The site, which houses the IT infrastructure of almost 500 major international organisations, will now purchase 100% of its energy from UK renewable energy provider, SmartestEnergy.

According to Telehouse, SmartestEnergy buys energy from independent generators from around the country and supplies it to its customers.

The move, according to Tokuji Mitsui, managing director of Telehouse and KDDI Europe, is part of the firm’s strategy to go green.

“The biggest challenge we face at Telehouse is to improve our energy efficiency and reduce our carbon footprint, and in order to support this challenge Telehouse has worked closely with industry leading partners and regulators. We are committed to our environmental responsibilities and continue to work to align our business strategy with our green ethics wherever possible,” he said.

“The majority of electricity supplied to us is utilised by our clients, therefore it is integral that we take on initiatives such as the 100 per cent green energy supply, which in turn benefits our customer’s credentials by reducing their carbon footprint. We intend to roll out this green partnership initiative with SmartestEnergy to all our European sites in the near future.”

What is unclear however is whether the decision to go with renewable energy will cost Telehouse any more than its current cost base, or whether any extra cost will be passed on to its customers.

One of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of renewable energy is the cost, since it typically costs more than conventional grid power. This, according to most industry experts, make renewable energy for large facilities like data centres economical infeasible unless government subsidies are involved – see our story on NTT America’s deployment of renewable energy systems at its California data centre.

Obviously, the press release can be interpreted in another way. Telehouse can source all its energy from SmartestEnergy for its own systems, but leave the choice to its customers to select its own source of power. In face the release makes clear that Telehouse London are awarded the Carbon Trust Standard, which certifies that organisations have measured, managed and reduced its carbon emissions across its OWN operations. It says nothing of the energy source that is used to power the equipment of its customers.

On the other hand, by connected to SmartestEnergy, Telehouse now have the ability to offer its customers access to renewables as well, if it is not doing so already. In fact, many data centre operators and managed hosting providers offer some kind of service for its customers to go greener, including more efficient equipment, renewable energy power, and so on.

As part of its “conquests 2015″ plan, Orange Business has identified cloud computing, M2M, as well as video conferencing, as “priority areas for growth.” What’s interesting is that all of these areas are part green ICT, and represent technologies that should help drive efficiencies in the enterprise, cities, and between people.

Of course, the operator didn’t mentioned the green element as such, but it is cool that a major international telco now sees much of its growth potential in green services.

Here are what Orange Business is setting out to do:

• generating 500 million euros in cloud computing by 2015 by accelerating its developments focusing on four areas: cloud-ready networks, “as a service” infrastructures, “as a service” collaborative solutions and communications, and application stores.
• selling 10 million SIM cards by 2015 on the M2M market (or Internet of Things), capitalizing on: the development of services beyond connectivity, its dedicated international expertise center in Brussels and its role as the driving force for the standardization of the market.
• becoming number 1 for videoconferencing in France and one of the top three worldwide. The guiding principles include: interoperability of terminals and networks, development of managed and hosted solutions, as well as simplification of uses through user support.

Oh, the fourth objective in the list is to generate 1 billion euros in revenues from emerging countries.

The primary driver for the clouds, according to GIA, is factors such as growing prominence of enterprise mobility, need for business continuity, and increasing adoption of cloud strategy among SMEs.

The benefits of cloud computing are earmarked as “radically lower IT costs,” allowing “even smaller companies to piece together an IT project without spending on purchasing legacy server, and storage systems,” and ease from “the burden of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required in running the network.”

“By offering a more cost-effective, less risky, and fundamentally faster alternative to on-site application developments, cloud computing is poised to transform the economics of information technology in the next few years,” GIA said in its release.

GIA continued that cloud computing adoption is being accelerated given the recent economic recession because it can potentially slash IT costs by over 35%.

“The bad economy fed the global cloud computing services market as cash, and revenue starved companies prowled for IT solutions that are cost-effective, require minimum to zero investments, and low management of computing resources. Technically, the feature of multi-tenancy, or the ability to scale up or scale down services on demand, makes fiscal sense in tough economic climate. And with cloud computing fitting the bill in every respect, the business case for the technology stands exemplified. In short, recession became the push factor, which tripped the market into the mass adoption stage.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/11/21/prweb8977106.DTL#ixzz1eW0e71jg

The site, to be located in the city of Hohhot, is expected to cost 12 billion yuan, or US$1.9 billion. The operator has already signed a MoU with the regional government for the project, according to chairman of its board, Wang Jianzhou.

One reason cited by the report in the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, is the region’s abundant wind and coal power supply, which ensures supply for the data centre.

