Category: cix

cix

Psst! You wanna buy a data center?

Well, ok not an entire data center but my share of the CIX data center.

As I have mentioned before, I am moving to Spain in July. When I move, I will no longer be able to make a meaningful contribution to the further development of CIX and in that scenario it would not be helpful of me to hold onto my shareholding.

This is an opportunity for someone with a passion for data centers/hosting to purchase an interest in Ireland’s newest and Greenest data center at a very early stage in its business life. The buy in price now will be cheap compared to how much the shares should be worth in a couple of years.

Because of its strong focus on energy efficiency from the outset, and the open approach we took in the build, CIX has received a lot of very positive publicity. This has obviously translated into goodwill, business enquiries and servers in racks.

Whoever buys the shares will need to be able to commit serious time to further growing CIX’s business (and therefore their investment).

For the right candidate with the correct technical skills my business partners would be willing to be very innovative around how the funding is set up so don’t think big money to buy into this.

If you are interested in this opportunity, drop me a mail or give me a call to discuss.

cix, energy, Green, IT@Cork

Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint – presentation

I gave a talk at the it@cork Green IT event yesterday entitled “Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint”.

The talk goes into some detail on how Cork Internet eXchange, the cork-based data centre I am a director of, achieves hyper energy efficiency.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=reducing-your-costs-and-your-carbon-footprint-1204720215720098-2

It is also worth noting that tomorrow’s OpenCoffee session is in CIX. Hope to see you there.

carbon neutrality, cix, Climate Change, energy

Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint – A Case Study

I am speaking at the it@cork Green IT breakfast event tomorrow morning (5th March ’08). My presentation is “Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint – A Case Study” and I will be using CIX as a case study on how innovative thinking can lower your carbon footprint and your costs.

The event kicks off at 07:45 in the Cork International Hotel, at Cork Airport and the other speakers are James Governor of RedMonk, whose talk is titled “The Sustainability Imperative: Towards Greener Software” and Mike Hughes of Microsoft Ireland who is going to talk about Windows Vista energy conservation features.

Should be a good event (and you get breakfast!).

Blogging, blogs, carbon neutrality, cix, Climate Change, data centre, energy, Microsoft, Silverlight, social media, video

My interview published on Channel 9

When I was in Barcelona for TechEd last year Charles Torre did a video interview with me. We had a wide ranging chat about data centre energy efficiency strategies, blogs/blogging and the Death Star!

Charles emailed me last night to let me know that the interview has now been published on Channel 9 (Channel 9 is a very high trafficked online forum where videos are posted and discussions on those videos take place).

It has already been viewed over 600 times!

The player is SilverLight and doesn’t appear to work on the Mac for some reason but there is a link to a .wmv version of the video so you can download and watch locally.

cix, data centre, energy, hosting, IT@Cork

CIX on Intruders.tv

We held our Open Day in CIX a couple of weeks back. We invited local businesses to come in and have a look at the data centre infrastructure before we closed up all the ducts and hazardous areas.

We also invited Intruders.tv to come along and film the event. They did and they published the interview they did with Adam and I the other day.

http://new.intruders.tv/swf/flvplayer.swf

The Open day was the day after the it@cork conference so I was quite tired. Watching the video now I realise I messed up on some of the figures! Typical data centres operate at 30% energy efficiency (not 70% like I said in the video) and CIX is rated to operate at 80% energy efficiency due to the innovative technologies we outlined in this interview.

cix, Climate Change, Conference

Off to Le Web3

I’m heading to the Le Web3 conference this week to deliver a talk on using technology (energy demand management) to reduce carbon footprints.

This comes from our work in CIX on delivering a hyper energy-efficient data centre and my working with Synergy Module (an energy management startup).

If you are going to the Le Web3 conference, I’d love to meet up. Drop me a mail (tom@tomrafteryit.net) or send me a text (+353-86-384 0828).

cix, cork, data centre

CIX open day

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

cix, data centre

US Data Center chillers not backed up by diesel generators?

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

cix, Conference, data centre, IT@Cork, speaking, Web 2.0

Phew!

These next few weeks and months are manic busy.

I think I need to clone me!