Final Report posted
Saturday, April 20th, 2013The final report for this project is now available.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Turn off the cooling without melting the servers!
Friday, August 24th, 2012See Measuring and Managing a Datacenter Shutdown about a recent cooling shutdown we performed and how we were able to successfully manage it using electrical and cooling metering that were installed in the Data Center as part of the NYSERDA project.
Updated NYSERDA & ConEd datacenter efficiency programs
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012See the NYSERDA site for more information, especially the Data Center Energy Efficiency Framework (DCEEF) guidelines.
NYSERDA Panel Event: Reducing Costs in Healthcare and Higher Education through Green IT
Monday, October 24th, 2011Reducing Costs in Healthcare and Higher Educationthrough Green IT: The Changing Impact of IT on Energy Consumption & Operating Costs The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority invites you to join our expert panel on Monday, November 14th: Mark Moroses, CIO, Continuum Health Partners James Haggard, Deputy CIO, CUNY Joe Sestito, Data Center Consolidation Program Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Steve ...
External Review Meeting held on 6/6/2011
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011CUIT held it's recurring External Review meeting on 6/6/11. Guests enjoyed Dinosaur BBQ while discussing Columbia and NYSERDA's Advanced Concepts Data Center Project. Initial results were shared with the group along with discussions on relevant green data center best practices, refining CUIT's measurements and preliminary findings from CUIT's airflow study. ...
Con Ed/NYSERDA: Improving the ROI for Energy Efficient IT on January 27th
Thursday, January 13th, 2011Please register for this free event on January 27th, 2011 in Armonk, NY, sponsored by Con Edison, IBM and NYSERDA: Improving the ROI for Energy Efficient IT This interactive discussion will focus on what the path forward for energy efficient data centers should look like. This session will feature ...
Stanford University’s 10 Steps to Datacenter Energy Efficiency
Thursday, January 13th, 2011See Joyce Dickerson's presentation on 10 Steps to Datacenter Energy Efficiency at Stanford's sustainable IT site. Also of note is Stanford's program with Pacific Gas and Electric to provide incentives to consolidate and/or virtualize servers.
JAN 7th Winter Workshop – Presentations posted
Monday, January 10th, 2011Despite the weather, the workshop was a great success! There was a lot of information sharing and networking accomplished. Hopefully, everyone who attended came away with some new knowledge, contacts and ideas. CUIT is very thankful to all those who attended and participated and helped make this a successful event. For those ...
Data Center PUE Animation
Friday, December 17th, 2010The video embedded below shows the PUE of Columbia's Data Center from January 2010 to November 2010. The top half of the animation shows separately the IT and cooling power consumption (in yellow and green, respectively) and the total power consumption (in blue). The bottom half displays the Power Usage ...
Preliminary Agenda – CU’s Jan 7th Workshop (Updated 1/4/11)
Friday, November 12th, 2010Columbia University’s Advanced Concept Data Center Pilot Project Winter Workshop Hosted by Columbia University Information Technology (CUIT) January 7, 2011 AGENDA 9:00am Registration & Breakfast 9:30 – 10:15 Welcome and Opening Remarks Victoria Hamilton & Alan Crosswell, Columbia University Joe Borowiec & Bryan Berry, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority Joseph ...
Columbia presents project at Educause 2010 in Anaheim, CA
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010On Thursday, October 14, 2010, Richard Hall and Alan Crosswell presented " Measuring and Validating Attempts to Green Columbia's Data Center" at Educause 2010. ABSTRACT: Columbia University began a pilot in April 2009 to measure energy usage and verify the benefits of techniques to improve energy efficiency of our data center. ...
Our project highlighted by Environmental Stewardship
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010See the article, entitled "Data Center Takes Big Steps in Going Green"
A tour of our cooling systems
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010The Data Center Secondary Chilled Water Loop The data center has a pipe loop containing chilled water that flows through a Plate Frame Heat Exchanger (PFHX) as well as via thermostatically controlled butterfly valves to dry coolers on a nearby roof. This is called the secondary loop as the primary loop ...
GreenMetrics 2010
Friday, June 11th, 2010I'll be giving a talk about our project at the GreenMetrics 2010 conference (which is part of ACM SigMetrics 2010) on Monday, June 14th.
US EPA releases Energy Star rating for data centers
Thursday, June 10th, 2010US EPA releases Energy Star rating for data centers June 10, 2010 by ian0 Facilities with PUE’s in top 25 percentile of peers can get efficiency label! EPA Energy Start Efficiency Ratings for Data Centers
Measuring UPS Efficiency – Help!
Saturday, April 17th, 2010One aspect of determining our Power Use Effectiveness (PUE) is to understand how much energy is "wasted" by our UPSes. This is especially important as we look to move from many small rack-mounted UPSes to a more central approach. We've been quite confused in reading about the relationships of Real ...
New ECAR study on Green IT in Higher Ed
Thursday, April 15th, 2010See the new ECAR study on Green IT in Higher Education
Overhead cable trays
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010[caption id="attachment_169" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="overhead cable tray"][/caption] Installation of new overhead cable trays has commenced. We took the opportunity of a new SAN purchase to start moving our cables from under our 12" raised floor to overhead. This will eventually allow us to reduce underflow blockages which impede airflow ...
Flexim UltraSonic Flow Meters Installed
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010CUIT with the assistance of CUF, Thermosystems, and Flexim has completed the installation of Flexim UltraSonic Flow Meters for the application of metering the chilled water supply and return in order to track the heat load of the data center. Three measurement points were chosen to cover the heat load ...
Participation in panel at Datacenter Dynamics Conference March 3rd
Monday, March 1st, 2010I'll be participating in a panel discussion entitled Assessing Performance – Metrics, Energy Use, and Useful Work from your Data Center at the Datacenter Dynamics conference on March 3, 2010.
Measuring PUE clarified by DOE
Monday, February 22nd, 2010The DOE has issued some clarifications about how to measure PUE as the original definition turned out to be too difficult for most data center managers to measure accurately. DOE Guides Data Centers in Standardizing Their Energy Efficiency Metrics