May 2008 Archives

For many in the US, this is a four-day work week because of the Memorial Day weekend. But there's a new trend of companies considering workweek compression to help employees cope with rising fuel costs.

Other countries may scoff, but higher gas prices in the US means that drivers' wallets and pocketbooks are draining at alarming rates at the petrol station. Part of the reason is that our highways are packed with relatively inefficient SUVs and plush, full-sized cars. The other reason is that we drive everywhere, usually by necessity.

Some employers have noticed, and they're giving their staffs the option to work four, 10-hour days instead of five 8-hour days, effectively cutting their commuting costs (fuel-wise at least) by 20 percent and putting a dent in CO2 emissions.

Reuters reports on organizations that are compressing their work weeks, such as Kent State, which is offering the option to its custodial staff and Neighborhood Development Services in Ohio.

Staff at Neighborhood Development Services in rural northeastern Ohio were talking about quitting to find work closer to their homes when executive director Dave Vaughan stepped in with offers to compress their work week.

"I didn't want to lose people," Vaughan said of the program, which more than half of his 19 employees began last week. "In rural areas like we are, gas price increases are more challenging because we don't have the mass transit alternative -- we can't jump on a bus or take a train."

Eventually, Vaughan hopes to close the office one day a week, further reducing energy costs.

It's interesting that he mentioned employee retention as a factor. Firms that offer telecommuting may just yank some talented, eco-minded workers from your payroll.

But flex-hours and telework present challenges for businesses, particularly security-conscious ones. Just a couple of days ago, we published this article by Sonny Discini that offers advice on securely and effectively instituting telework programs from an IT perspective. It's filled with great advice on jump-starting your own telework programs.

Dell just rolled out the new Vostro 410 desktop aimed at the small business market, six months earlier than it planned and filled with energy saving goodness. Packing a Intel Core 2 Duo Quad processor, the computer saves companies "47 percent in annual energy cost" using the machine's Energy Star settings according to the company.

Prices start at $599. That configuration gets you a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor, 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB SATA hard drive, a 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro graphics card, integrated 1 GbE networking and Windows XP Home. Perhaps the nicest nod to business users, besides expansion ports aplenty, is the inclusion of ZERO crapware!

Joining the Vostro 410 is the just-released EPEAT Gold-certified, E207 20-inch widescreen LCD, which costs $259. Dell says it saves users 28 percent in energy costs compared to CRTs, which is a silly comparison since you'd be hard-pressed to find a CRT monitor these days for general business use. Dell's own SMB store sells just twelve, most of them falling into specialty category.

You can catch a video of Mike Blood, head of Vostro product line, explaining the new PC here.

And so it begins.

Amazon's e-book reader has started shedding a few dollars off its price. 10 percent, actually.

Engadget informs that Kindle now sells for $360, a savings of $40 off its original price. So, has supply finally caught up with demand or is there a Kindle 2.0 in the works?

Either way, the funky, retro-looking device has won its share of fans, including our CEO. A warning, however: international travelers should stock up on reading material before they board that plane.

Treehugger's Lloyd Alter has a new spin on the well worn "if we can put a man on the moon" chestnut in light of this weekend's successful Phoenix Mars polar lander mission.

If we can send a robot 422 million miles to land on Mars and get another robot to casually snap a picture of it descending, glowing in the dark, (a "speeding bullet photographed by another speeding bullet) we can do anything.

Indeed!

By the way, if like me you haven't visited NASA.gov in a while, you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the site has undergone a nice redesign.

A couple of new updates this week on the virtualization front. First comes the news that Microsoft has a made available the first Hyper-V release candidate. Compatibility issues still haunt the software though.

Richard Adhikari at InternetNews reports:

Hyper-V RC 1 is a "feature-complete version with three areas of improvement over the beta release, RC 0 -- improved stability and usability, improved performance, and additional guest operating system and language support," Microsoft said.

But already there are holes in this proclamation: Hyper-V RC 1 doesn't work with Microsoft's own virtual machine (VM) management software, and the only other guest operating systems it supports in addition to Microsoft's are Novell SUSE Linux, which partners with Microsoft.

A day later he brings us news on the MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution. The draw over VMware: automated VM lifecycle management.

Essentially, MokaFive takes the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) -- the core virtual layer that separates the hardware from software -- and builds intelligent services around it "so you can move the software from machine to machine, distribute it across the Internet or around the world," Whaley said.

Updates to the master image are automatically sent to users, and here's where it differs from VMware Ace.

