Solar power and your network
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes
I just finished an article written by Robin Lloyd, titled “Solar Power to Rule in 20 years.” Alternative energy sources have always been my passion, so I read on; maybe it would shed some light on the subject (lol – had to say it). Robin quotes Ray Kurzweil saying, “There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs.” Can you imagine being able to generate all the electricity required to run your server room? Imagine being the person who brings this technology to your company?
I spent my lunch time researching my proof of concept design. I Googled Solar Panels and found everything from cool DIY YouTube videos to full service companies. Finding a package wouldn’t be that difficult. Monitoring the package and integrating its data into our current network would be a little more involved.
Monitoring the output of a solar panel can be done with the Ravica Power Monitor. The power monitor can read both 120v and 22v. With this monitor you are able to determine up/down state and measure voltage on a constant basis. With this data you can be alerted on the sensor exceeding a pre-defined threshold with industry leading notification options like: SNMP traps, email, SMS, MMS and the recently released Skype support. You can also use the data to trend the panels output.
I was done, a quick proof of concept that could work. Imagine being able to show your company how much the IT department is saving! It might be a dream now, but someday it will be reality. Bigger ideas have been planned on the back of a cocktail napkin. Mine was in a Google note book, so I am a step a head!
Did you notice that the price of oil is up again?
- Jimmy D
Should we Recycle Server Room Heat?
Over the weekend, I was watching System, which is one of my favorite shows on Revision3 .com. One of the questions was on how to use the excess heat generated by computers to heat a room. I am a big supporter of the “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” philosophy, and thought that was a great idea.
After some hard and heavy Google’n, I was excited to find out other ways people have used this wasted server room energy. The story of a Mid-Western college saving their greenhouse caught my eye.
“The University of Notre Dame’s high-performance computing (HPC) department has taken things a step further. It now reuses the heat generated by its servers to warm up a historic greenhouse that the city of South Bend, Ind., has threatened to shut down.”
By using the heat from the server they are saving the university $100,000 on cooling costs and the owner of the botanical garden, the City of South Bend, Indiana, another $70,000 on heating costs. It’s win-win for everyone.
Now I am trying to figure out ways to implement this type of thinking here at work and at home. I think that my first step would be to add another temperature probe to the back of the server rack. This should give me the data that I need.
Maybe I can use the excess heat to warm up my cube. I’ll update you with what I find out.