The centre will support the operator’s pending roll out of 4G, or TDD-LTE, services in the coming year. China Mobile has more than 630 million subscribers, making it the largest mobile operator in the world by the number of subscribers.

Core to the improvements was the adoption of a solution from Vigilent, an intelligent energy management system firm. NTT America chose Vigilent as its energy management partner after a successful pilot project at a data centre in San Jose. Following the success of the Vigilent system during the pilot project, NTT America extended deployments at both the San Jose and Sterling data centers. The deployments at the two data centers encompassed 178 DX and chilled-water CRACs (Computer Room Air Conditioners), and in total more than 3,000 racks of servers, within 135,000 sq. ft. of floor space.

In addition to direct energy savings, NTT America identified potential indirect financial benefits totalling US$210,000 annually as a result of the Vigilent solution. These include reduced maintenance costs, increased cooling capacity, improved thermal management and deferred capital expenditures.

The system also improved the PUE performance by 10% at the Sterling site and 5% at the San Jose site, and offered a ROI period of under two years, NTT America said.

“We recognize the importance of reducing the amount of energy required to cool the data centers NTT America operates. Equally important is our enterprise customers’ interest in, and support of, energy efficiency both from the environmental and cost reduction avenues. As a key driver for the future of the data center, NTT America will continue to evaluate, support and deploy technologies that can be environmentally sound and cost effective for our customers,” said Kazuhiro Gomi, president and CEO of NTT America.

According to NTT, the Vigilent system is able to deliver cost saving benefits through dynamic, automated control of extremely complex cooling environments utilizing advanced, artificial intelligence technology. The system employs a wireless mesh network of sensors which provides real-time feedback from tens to thousands of data points throughout the data center to an artificial intelligence engine. The engine incorporates this data, along with thousands of other variables, to dynamically and continually adjust air cooling and flow equipment for maximum efficiency in alignment with changing IT loads, within pre-specified environmental parameters.

The first is on the company’s view on PUE.

While there are no surprises in terms of the company’s definition of PUE, Adil Attlassy, vice president of Technology at Digital Realty Trust points out that its importance extends beyond just an internal measurement of efficiency, but serves as a global standard that can be used to benchmark from data centre to data centre and user to user.

“We see that as being very critical part of our business, to demonstrate to our client that we have a consistent methodology” across the company’s global footprint, Attlassy said.

The second video illustrates several best practices for data centre operators inside Digital Realty Trust’s facilities.

Notable points provided by Attlassy include sealing floor gaps to minimise cool air leakage, using cold/hot aisles, and reconfiguring the fan speed of servers – which come default from the manufacturer set at maximum, which is not always required.

Services are available from the company’s 18-hectacre campus in Kelfavik, Iceland, a location with key operating advantages that providers well over 50% cost savings over traditional data centres in Europe or New York, the company said.

The company also announced its first customer, Datapipe and its principle supplier, Colt Data Centre Services, a producer of modular data centres.

Verne Global’s commercial launch marks the first realisation of what has become a key marketing pitch for the Icelandic government – green data centres.

According to Verne Global, its facility is 100% carbon neutral, drawing power from Iceland’s dual-sourced renewable energy power grid and utilising Iceland’s ambient temperatures to provide free cooling.

“The demand for high capacity, flexible and scalable data centre campuses has increased in parallel with the growing concern of rising cost and environmental impact of traditional data centres,” said Jeff Monroe, CEO of Verne Global. “We have designed a flexible, dynamic solution that answers the need for both high capacity computing and cost management.”

Another benefit of being in Iceland is that Verne Global not only has access to power and space, but plenty of it. The company says that the new facility will basically be able to support “almost any data centre power requirement, from racks to megawatts.”

The abundance of power available on the Verne Global campus, combined with it being 100% renewable is unique to the colocation industry.

Verne Global says it has selected Colt’s modular data centre solution, which is customised to offer chillerless cooling. The design allows Verne Global to gain rapid entry into the colocation business.

“Power remains one of the primary concerns for corporate IT managers as they evaluate their data centre needs and options going forward in terms of availability, cost and environmental impact,” said Katie Broderick, Senior Research Analyst, Servers and Datacenters, IDC. “Renewable power will continue to play an important role and, as the market evolves, Verne Global’s ability to source an abundant supply, coupled with the added benefit of free cooling, will present a compelling availability, cost and environmental advantage in the marketplace for companies looking to expand their data centre operations.”

