Web Hosting News

We received a very long press release this week from TrendPoint Systems, a company that produces a “turn-key data center energy management solution.”

It’s not a company we’re especially familiar with at the WHIR, but with TrendPoint’s fairly singular focus on data center energy efficiency and carbon monitoring, it’s an organization that ought to be thoroughly on the radar of the hosting business.

Along with its TrendOne, EnerSure and EnviroCube products, which are generally hardware offerings designed to monitor environmental conditions and energy efficiency in enterprise data centers, the company appears to be actively publishing white papers on the general subject of data center efficiency, which makes it especially relevant to just about anyone operating a data center.

I know at the WHIR, we’ve got a pretty heavy appetite for published “green data center” information at the moment.

The TrendPoint data sheet can be downloaded in PDF form from the company’s website, so I won’t go into exacting detail about the plan itself.

In introducing the four-point plan, the press releases on several of the more important widely held truths regarding data center efficiency. Namely, that data centers are well on their way to becoming one of the world’s largest consumers of energy (and subsequently producers of carbon emissions), and that as a result of that, we’re not far from seeing some tough regulatory attention to carbon emissions worldwide.

The release includes a quote from TrendPoint CEO Bob Hunter, who offers an in-a-nutshell view of the current energy near-crisis facing data center operators.

“Data centers will soon be hit with a ‘perfect storm’ in terms of coal and natural gas driven utility cost increases coupled with the new carbon caps. These sites already have energy densities that are ten times greater than that of commercial office buildings, and their energy use is doubling every four years. The combination of rising energy usage coupled with significant electricity price increases and carbon caps creates a very troubling picture for data centers.”

Before we get too far along, here, I’ll warn you that there most likely isn’t going to be a “eureka!” moment for any of you in reading the four-point plan. It’s a pretty straightforward list of common-sense tactics responsible data center operators (especially in the service provider business) will most likely already have investigated, if they’re not already implementing them to some significant degree.

Unsurprisingly, and understandably, the four-point plan is liberally populated with TrendPoint sales pitches. This ought not stun anyone who has ever read any white paper ever produced by any company.

Set an energy budget

Companies, says TrendPoint, should have an energy and carbon budget that can be broken down among users, departments and sites. “Colocation facilities, in particular, need to be able to provide each customer with the ability to manage their own energy and carbon usage and to provide a system to bill back customers appropriately.”

Virtualize servers

The oft-repeated point - consolidating your physical resources and trimming away unused capacity is a data center energy saving tactic of the “do it right now” variety. TrendPoint’s interesting add-on: “TrendPoint has seen that virtualized servers generate significantly more heat visa-vis the under-utilized machines and, therefore, need careful attention with their cooling management. Without proper cooling, virtualized servers, like all highly utilized systems, can develop ’server thermal inversions’ within a data cabinet”

Equalize heat and cooling balance

TrendPoint says matching cooling resources to the needs of each individual cabinet can save 25 percent or more on their cooling energy use. And you can conserve more by balancing heat loads through grouping servers into zones within cabinets and working toward equalized heat loads.

Manage to the metrics

One of the more overt TrendPoint pitches in this section, but an interesting point - as data center equipment changes, managers need to continually monitor and manage heat and cooling. The company makes solutions that manage energy use according to The Green Grid’s PUE standard.

In the press release, TrendPoint describes how a couple of its customers are seeing fast ROI from using the company’s products.

The PDF is worth going through. It includes a lot of study-supplied supplemental information. And the great thing about energy efficiency is it has that potential to impact the bottom line of your data center operations. If the ideas (or even the products) discussed in the document have the potential to do that for your data center, you can definitely afford the 15-or-so minutes it will take to read.

One more note - there’s a link at the end of the press release to a site with more information about some of the proposed energy regulations.

Managed dedicated hosting provider SingleHop recently launched LEAP, what the company considers the first “webtop” or browser-based dedicated server interface (in other words, a fancy, schmancy control panel) that enables users to have complete management access to their dedicated servers.

We recently spoke to Dan Ushman, the co-founder and vice president of SingleHop about the company’s latest innovation.

You can get a closer look at LEAP with the demo on SingleHop’s website.

In June, application delivery optimization company KEMP Technologies launched a version of its load balancing and delivery control solutions designed for managed hosting providers.

While at HostingCon 2008, the company took the opportunity to elaborate on this while discussing the challenges facing today’s managed hosting providers and how to better address the growing application delivery needs of SMBs.

We sat down with Peter Melerud, VP of product management at KEMP Technologies to learn more about the company’s latest LoadMaster solution, it’s recently launched technical training program for channel partners and its upcoming virtualization-friendly offering.

A few weeks back, the WHIR conducted an email interview with Mark Klein, director of business development at Sedo, and asked him to make the case for his HostingCon 2008 session titled “Tapping the Exploding Secondary Domain Market: How It Can Increase Your Revenue and Customer Loyalty.”

Afterwards, I caught up with Mark at Sedo’s booth and asked him to give us some further insight into the maturing secondary domain name landscape and how web hosts could take advantage of it.