HP and Facebook act on ‘hyperscale’ data centres in bid to curb computing emissions

Hewlett Packard has announced a new data server service that it says will reduce energy use by up to 89% and halve costs.

Project Moonshot, designed for companies operating thousands of servers, will save space and energy through the sharing of storage, networking, power and cooling. The firm says the initiative addresses the needs of “hyperscale” computing environments, which it claims face a capacity crisis and require fundamental change.

It says its Moonshot, which will be developed over the next few years, will simplify high-volume data servers, using up to 94% less space than traditional server systems, reducing energy costs by up to 63%.

The move is one of many recent attempts to reduce the environmental impacts of data centres. Facebook’s recently-built ‘green’ data centre in Sweden, will run on renewable energy and reduce its reliance on some generators by 70%. Partly an answer to a Greenpeace report that claimed over half of Facebook’s electricity was generated by coal, the firm’s first ever data centre outside the US will serve all data processed from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The company also recently announced that Intel, Dell, Mozilla, Rackspace and Netflix have joined Open Compute Project, a collaborative venture with the goal to “build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost”.