I know what you're thinking, Sundance the famous ski resort in Utah and snow paint interesting images so why have i destroyed this very appealing vista with the words Data Center? Well that's because Oracle is building a new data center near the Wasatch Range that is nothing but ordinary. Although this data center may not make it on Lonely Planets top 10 attractions in Salt Lake City it probably should. Especially if you're one of those CIO's that has been tasked with greening your data center or in Oracle's case a snow white data center.
Data centers have enormous pressures on then now, years ago 5x9's was an admirable goal for uptime. Storage has ballooned to over 45 gigabytes per person and terms like Exabyte have entered the vernacular (1 million terabytes). Storage however is now reducing in costs, in 2009 the second highest costs according to IDC for a data center management is energy with labour being number one. Along with energy comes heat, the two go hand in hand with the more equipment comes more heat and then more cooling. Data centers according to McKinsey and Company could exceed airlines as a greenhouse polluter by 2020.
Simply put we all need to do out bit for the environment, and data centers need to move along with the times. So what's special about Oracle's new data center or "Project Sequoia: Oracle Utah Compute Facility" in simple terms – everything. Not everyone gets to build a data center from scratch, fortunately for Oracle we are old hat at this - the data center in Austin is our current facility and won the "data center of the year" when commissioned and Oracle was the recipient of the "EPA Green Power Leadership Award" since it consumes approximately 50% less power than equivalent sized facilities. Project Sequoia has further optimisation around HVAC using the environment for instance- if you have been to the snow the air is cool and dry which is ideal for data centers and even on days up to 29deg C the cooling systems will have savings.
But power and cooling efficiency will only take you so far, Linux and virtulisation change the game further. And we have seen within our own environment how these technologies have an impact on real estate, electricity and improved utilisation of the infrastructure. Oracle Open World in San Francisco is occurring next week and will have a strong green theme with some exciting announcements to follow.
In ANZ we will be running a series of "Greening The Data Center" forums in the coming months. At these events you will hear firsthand about Project Sequoia which when complete will stretch to nearly half a kilometer, Linux, Virtulisation and other solutions that can help transform your Data Center.
I look forward to seeing you at these events, in the mean time get your lonely planet guide out and head for them snow peaked hills in Utah.
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