GE Achieve Platinum LEED Certified Data Centre

Of all LEED-certified buildings globally, only 6 percent have ever achieved Platinum certification. Considering that GE’s new LEED-Platinum building is a data centre in Kentucky only exemplifies how impressive this latest award is.

GE Appliances & Lighting’s data center houses 128 cabinets of highdensity, high-efficiency servers, providing the computing power necessary to run a global business.

The $48 million project was designed from the get-go to be a leaner impact on the environment, while still providing the massive computing power needed for such a major company as GE Appliances & Lighting.

“GE is joining an elite group of LEED-Platinum data centres around the world,” said Rick Fedrizzi, president, CEO and founding chair of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

“Given the amount of energy data centres consume, achieving LEED Platinum will help GE reduce its environmental footprint, while moving the industry forward in its effort to reduce the global environmental impact of IT operations.”

GE’s design and implementation of a LEED-Platinum certified data centre is especially impressive considering a recent McKinsey & Company study which estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from data centres will only quadruple in the coming years, exceeding emissions from the airlines industry by 2020.

“We’ve come a long way since we installed a UNIVAC system here nearly 60 years ago,” said James Campbell, president and CEO of GE Appliances and Lighting during the live-streamed news conference.

“Here” was an existing factory in Kentucky that GE converted, maintaining 98.3 percent of the walls, floors and roof. GE also received LEED credit for sourcing 50.7 percent of construction materials regionally; building with 30.2 percent recycled materials; and diverting 85.4 percent of on-site generated construction waste from the landfill (ie, recycling).

http://www.genewscenter.com/imagelibrary/Detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=4022

The data centre will be serving 27,000 employees in a hundred countries who currently work for GE’s Appliances & Lighting branch, and it will provide more than four times the capacity of the data centre that it is replacing, which will allow it to handle the growth of the company for some 25 years.

In the end, the new data centre is 34 percent better in terms of energy savings than a typical code-compliant building.

Providing the computing power needed to run a large company like GE Appliances & Lighting requires a lot of servers and a lot of cooling. But GE have installed high-density servers so that more computing power is confined to a smaller space, meaning that there is an overall smaller amount of space to cool than the data centre it is replacing.

“It’s hard for data centers to achieve LEED certification,” said Anita Baldock, GE’s data center project lead, in a video about the facility. “If you’re making a facility to house thousands of computers, obviously you’re going to have a huge power draw.”

“As GE invests in the business and creates more manufacturing jobs in the U.S., our new high-efficiency data center will help us manage energy costs so we can compete in a global marketplace,” said Alan Kocsi, chief information officer, GE Appliances & Lighting.

“GE’s new data center will also provide the high-density computing necessary to support global business growth and significant manufacturing-revitalization efforts that will provide customers with innovative technologies, high-quality products, and better customer service.”

Source: GE

Cyber Monday sales strong during shopping blitz.(Microsoft Blog)

Seattle Post-Intelligencer November 30, 2009 By late in the day, sales on what the e-retail industry calls Cyber Monday were up 11 percent from a year ago, according to Web analytics firm Coremetrics. website cyber monday sales

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images A man looks at a Cyber Monday advertisement on his laptop computer Monday in Los Angeles. After a modest start to the U.S. holiday shopping season with Black Friday, online retailers were looking to Cyber Monday for a boost in sales. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent $41.2 billion over Thanksgiving weekend, compared to $41.0 billion a year ago. Click to enlarge Cyber Monday, the first weekday after Black Friday, traditionally is a big day for online shopping. Web retailers stepped up promotions and discounts, though online sales account for only about 10 percent of holiday shopping.

“Sales have been going well,” said John Squire, Coremetrics’ chief strategy officer. “In Cyber Monday 2008, sales picked up a little quicker in the afternoon than we’ve seen in Cyber Monday 2009.” The San Mateo, Calif.-based company likes to compare Cyber Monday sales to online Black Friday sales, to see how “cyber” the Monday actually is. As of about 5 p.m. Pacific time, Cyber Monday was about 13 percent ahead of Black Friday, Squire said.

Last year, Cyber Monday sales were about 50 percent ahead of Black Friday.

“I’m hesitant to say Cyber Monday will beat Black Friday to the same level this year,” said Squire, whose company represents about 500 retailers.

For Seattle-based Amazon.com, Cyber Monday was “looking out to be definitely one of our busiest days of the season,” spokeswoman Anya Waring said. “It’s a huge day for us from both sales and traffic perspectives.” However, neither Black Friday nor Cyber Monday are generally Amazon’s busiest days. The company’s biggest day comes in mid-December, usually on the last day that free shipping will get popular items to their destinations before Christmas, Waring said.

Nevertheless, Amazon sales on Cyber Monday were “exceeding our expectations” late in the day, she said.

The online retailer’s most popular items were TomTom and Garmin GPS devices, Apple iPod Touches, Samsung LCD HDTVs, various LEGO sets, Elmo’s Tickle Hands from Fisher Price, and Bakugan-related products, Waring said. Amazon also set up a special Web page, amazon.com/cybermonday, for special deals.

Product-comparison sites, such as Microsoft’s Bing Shopping, have grown in popularity in recent years. But at publication time, it was still too early to tell how big those sites’ piece of the Cyber Monday pie was, and Microsoft didn’t have any figures to share. in our site cyber monday sales

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images FedEx workers in Miami sort through packages during last year’s Cyber Monday, on Dec. 2, 2008. As online retailers offer promotions on free shipping during Cyber Monday, shipping companies such as FedEx see more volume as the orders are processed and mailed Click to enlarge The Bing team plans to release some Cyber Monday information on Tuesday.

The biggest surprise of this year’s shopping blitz was sales on Thanksgiving Day, Squire said. Last year, sales on Thanksgiving were about 90 percent less than on Black Friday; this year was different.

“They’ve finished dinner, it’s 6 o’clock Pacific, and you have people going online and buying,” Squire said. “It’s Cyber Thursday, or Cyber Sunday. Maybe it’ll be just one big Cyber Week.” Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at market-research firm NPD Group, told The Associated Press that this year saw the “graying of Black Friday.” Big promotions are being spread out over a longer period of time.

From the AP:

The Monday after Thanksgiving is usually far from the busiest online shopping day of the year, but it is typically one of the 10 busiest. It was dubbed “Cyber Monday” by the National Retail Federation trade group in 2005 to describe the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.

The thinking was that shoppers who lacked broadband Internet access at home would wait until returning to work to look online. Now that most homes have broadband, that rationale has faded.

Retailers also have done a much better job this year of advertising their holiday deals, Squire said, driving more consumers online and into brick-and-mortar stores. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter also have been driving promotions.

Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru predicts online holiday sales will increase 8 percent this year to $44.7 billion, according to the AP.