"With VMware Ace, you can package up a virtual machine and send that out, but it doesn't handle subsequent updates; if users want to get a new version, they have to go out and download it," Whaley said.

And over at Amy Newman's Virtually Speaking column at ServerWatch, she delves into a cozy new partnership between VMware and Sun, all in the name of thin clients.

Now Sun is partnering with VMware to bring its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution to the Sun Ray system. The Sun Ray is cool. Say what you will about thin clients, but there is much to love about popping a pluggable smartcard into your pocket rather than dragging a bulky laptop around.

On Monday, VMware made a number of announcements centered around thin-client developments and professional services. Among the news to come out of Palo Alto was a glimpse of an integrated desktop solution designed to leverage its VDI platform with Sun Ray Software and virtual display clients.

The Sun Ray system is an ideal candidate for VDI because it is already functioning as such.

If you want up-to-the-minute virtualization news, bookmark the InternetNews virtualization tag.

From the CIA to a cleantech venture capital firm, draw your own conclusions...

Former CIA Head Joins VC Firm VantagePoint - Earth2Tech

Venture firms have made partners out of the rich, the famous and now the spooky. VantagePoint Partners has added R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as a Venture Partner.

Competing To Fuel The Future - Forbes

ICE focuses on early-stage clean tech start-ups that have combined compelling technology with sound business strategies. Although New England has several mature clean tech companies, the competition focuses exclusively on those that have not received institutional or venture funding. The competition, organized by MIT's Enterprise Forum in Cambridge and sponsored by Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, has been largely dominated by clean-energy start-ups from the northeast.

Three Cleantech Startups Make Red Herring 100 List - Sustainable Business

Silver Spring Networks is developing open-standards, real-time networking for utility companies to improve efficiency, reliability and customer service. The company says open standards are the key to allowing multiple vendors to compete, while allowing integration of advanced metering technologies on scale.

GreenFuel Closes $13.9 Million Series B Funding for Algae - Clean Edge

GreenFuel Technologies Corporation, a privately held company developing algae farm technologies for recycling CO2 emissions, has closed a $13.9M venture capital round led by Access Private Equity, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Polaris Venture Partners. GreenFuel intends to use these funds to prepare for algae farm technology development and scaling projects during 2008.

Canadian Solar: Shining Bright - Seeking Alpha

In the current market environment, a couple of factors are causing high prices for solar modules, such as an industry-wide shortage of silicon (a primary constituent of solar cells) and higher demand caused by the expansion of the solar power and semiconductor industries.

If you weren't moved by their new datacenter in the UK, then these shots over at Royal Pingdom might prove to you just how serious Rackspace is about keeping things green (if a bit low key).

Witness the bridge of AT&T's Death Star in NJ versus Rackspace's modest NOC in San Antonio, TX. A lesson in keeping things simple, hence green.

Some commenters over there are saying that the Rackspace pic is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Also, AT&T is orders of magnitude bigger than Rackspace so be sure to take that into consideration too.

[via Gizmodo]

According to this Gizmodo post, each and every MacBook sold in 2009 will sport an LED backlight. Some MacBook Pros already ship with LED backlit displays that aren't just mercury-free, but also consume a little less energy.

In the mobile computing game, every little bit counts. And like Gizmodo's post points out, LED backlit displays look great.

Bring them on!

Web hosting and services provider Rackspace just completed construction on the 40,000 server facility just outside of London that we caught wind of last year.

Now they're starting to outfit the facility.

The data centre, in Slough, Berkshire, will draw power from a local combined heat and power plant that uses wood chips, waste paper and fibre fuel to generate electricity, hot water and steam.

Rackspace has converted a former warehouse on the Slough Trading Estate, to provide 55,000 square feet of net technical space. Construction has been completed and equipment is being installed in the first data hall. The first customers are scheduled to go live in June. The date centre layout has been built to Rackspace specifications, which were designed to better manage customer needs.

The datacenter gets its power from Scottish and Southern Energy, the "UK's largest dedicated bio-mass energy plant." Rackspace also informs that the they have planted over 2,500 trees as part of the company's carbon neutral hosting program. That's a lot of trees...

Thanks Alex!

Besides its slightly controversial feature story, the latest issue of Wired has another interesting item in the form of a question that was asked of Mr. Know-It-All, aka Brendan I. Koerner. A reader wanted to know how to green up his or her WoW addiction.

That desire may come from this guilt-inducing statistic regarding Second Life.

