This morning, at a press conference in Buffalo, New York, with New York Governor David Paterson and Senator Chuck Schumer, we took another big step forward in addressing climate change. We announced plans to build one of the greenest, most energy-efficient data centers in the world.

This is significant because data centers represent the majority of our energy consumption. Keeping Yahoo! running smoothly for more than 500 million people around the world calls for a lot of server power. So we’ve made it a priority to become a leader in designing and building data centers that are environmentally sustainable, investing millions to design facilities that make the best use of the energy we consume.

Here’s what makes us so proud of our future New York data center plans. First, it will be powered by one of the cleanest utilities in the country – fed predominantly by renewable hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls. And second, a record 90% of that energy will power the servers. To put that in context, the industry average is 50% or lower, with the other half dedicated mostly to keeping the servers cool.

For data center geeks, we expect our Buffalo Lockport, NY, data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better. To achieve that, we’ve come up with a unique building design that we call the Yahoo! Computing Coop (because it looks like something chickens live in), which is angled to take advantage of Buffalo’s microclimate, using 100% outside air to cool the servers.

We’ve been pushing green data center standards since we started building our own data centers two years ago. For example, our facilities in Washington are powered by zero-carbon wind and hydroelectric sources, and we use free cooling for most of the year, dropping energy consumption by 40-50%. As we build more capacity to meet demand, we’ll continue to focus on innovations and inventions that improve energy efficiency. And we’ve been sharing best practices to encourage the entire industry to put smarter policies in play.

And we’ll continue to push ourselves hard to lower our impact. Today we’re committing to reduce the carbon intensity of our data centers by at least 40% by 2014. In other words, we’ll decrease our average electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from our data centers around the world. We’ll get there through a combination of innovative data center design, improving how we utilize our servers, cloud computing, and locating our data centers in areas where cleaner energy is available.

Reducing our carbon footprint has always been a priority and we’ve decided to focus all our energy and investment on that philosophy. We will no longer purchase carbon offsets as announced in 2007. Instead, we’ll focus our resources on reducing our carbon impact while helping the rest of the industry do the same. We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change.

So the next time you check your email, do a Yahoo! search, or get the latest environmental info on Yahoo! Green, you can feel good about putting some of the greenest data centers in the industry to work.

David Filo
Co-founder and Chief Yahoo

Today, Internet science takes a big step into the clouds. In a partnership with tech giants HP and Intel, we’re creating a global, multi-datacenter research testbed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. (What’s cloud computing? Think of it as the technology that makes it possible for computing resources to be provided as a service where you only pay for what you use.)

Academic research is facing new challenges in today’s Internet age. Universities often don’t have the equipment –- hardware and software -– to maintain in-depth research at Internet scale. Academic researchers are limited in the research they can conduct, and this, ultimately constrains the amount of large-scale Web innovations coming to the marketplace.

Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way towards building the next generation of the Web. As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.

The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a significant step in that it will not only allow researchers to run applications and data on large-scale supercomputers, they will be able to experiment and conduct research on a massive scale. It’s like letting them simulate a true Web environment and that’s exactly what you need to ensure which ideas will work in the wild.

Joining us in this first-ever large-scale international consortium are Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, with contributions from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well.

This is all part of Yahoo!’s overall focus and investment in cloud computing and data infrastructure. We recently announced the formation of the Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure Group (CCDI), a new group dedicated to building out our next-generation cloud infrastructure.

In addition, in November 2007, Yahoo! deployed a supercomputing-class data center, called the M45, for cloud computing research; Carnegie Mellon University was the first institution to take advantage of this supercomputer. In March 2008, Yahoo! announced an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to jointly support cloud computing research in India. The CRL supercomputer is one of the world’s top five supercomputers and is the first supercomputer available to academic institutions in India.

I speak for our many research scientists when I say we’re excited about this open testbed and being able to collaborate with leaders who share our same vision. The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a truly global research effort, and more partners and researchers will be invited to join and participate in the program when all of the systems are up and running later this year. The sky is the limit from here on out.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Research

Photo from Nicholas_T