The facility will be fitted out with a solution from Colt Data Centre Services (unrelated to Colt Telecom), which makes modular data centre equipment. According to Colt, it is shipping 500 square metres of capacity to Verne Global.

Datapipe is first customer

Verne Global also announced that managed services and infrastructure provider, Datapipe, has signed on as one of its first customers.

Datapipe says that Iceland’s location between the two largest financial markets in the world, London and New York, allows it to offer strategic services, such as disaster recovery, business continuity and cloud computing solutions.

“Verne Global has engineered an environmentally sustainable data centre that will enable Datapipe to expand into a new market while continuing our environmental leadership,” said Robb Allen, CEO of Datapipe. “Power and cooling efficiencies combined with the strategic geographic location will provide our clients with an option for carbon neutral, enterprise ready IT services and a 100% green cloud.”

The interview is from May, at the eGovAsia conference here in Hong Kong, but it’s still very much relevant today.

There are no obvious surprises in what Lee says, but he does summarise very clearly the advantages of Hong Kong in Part 1, including reliable and relatively cheap power, low or no, tax for equipment imports, availability of skill workers, a reliable rule of law, and the fact that we are located far from the earthquake zones.

He also highlights the challenges for data centre operators in Hong Kong in Part 2, namely the availability of land. According to Lee, the solution is to rezone land and establish dedicated areas for data centres, which would lowered the cost of bringing in and developing the support infrastructure, such as the power utilities, fibre infrastructure and so on.

According to the words of a Google spokesperson in Hong Kong, the reasons for its choice of location for its data centres are, “closeness to our users, robust local infrastructure, reliable power, availability of skilled workers, reasonable business relationships and cost,” as well as “close proximity to existing underwater communications cables.”

Most likely, the Hong Kong site will serve China and North Asia, while the Singapore facility will serve India and the rest of South Asia. The Taiwan site will obviously add extra capacity as well as increased resiliency to the regional infrastructure.

Like its facilities in the US, energy efficiency and environmental sustainability will be at the heart of the designs for the new site, which will be “subject to the same high technical and environmental standards we use worldwide.”

But while the new facilities will be as green as they can be, it is also obvious that Google is putting performance over environmental sustainability. As NTT said last week, data centre locations will eventually be selected based on either performance, as in proximity to end-users, or environmental sustainability, as in green power.

In this way, it doesn’t matter how efficient Google’s new sites are, the power that it uses will be from coal fire plants. Also, the climate of Singapore and Hong Kong won’t support green technologies like free air cooling.

Still, the presence of Google data centres in Asia will go a long way in establishing new green benchmarks for the region. Just as it helped turn the spotlight on power usage efficiency (PUE) for the data centre industry in the US, Google’s new sites will surely show the rest of Asia what can be accomplished.

According to the Brandon Lee, chief strategy officer at NTT Com Asia, there will be two types of data centres in the future – one type that is optimised for energy efficiency and cost, and a second type that is focused specifically on reducing the latency of applications it houses.

Basically, there will be data centres that will serve basic Internet content, so where they are located is not really that important as users can wait a few more milliseconds to download their friend’s photo from facebook. This category of data centres will be located in cooler regions, where they can take advantage of free cooling for much of the year. Other critical factors for the location of this category of data centres are regulatory support [read tax breaks], power [read cheap, and preferably green], and the availability of skill resources.

Obviously, this type of data centres has been discussed extensively. In fact, the government of Iceland has made it platform to attract foreign investment. More recently, reports have Google, Facebook, and no doubt others, now building new facilities in Sweden and Finland in a similar vein.

What Lee brings to the discussion is that these types of data centres won’t be enough. There will be a requirement for another type of data centre, one that will be needed to serve latency-sensitive [read high frequency trading], and/or mission-critical enterprise applications.

The type of facility will put proximity to inter-related systems, such as the trading platforms of various stock exchanges, as the key factor for their location and design. For these sites, cost won’t matter because they are support commercially vested applications. The ONLY thing that matters will be the latency, often measured in micro-seconds. Obviously, other things like redundancy, reliability, scalability, also matter, but those all can be acquired as long as cost is not an issue, and in these cases, it really doesn’t matter to some extent.

This type of facility is what NTT Global is calling ‘financial data centres.’ The operator is currently building out two of these sites in Hong Kong and Singapore – literally across the street from the respective market’s stock exchanges, as part of a pan-Asia ultra-low-latency platform that will include a third financial data centre in Tokyo, connected together via its upcoming high capacity subsea cable, ASE (Asia Submarine-cable Express), which links Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan.

Check out a video of their Hong Kong Financial Data Centre