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The Greening of IT
162 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

Rhode Island and Connecticut. In addition, the university is moving toward
providing students with unified communications and IPTV and is in talks
with an accounting software company to host apps in the Bryant data center
to bring in extra cash.
Rich Siedzik, director of computer and telecommunications services at
Bryant, indicated that before the new data center was created, just reacting to
problems was the major focus. Now, with the new data center, his team has
more time to be innovative. The university IT services group has moved from
an operational focus to a strategic one. With all the IT projects, Bryant is
now considered one of the most wired campuses in the country. Bryant is also
considering ways to further save energy.

Other Modular and Container Data Center Designs:
Google, Sun, Rackable
As mentioned at the beginning of the section describing the modular data
center for Bryant University, other IT vendors offer similar designs: designs
similar in concept to the IBM design used for Bryant, including Google’s Data
ptg
Center in a Box design, Sun Microsystems’ Project Blackbox, and Rackable
Systems’ ICE Cube. Google has a patent for its Data Center in a Box concept.
One of the convenient ways to search for patents is with Google’s patent
search engine located at: http://www.google.com/patents. The following URL
was obtained from the Google patent search engine based on a search on
Google’s Data Center in a Box patent: http://www. google.com/patents?id=
7TypAAAAEBAJ&dq=patent+number+7,278,273.
Google’s patent covers “modular data centers with modular components
that can [be] implemented in numerous ways, including as a process, an
apparatus, a system, a device, or a method.” The patent also covers a method
for deployment that includes building one module within a ready-to-ship
container, shipment via a transport infrastructure, several computing systems
mounting within the container, and transporting the container to a new site
via the infrastructure. Finally, it states that deployment will involve connect-
ing at least one resource connection—like electricity, natural gas, water, and
Internet access—to at least one module.
In 2008, Microsoft announced that it had completed the first phase of its
new, container-based data center in the Chicago area. The new facility is
being built on modular, shipping-container-based data centers. The testing
phase indicated the data center to have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
rating of 1.22. In 2008, Google also released PUEs for some of its data