Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets.
Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent.
Data centers are vital to huge Internet businesses such as Yahoo, and companies throughout this industry have started paying more and more attention to the amount of energy consumed by facilities that can have thousands of servers running all day, every day.
Google has talked up its own push for greater efficiency in its data centers, and Microsoft just announced plans for two new data centers geared around energy efficiency.
As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.
Yahoo plans to focus its green strategy on projects such as the Buffalo data center rather than the purchase of offsets, which means it will take them some time to return to the carbon-neutral goal set in 2007. "We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change," Filo wrote.
Corrected at 3:05 p.m.:
Yahoo clarified the new data center will be in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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Yahoo redesigns data center, ditches carbon offsets
Many of us are doing a great job of making our data centers more efficient, but why aren't more of us asking the big question?
Once the data center has reached optimal efficiency (best efficiency based on cost benefit), what do you do next? No one seems to be talking about the IT equipment. Do Yahoo & Google really need all the equipment they have? Have they virtualized fully or are they shutting off equipment during non-peak hours? A 20% reduction in server use by Yahoo or Google would equate to more savings than either of them could ever get from building (MEP) improvements.
Posted by Mark Thiele on Thursday, July 02 2009 02:02 AM