Archive for the 'cix' Category

CIX open day

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/11/2007
in cix, cork and data centre
. 0 Comments

Cork Internet eXchange (aka CIX) are having an Open Day on the morning of November 29th at 10am.

This will be your final opportunity to have a gander around the innards of a data centre in the making. After the 29th, ducts will be closed and off-limits areas will be off-limits!

If you are interested in having a look, drop me a mail so we have an idea of numbers (tom@tomrafteryit.net).

See you there.

[Disclosure - I am a director of CIX]

UPDATE - edited to correct my email address - thanks James

US Data Center chillers not backed up by diesel generators?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/11/2007
in cix and data centre
. 4 Comments

Rackspace are a high-profile data centre in the US. They had a couple of outages in the last few days which have badly damaged their reputation. The main outage, according to Rackspace, happened when:

at approximately 6:30 PM CST Monday, a vehicle struck and brought down the transformer feeding power to the DFW data center. It immediately disrupted power to the entire data center and our emergency generators kicked in and operated as intended. When we transferred power to our secondary utility power system, the data center’s chilling units were cycled back up. At this time, however, the utility provider shut down power in order to allow emergency rescue teams safe access to the accident victim. This repeated cycling of the chillers resulted in increasing temperatures within the data center. As a precautionary measure we decided to take some customers’ servers offline.

When I read this, something about it didn’t seem right. I couldn’t understand why the chillers (the machines which cool the water for the aircon) would need to be power cycled. Then, an explanation showed up on the Texas Startup blog:

It turns out that in most multi-tenant commercial property in the United States, the building owner provides chilled water so that tenants can run their HVAC systems. In general, most buildings do NOT put these chillers on power with generator backup

If this is true, it is frightening!

In other words, if power fails to these buildings, the diesel generator will ensure that their aircon will be circulating air which is rapidly increasing in temperature because the water is no longer being chilled.

I’m director of Cork Internet eXchange, the first professional data centre in Ireland outside of Dublin and I can absolutely guarantee that our chillers are on power with a backup from our diesel generator. Of course they are. Why would you design it any other way?

Om Malik put it well when he said:

our Internet infrastructure, despite all the talk, is as fragile as a fine porcelain cup on the roof of a car zipping across a pot-holed goat track

Phew!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 11/10/2007
in Conference, IT@Cork, Web 2.0, cix, data centre and speaking
. 3 Comments

These next few weeks and months are manic busy.

I think I need to clone me!

Embeddable Google maps

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/8/2007
in cix and geo
. 3 Comments

According to this post on the Google Maps blog site, it is now possible to embed Google Maps on your own site in the same way you can embed YouTube videos.

The image below is of the industrial park where we are building the CIX data centre

View Larger Map

Video interviewed by Loic

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/7/2007
in Web 2.0, cix and climate change
. 1 Comment

Loic Le Meur, France’s best known blogger and organiser of the Le Web conference interviewed me recently by Skype Video.

Previously I had panned Loic very publicly for the way he handled the Le Web conference last year. Loic starts this video by asking how he can do better this year. Soliciting people’s opinions is a great start Loic. Loic finished by asking me to be on the advisory board of this year’s Le Web. I’m now on the advisory board of the Le Web conference, the Web 2.0 Expo in Berin and I’m chair of the organising committeeit@cork annual Business in Technology conference. Phew!

For the majority of the interview (from 06:30 onwards) we talked about CIX, how to make data centres carbon neutral (while at the same time facilitating bringing more wind energy onto the national grid!) and the energy efficiency strategies we have designed into the CIX data centre.

I’m going to be printing out the screen grab from this video and using it to scare away the neighbours kids!

Using I.T. to add green power to the network

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2007
in Global Warming, carbon neutrality, cix and climate change
. 6 Comments

The problem with wind power is that its production is variable and difficult to predict. From the perspective of a power supply company, such a supplier is unreliable and likely to de-stabilise the power network.

For instance, at 2am in Ireland, when the demand for electricity is near its lowest, if a 40mph wind is blowing across the country, wind can be supplying up to 30% of the demand. However, if the wind picks up to 50mph, the wind farms shut down to protect their mechanisms and suddenly you lose 30% of your supply! The electricity supply companies have to scramble to bring power stations online to meet the sudden fall off.

In CIX, we have come up with a strategy for Data Centre’s to act as a flywheel for electricity supply companies. This will allow the supply companies to greatly increase the amount of green energy they buy. And if the Data Centre’s are burning biodiesel then you are in a win-win situation .

It seems we are not alone in our thinking - Google, no-less, has come up with a similar strategy using cars! Yes cars. You’d think that with all their data centres they’d use them in the way we propose but they have decided to go the ‘vehicle to grid’ route for now.

Google’s strategy is modify hybrid cars so that they can consume power from the grid. These new ‘plug-in hybrids’ achieve 70-100mpg.

These plug-in hybrids take power from the grid overnight at times of low demand, say. Then the batteries in these cars, which store electricity, can ’sell’ electricity back to the grid at times of high demand.

Check out the Google video on this to see what I mean:

A cute idea but one which would have to achieve massive scale before making a difference, I suspect.

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