According to Julian Bleecker, cofounder of design think tank the Near Future Laboratory, the average Second Life avatar requires 1,248 kilowatt hours of electricity to "exist" for a year — 153 kWh for the servers and 1,095 kWh for your PC. In terms of carbon emissions, that's roughly the equivalent of driving 1,800 miles in a BMW 750Li. No one's made similar environmental calculations for WoW, but Mr. Know-It-All can't imagine the game being appreciably cleaner than its competitors.

The answer, by the way, is to purchase carbon offsets. Though in my opinion, players also have some options. If you're not hung up on the absolute fastest framerates, you can play on a decently specced laptop/desktop replacement with discreet video subsystems. You can also research efficient PCs or individual components and build one yourself.

On the part of game companies, it would be nice for them to disclose (or *advertise*) what, if any, steps they are taking toward datacenter energy efficiency.

Happy questing!

Wired's environmentally themed issue is going for some shock and awe. And while the main feature (not yet available online) makes some good points, not all of them are being well received.

EcoGeek spent a Saturday dissecting the article, scoring the 10 points made by the article. Some he grudgingly agrees with, but others simply do not fly. For instance...

Carbon trading doesn't work: FALSE

The only large-scale emissions trading scheme that we have to judge with (the American cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide and other emissions) has been a gigantic success. The cap has been met, lowered, met again, and then lowered again and met again. To say that a carbon cap-and-trade system won't work because Kyoto hasn't worked is, once again, foolish. Kyoto has no enforcement mechanism, and was, from the beginning, an extremely inadequate cap. All proposals on the table in the U.S. right now have two things Kyoto doesn't have. 1. Real, significant reduction targets and 2. TEETH.

Read the rest of Hank Green's post here. Keep an eye on Wired.com for the article to pop up in its online form.

If you can't wait, hit the newsstand and look for that cover in the picture. It's kind of hard to miss...

[via Treehugger]

Update: Wired.com has posted the feature online.

How big? $2 billion big.

That's how much T. Boone Pickens is paying GE for 667 wind turbines, each costing $3 million, to sprout up in the Texas panhandle, according to this MetaEfficient post.

The $2 billion order is just one quarter of the total amount he plans to purchase. Once built, the wind farm would have the capacity to supply power to over 1,200,000 homes in North Texas. Each turbine will produce 1.5 megawatts of electricity. The first phase of the project will produce 1,000 megawatts, enough energy to power 300,000 homes. GE will begin delivering the turbines in 2010, and current plans call for the project to start producing power in 2011.

His company, Mesa Power, plans to complete the $10 billion project by 2014.

InfoWorld has some interesting stats on datacenters and the power they consume from McKinsey and Company.

$11.5 billion - The total estimated energy bill for datacenters come 2010, up from $8.6 billion in 2007. Driving that figure: The installed server base is expected to grow by 16 percent to as many as 43 million machines worldwide; energy consumption per server is increasing by 9 percent; and energy prices have risen by an average of 4 percent, according to McKinsey. That, of course, means that if you're feeling some pain now from high energy prices or insufficient power, it's going to get worse if you don't make some changes.

Another interesting stat is $1,870, the "annual operating expense for powering and cooling a single midtier ($2,500) server in a tier III datacenter."

EPS Corp. unveiled a new hardware and software called xChange Point that gives companies "near real-time" visibility into their power consumption and carbon footprint.

xChange Point™ is the premier hardware and software carbon and energy monitoring solution designed to integrate system-wide information in real time, providing executive and operational management with the data to track and adjust energy consumption and carbon emissions. The product provides an eagle-eye view of a facility’s systems and subsystems and gives decision-makers the ability to have near real-time information to make decisions on a micro and macro level like never before. xChange Point™ helps companies calculate their energy usage and carbon output at the product level.

According to EPS, the product is currently in beta testing and will become broadly available in June as a subscription-based offering. The company's other work includes a recent 223 kW solar project in the California Bay Area.

Thanks Dan!

Bigger than Craigslist vs. Ebay, today's green stories of note.

DOE Report: Wind Could Power 20 Percent of US Grid by 2030 - Wired.com

A new report from the Department of Energy claims that wind turbines could generate 300 gigawatts by 2030, which would power about 20 percent of the US electrical grid.

The forecasting scenario would require tremendous growth in the wind industry, which currently produces about 17 gigawatts of electricity, or a little over one percent of total capacity.

'Green' procurement goes into the black - Purchasing.com

Just ask IBM, Herman Miller and GlaxoSmithKline. At IBM, sustainable sourcing and supply chain efficiency go hand in hand. Herman Miller uses Green concepts to optimize the lifecycle of their products. And at GlaxoSmithKline, purchasing works with the company's research and development staff to find ways to save energy, water and cut down on emissions. Though their definitions of Green and their approaches to environmentally friendly purchasing may differ, each company follows the three Rs—reduce, reuse, recycle—and each works to find the best way to promote Green throughout their respective supply chains.

