries on all of the companies contributing to this effort.  Stay tuned!

Testing under way!

Posted Tue, 06/02/2009 - 12:59 by brian.day

I am very excited to announce that we began testing and collecting data last week for the Knurr Cool Therm single rack configuration!  Since Thursday (5/28) we have been running through the various chilled water and server inlet air temp set points to verify there are no issues with the entire system (mechanical, electrical, Cool Therm unit, servers, and data collection/reporting system).  All system components have been working as expected.  Geoffrey returns Wednesday (6/3), at which point we will reset to to the initial test set point and begin collecting official study data on Thursday (6/4).  We expect to wrap the Cool Therm test by 6/10 and move quickly to Knurr's Cool Loop next. 

See the latest DCP YouTube channel posting about CoolTherm below:

In this episode Dean Nelson interviews Heiko Ebermann, the Global Product Manager of Thermal Systems with Kneurr. Their CoolTherm product is the first to be tested in the chill off 2. It is a contained water cooled rack up to 35kW in 37U.

Website Update #2

Posted Fri, 05/29/2009 - 17:39 by DCP

Here's the latest update for the web site.

We've implemented the following over the last few weeks.

  • Switched Domains from .com to .org
  • Added SSL for Secure Login & Editing
  • Added Data Center Jobs Listing Section (for members)

Any questions or comments can be sent to feedback@datacenterpulse.org

Testing set to begin this week!

Posted Tue, 05/26/2009 - 12:24 by brian.day

We're almost there!  With all the hard work over the past few months to get the Chill Off 2 test environment set up and operational it is very exciting to be so close to getting the testing kicked off.  All of the suppliers involved (will be listing them here) have done a tremendous job of volunteering their time and resources to get this test set up.  We met this morning and the site is operational.  A few tasks remain to get the first test kicked off on Thursday:

Innovation Matters, What's Cool in Datacenters

Posted Sun, 05/03/2009 - 22:56 by geekism

 

Late last year I had a fun conversation on Greg Papadopolous show, Innovation Matters.  This show was targeted for Sun Internal, but there was quite a bit of interest to share it externally.  So on February 14th, it was shared on channelsun.com. We are very transparent when it comes to the work we do, and we want our customers to benefit from it.   So enjoy the segment Greg titled, What's Cool in Datacenters.

 

Website Update #1

Posted Tue, 04/28/2009 - 11:11 by DCP

Hello, world! Here’s a web site development update.

In the background, there has been a number of items undergoing development and upgrade over the last six weeks. We are happy to announce that these items are closing in on release, and we will be starting a progression of deployments starting next week. The first of which will be a new site layout that will enable a more flexible content display and intuitive navigation system.

  • External User Blog Feeds
  • User Points & Rewards Systems
  • User Rating System for Content
  • Data Center Jobs Listing
  • User Messaging Services
  • User Profiles & Dynamic Content Display
  • Industry Events Calendasr
  • SSL & OpenID

You may have also noticed that we moved from the datacenterpulse.org to datacenterpulse.com domain, and in fact will shortly be moving back to .org. This unfortunately, was due to the fact that within a week to closing out the old .com site, we ended up also needing to move hosting providers for the new .org site. As we are continuing down the Non-Profit route, the .org domain makes best since in the long run, and will help us finalize our email and addresses systems.

Going forward, we will continue to permanently redirect .com items to .org, to the best of our ability so as to elevate confusion. Search however will take some time to counter correct.

As always, any questions or comments can be sent to feedback@datacenterpulse.org

Bring Out Your Dead!

Posted Fri, 04/24/2009 - 11:48 by geekism

Late last year we instituted a project titled Bring Out Your Dead (inspired by the Monte Python's Holy Grail Film).  It was an effort to hunt down and remove orphaned and unused hardware at the company. The challenge I gave to Serena Devito on my staff was to do this as a low-cost, no-cost effort.  We weren't out to spend millions on replacing equipment, we just wanted to find comatose devices and get rid of them.  We knew that even with all our datacenter consolidation efforts over the last two years, there was still a lot of waste going on.  The reorganizations, acquisitions, reductions in force and other business activities left quite a bit of equipment in limbo.  So, we partnered with our lab and datacenter managers to get rid of them.  What we found surpassed even our expectations.  We pulled 440+ pallets of equipment from four of our major campuses in just three months.  6,199 devices in all with 4,100 of them being servers!  The icing on the cake was that 64% of the equipment we pulled was still powered on!  It was just sitting there burning energy.  The picture below shows 50% of the equipment that was removed.  It filled one of our warehouses in Hayward, CA!

 

Wild West Data Center

Posted Wed, 04/22/2009 - 06:29 by geekism

 

On January 26, 2009 we had a grand opening for Sun's Broomfield, Colorado Datacenter.  It has a been a long project to consolidate 496,000 square feet from our Louisiville, Colorado campus (former StorageTek site) into 126,000 square feet across five floors in our largest building Broomfield.

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