Friday, July 1st, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	New Windfarms to Power Google Data Centers in Europe Google data centers in Europe are now one huge step closer to being fully powered by renewable energy. The internet giant has agreed to buy the entire future output of two windfarms currently under construction in Norway and Sweden. The 50-turbine project in Norway will be the largest windfarm in the country, and the deal represents Google’s largest renewable energy purchase agreement in Europe to date. Google is one of a handful of the biggest tech companies that have been making huge investments in development of new renewable energy projects to compensate for regular grid energy their massive data centers consume around the world. Facebook and Microsoft have made data center-related power purchase agreements of similar magnitude, but Google pioneered among data center operators the practice of long-term utility-scale power purchase agreements that provide the financial security these development projects require to proceed while securing static long-term renewable energy rates. Data centers consume a lot of energy. In the US alone, they use about 70 billion kilowatt-hours annually, or 2 percent of the country’s entire energy consumption, according to a recently published study by the US Department of Energy. Read more: Here’s How Much Energy All US Data Centers Consume While the growth of its energy consumption has slowed down substantially in recent years, due primarily to efficiency improvements, the industry’s energy footprint is enormous and will continue growing into the foreseeable future. As it grows, there has been pressure on data center operators in recent years, especially well-known companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, to reduce the environmental impact of their operations. Combined, Google’s two windfarms in the Nordics will have the capacity to generate 236MW of power, Marc Orman, the company’s EU energy lead, wrote in a blog post announcing the agreements. The company has now made seven power purchase agreements in Europe (four of them in Sweden), which total more than 500MW. See also: Cleaning Up Data Center Power is Dirty Work Globally, Google has made 18 such deals to date, totaling 2.5 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity. The company has a goal of powering its operations by 100 percent renewable energy. The 50-turbine Norway project is expected to come online late next year, while the Swedish project, a 22-turbine windfarm, will be completed by early 2018, according to Orman. “In both cases, we’ve signed long-term contracts that give us price certainty and help wind farm developers secure construction financing, in these cases from companies like Blackrock and Ardian,” Orman wrote. See also: Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy It Generates There are four Google data center campuses in Europe: in Dublin; Eemshaven, Netherlands; Hamina, Finland; and St. Ghislain, Belgium. The company also has a global content caching network that lives primarily in leased colocation data centers, but it doesn’t disclose their location. The biggest Google data center footprint is in the US, where the company owns and operates eight massive data center campuses in rural towns in Iowa, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Oregon. There are is also one Google data center in Latin America (in Chile), and two in Asia, in Taiwan and Singapore. See also: US Data Center Giants in Europe: the Brexit Effect (Comment on this)
3:00p	Oracle Loses $3B Verdict for Ditching HP Itanium Chip *Updated (Bloomberg) — Oracle was ordered by a jury to pay $3 billion after finding that billionaire Larry Ellison and his company violated a contract to support software for Hewlett-Packard’s once-promising Itanium chip. The jury saw the case as clear cut and were swayed by what they saw as efforts by Ellison and former HP CEO Mark Hurd to hurt his previous employer, said juror Kyra Knaver, a student at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Ellison lured Hurd to Oracle in 2010 shortly after Hurd resigned amid an investigation into his relationship with a contractor. Jurors in state court in San Jose, California, reached the unanimous verdict in less than five hours of deliberations Thursday, concluding that Oracle’s decision to bail out of an agreement to develop software for the Itanium chip hurt HP’s revenue. Oracle said it will appeal the verdict, which is the largest in the US this year according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. Read more: Larry Ellison Tells Jury Oracle’s Itanium Retreat Was Just Business “Oracle’s decision to stop future software development on the Itanium server platform in March of 2011 was a clear breach of contract that caused serious damage to HP and our customers,” Hewlett Packard Enterprise said in an e-mailed statement. The decision is the second trial defeat for Oracle in about a month after the company lost a $9 billion verdict to Google while trying to stake a claim to the search giant’s Android phone business. The $3 billion award, if ultimately paid, would account for 5.4 percent of Oracle’s $56 billion cash on hand, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. HP has