Ahead of the Curve: It's quiet, it's green, it's the Rack o' My Dreams - InfoWorld

After a long and edifying discussion, GizMac, a company that really needs to work on its name, agreed to send me an XRackPro2 sealed rack enclosure. GizMac was careful to set my expectations. XRackPro2 is not, the company warned, a noise-isolating cabinet. It reduces noise, I've learned, with varying effectiveness depending on the type and amount of fan noise generated inside the rack. But I'll tell you this: I packed an 8-core Xserve and two 16-core machines in a 6U XRackPro2. When I powered them all up, the noise was so overwhelming as to make a telephone call impossible from anywhere in the room. Until, that is, I shut XRackPro2's foam-sealed front and back doors.

The top 10 green issues in the workplace - ITWeb

Results of the survey show that almost 40% of US respondents said their number one office environmental pet peeve was mindless printing resulting in abandoned pages at the printer, followed closely by leaving the lights on in unused offices (37%).

DOE Lab To Get the Biofuels Party (Re)started - Matter Network

Specific projects will focus on perfecting biochemical and thermochemical processes for turning cellulosic biomass into a more eco-friendly ethanol brew. "Cellulosic ethanol is a critical component of the President's comprehensive strategy to diversify our nation's energy sources in a sustainable manner, enhance energy security and address the serious challenge of global climate change," said Andy Karsner, DOE Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Charming Europeans for ages, the Smart Fortwo is finally taking to the streets in the U.S. The sub-subcompact is certainly eye-catchingly cute and it delivers relatively high MPG ratings (more on that in a sec), but not everyone is smitten.

The New York Times took the tiny car for a spin in LA and NYC and they walked away a bit underwhelmed. In short, practicality is not the car's strong suit--no shocker there--and power is on the meager side. But the biggest knock against it is that there are already cars on the road that deliver better performance and can fit at least two more people and their gear for around the same MPG and sticker price, even if they're slightly harder to park between two SUVs.

Author Lawrence Ulrich's spin around NYC reveals the following.

Sizing up the Smart against a subcompact you’d expect it to get at least 50 miles to the gallon. The Smart design certainly gets the basics right: it weighs just 1,800 pounds and its rear-mounted engine, a 1-liter 3-cylinder power plant of 70 horsepower, is the smallest in the market.

While the Smart has the best fuel-economy rating of any nonhybrid sold in America, you’d expect far better numbers from its bite-size body. Its E.P.A. rating is just 33 miles per gallon in town and 41 on the highway. I averaged an unspectacular 33 m.p.g. over a week of driving.

So, does the Fortwo have an uphill battle ahead or it is the right car at the right time?

Despite the sordid corporate maneuvers and technological hiccups that plagued Tesla Motors, enthusiasm over the battery-powered roadster is still high not that they have a showroom in LA and the car is emerging from vaporware's smoky tendrils. But someone's not feeling the love.

That someone is Tesla's (booted) founder, Martin Eberhard.

After being denied the first production car (tacky much?), he was promised the second one to roll off the line. Now it seems he's not even get that one. Of course, it all depends on what you take "production car" to mean.

If you want to follow this drama-soaked tale, go to AutoBlog Green. But make yourself a sandwich first, it's a doozy.

Exciting news out of Osaka, Japan!

Semiconductor maker Rohm Co is promising to vanquish vampires, those gadgets that consume power even when they're supposedly off. The company has developed a large-scale integrated (LSI) circuit that requires zero electricity as it waits to be reawakened.

Productions starts next year. In Japan, the company estimates that 15 billion kilowatt hours are wasted on electronics that are just sitting around, waiting.

Soon you won't have to crawl under your desk to shut off your power strip. Not that you do it now, but if you did...

Climate Counts has just released their environmental score card and Apple came in dead last. Why? Here's their report card to help explain:

Review: 0/22 points. Climate Counts found no publicly available information on Apple’s efforts to measure its companywide impact on global warming (i.e., its greenhouse gas emissions or climate footprint).

Reduce: 8/56 points. Climate Counts has found that Apple has completed analysis of the impact that many of its products have on global warming while being used by consumers and has engaged with its employees and other companies on climate-related issues.

Policy Stance: 0/10 points. Climate Counts found no public information to suggest that Apple supports public policy that addresses climate change.

Report: 3/12 points. Climate Counts has found that Apple has made some public information available on its efforts to address global warming.

