After the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks, even more focus is on saving energy, and one of the major areas for the electronics industry is in the data centre.
A typical data centre uses up to 30 times more energy than a typical office building, and total data centre energy use is doubling every five years, says IBM. While the UK and US are battling it out for the title of the 'most green' data centre, two UK startups are taking different approaches to reducing power.
In the US, IBM has built a $12m 'green' data centre with Syracuse University that will start operation in January. This is using natural gas-fueled microturbines to generate all the electricity for the centre and cooling for the computer servers so that the centre can operate completely off-grid.
"We looked beyond conventional wisdom and addressed the broader issues of where and how to generate the electricity, how to cool the data centre and how to make the computers more effective and efficient," said Vijay Lund, vice president for cross-IBM offerings in IBM's Software Group.
Meanwhile Infinity SDC in Milton Keynes has set up a 'dark green' data centre just outside BT's Adastral Park research centre.
This uses power generated from heat pumps and bio-matter supplied by a local group of cooperating farms. The bio-matter is broken down in an Anaerobic Digestor providing methane for generating electricity and a nutrient rich "digestate" used as fertiliser to grow more bio-matter.
This won Infinity a prestigious "Future Thinking and Design Concepts" Award in December, beating off Europe-wide competition. "We believe that Infinity ONE is the first workable green data centre solution to address the IT energy challenge as highlighted by United Nations at the recent Copenhagen summit. Critically, Infinity ONE will allow UK business leaders to reduce their carbon footprint and economic costs from operating a data centre," said Martin Lynch, CEO at Infinity.
But this is not just about using green power sources. Gnodal in Bristol is looking at the whole data centre with a new Ethernet architecture for switching that significantly reduces the overall power consumption. It has raised several million from finance groups such as NESTA to develop both ASICs and systems and is planning to start shipping products later in 2010.
Dan Chester, the former VP of Business Development at multicore startup Ignios and Business Development Manager at Radioscape, is now chief executive of Iceotope in Sheffield, which showed its technology at the High Performance Computing conference in Portland, Oregon, in December.
Iceotope has developed a patented scalable, modular liquid cooling system for rack-based server architectures, capturing the heat from the processors by immersing the server motherboards in individually sealed baths of an inert synthetic liquid coolant.
Using this technology, Iceotope and its licensed partners produce servers that are highly suited for deployment in enterprise data centres, high performance computing (HPC) facilities and cloud computing infrastructure. This provides lower operating costs and carbon output, or, as is more likely, more compute capacity within a given electricity budget. It also means the servers can be deployed in non-traditional locations, without the overheads of air cooling.
Like Gnodal, Iceotope expects 2010 to be the year that its technology comes to the market, so reducing the power footprint of the data centre will be a key focus for startups throughout the year.