since separated two companies, with HP Enterprise taking the business under dispute with Oracle. HP Enterprise, looking to invest in new ways to win customers, has about $9 billion in cash, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Since it split in November from its sibling company, now HP Inc., its shares have jumped about 10.4 percent. Developing Software In 2010, Oracle agreed to continue supporting the Itanium chip among other products. Two years later, a judge ruled that Oracle was contractually obligated to continue developing software for Itanium. Oracle told the jury at this month’s trial that it had re-introduced the platform and would include support for it in future updates. “Oracle never believed it had a contract to continue to port our software to Itanium indefinitely and we do not believe so today,” the company said in a statement after the verdict. “Oracle has been providing all its latest software for the Itanium systems since the original ruling while HP and Intel stopped developing systems years ago.” HP Enterprise argued that by abandoning the product in 2011, the damage was already done. Diana Garrett, a retired Intel software manager, said her familiarity with chip development helped her to quickly reject Oracle’s case. “Their arguments didn’t make sense,” she said. “Pretty much nothing added up.” The Itanium chip, developed in collaboration between HP and Intel in 2001, was once touted as architecture that would be pervasive in the computer industry. The processor failed to win industry-wide adoption, causing both HP and Intel to reduce their investment in it. The case is Hewlett-Packard Co. v. Oracle Corp., 11-cv-203163, California Superior Court, Santa Clara County (San Jose) (Comment on this)
6:25p	NRDC Acknowledges Its Data Center Energy Estimates Were Off The high-profile US activist group Natural Resources Defense Council, which two years ago rang a loud alarm bell about growing data center energy use in the US, has responded to the US government’s latest report on data center energy consumption in the country, which shows that NRDCs 2014 report grossly overstated the amount of energy the industry consumes. The government estimated that all data centers in the US consumed about 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014, which is 6.4 billion kWh less than NRDC’s estimate for 2011 and 21 billion kWh less than NRDC’s estimate for 2013. The industry’s overall data center energy consumption grows over time, as more facilities are built and brought online, even though the government’s study shows that the growth rate has been much lower than even the study’s authors had expected, due primarily to efficiency improvements. The government’s study, second of its kind, was conducted by researchers from the US Department of Energy, Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon University. Read more: Here’s How Much Energy All US Data Centers Consume Pierre Delforge, director of NRDC’s High Tech Sector Energy Efficiency, Energy and Transportation program, acknowledged the discrepancy between NRDC’s and the DOE’s data center energy use estimates in a blog post on the group’s website Thursday, saying NRDC had used the best available data at the time, but didn’t say how big the discrepancy was. The government’s estimate is “lower than previous industry analysts’ estimates, which NRDC’s 2014 report used as the best available information at the time,” he wrote. Estimating industry-wide data center energy consumption is extremely difficult. Most data center operators don’t disclose their energy use, and many, who operate older, poorly instrumented facilities, simply don’t have that information. Data available to researchers is limited, Arman Shehabi, research scientist at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the new study’s lead authors, told Data Center Knowledge in an interview. The researchers relied to a great extent on data center sizes, infrastructure efficiency estimates, and server shipment estimates provided by industry analysts, so the final conclusions about the industry’s overall energy use are a combination of some bottom-up analysis and lots of “top-down” assumptions, he said. Where the DOE report agreed with NRDC’s findings was that most of the efficiency gains were being made by operators of hyperscale data centers, companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. While their overall data center footprint is growing quickly, most of the world’s data centers are smaller, predominantly inefficient single-user enterprise facilities. See also: The Problem of Inefficient Cooling in Smaller Data Centers Another point of agreement is that the total amount of energy consumption in the US is still enormous, and that there are no signs that demand for data center capacity will slow. As Delforge pointed out in his blog post, the amount of carbon emissions associated with generating 70 billion kWh of energy is about equivalent to the monthly carbon output of the UK, the world’s fifth largest economy. Both Delforge and authors of the DOE report cautioned that the recent gains in efficiency don’t mean the problem of growing data center energy use has been solved for good. (Comment on this)

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