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DRT Joins Open Compute Foundation to Spread Word about Data Center Power, Efficiency
By David Sims TMCnet Contributing Editor
What are the best ways to tackle rising data center power consumption costs and data center efficiencies? Digital Realty Trust (DRT), a provider of data center solutions and consultation, might have the answer.
Recently, DRT announced that it has become an official member of the Open Compute Foundation, a foundation that encourages companies to share knowledge about data center power and efficiency. DRT officials said the company will use its standing to “release its secrets” on power and cooling at its 98 properties around the world, according to a recent DatacenterDynamics story.
DRT CTO Jim Smith said that becoming a member of the foundation means that DRT is committed to “developing a blueprint for data center facilities that increases efficiency, reduces costs and mitigates their environmental impact”.
You may have heard of the Open Compute Project which was set up by Facebook (News - Alert) to find more data center efficiency by sharing knowledge between operators and engineers working with different companies.
It’s basically a Web 2.0 efficiency effort. Just last month TMCnet reported that Mellanox (News - Alert) Technologies, a supplier of connectivity tools for data center servers and storage systems, joined the Open Compute Project under the Open Compute Foundation.
David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies, said at the time that they believe that the OCP (News - Alert) standards provide “best practices that will help more companies to build efficient solutions for the emerging Web 2.0 and cloud applications."
Getting into what the specifics might mean, Smith said DRT is planning to make the Open computer power and cooling option “available in our Powered Base Buildings and Turn-Key Data Centers in order to facilitate the adoption and delivery of this new type of data center architecture.”
The initiative is even encouraging industry players to share secrets about how their data centers run, from such traditionally sharing-shy entities as investment firm Goldman Sachs, Intel and Rackspace Hosting (News - Alert).
When Mellanox joined, the company announced immediate availability of 10GbE mezzanine cards based on Mellanox's energy efficient, high performance ConnectX-3 EN silicon that are compliant with the Open Compute Project specification. The OCP ConnectX-3 10GbE mezzanine adapters offer optimized latency and performance for converged I/O infrastructures while maintaining extremely low system power consumption.
“For the many corporate enterprise customers that may not have the resources to operate or deploy data centers at Facebook’s scale, Digital Realty can help bridge the gap for them in our existing portfolio or new build-t-suit facilities,” Smith noted.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Carrie Schmelkin
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