Seems the company is getting hammered for being less than forthcoming. The good news is that at they scored 9 points above last year's results.

The top spot goes to IBM, which has a score card that reads like a love letter:

Reduce: 44/56 points. Climate Counts has found that IBM has established clear goals to reduce its energy use, and has reduced its impact on global warming (i.e., its greenhouse gas emissions or climate footprint). The company also encourages energy conservation by others.

Kudos!

[via MacNN]

Enterprise storage watchers have been keeping an eye on MAID (massive array of idle disks) technology, not only for energy savings, but also keep lower priority data off costly, high-performance storage systems. Companies like Copan, for example, have made a name for themselves by offering arrays that shut down disks when they're not in use.

Now the industry is looking to minimize the performance penalties inherent to MAID, according to Gary Watson, CTO of storage vendor Nexsan. Hence, MAID 2.0. In an article over at Computer Technology Review, he writes:

Here’s how MAID 2.0 works: data center managers set multiple (usually three) settings on their drives. The first setting saves a moderate amount of energy by unloading the drive heads but maintaining full disk spin. This is the most commonly used setting during times of regular application usage. The next setting slows down disk spin rates and can save significantly more energy. The tradeoff at this setting is an approximate 15 second recovery time. This is used typically for less critical data retrieval, depending upon the individual needs of the user. The final setting saves the most energy and stops spinning the disks altogether. Unlike traditional MAID, however, disks don’t have to wait for a given RAID set to be allowed to spin up; they just spin up as needed. This results in sub-minute recovery times for data retrieval, well within acceptable parameters of even the most demanding data center professionals.

He then goes on to give advice on getting IT managers to invest in greener gear, especially now that they're subject to massive amounts of greenwashing.

Plastic bags are already on the environmentalist's hit list. Now they're botching up Google Street Views in Alaska.

Geeks, revolt!

[via Gizmodo]

There's no getting around it. Greening your datacenter or company (or both) is going to take some adjustment. But at its core, it's an opportunity to get back to business basics, submits Polly Traylor of Datamation. Namely, getting the most output for the least amount of input and profiting from it.

In her article, "Green Computing, Green Revenue", she lays out five steps to not only cut carbon emissions, but also help to you keep more of that hard-earned revenue. In my opinion, step number 3 is the most critical....

3. Get a Professional Energy Audit and Track Energy Use.

Yes, this will cost you money – anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, according to Jerry Lawson, national manager of Energy Star. However, if your business is going to be around for a long time, hiring an auditor might be a wise investment. "We believe you can't manage what you can't measure," he says.

Grab the rest of the steps here.

Some DIY gumption, business savvy and a hint of green... now this is the kind of story I like!

Newsweek brings us the story of Canadian executive Howard Weinstein who set out to provide relief to the hearing impaired in Southern Africa. The problem is that hearing aids, as they are traditionally designed and manufactured, are expensive to maintain because of batteries.

His solution: rechargeable batteries, a solar charger and an untapped source of skilled labor.

[via Engadget]

Yesterday, I posted about harnessing alternative energy in Nothern Idaho. Today, Gary Garrett of North Idaho Connection, an ISP that serves the region, sent me the specs on his off-the-grid wireless ISP.

Given the location, the sun's rays don't exactly abound. Nonetheless, his setup makes for a fascinating read...

We operate a Microwave relay site on off-grid power. Only 160 watts come from solar, and that only a few hours a day, as this is the Pacific NW with 200 cloudy days a year.

The site consists of a Cisco 3640 router, a Portmaster 3 with 48 modems, 24 port switch, Trango T-Link 10 microwave, Trango 900 AP, and a Mikrotik 2400 AP. There is also a complete office, lights, water pump, and living quarters with 2 laptops, fax machine, a printer and print server that is turned off when not in use. Without the office equipment the system draws 24 amps at 12 VDC 24 hours a day.

This power is provided by an Exeltech redundant inverter consisting of 4 1,000 watt modules any one of which will run the whole thing. The 12V is provided by a 2400 Amp hour battery bank with another 460 Amp hour bank for the office.

The batteries are kept charged by a group of battery chargers powered by a 25KW propane generator that runs on a time clock 2 hours twice a day.

Sure, propane is non-renewable, but it pollutes considerably less than gas or diesel. And this all adds up to uptime that would make many a utility jealous...

We have not had a power failure since 2001. The Solar is just a drop in the bucket but we have been off the grid for 27 years. Basically it is powered by Propane but we are working on Peltier Junctions to cut down on the generator wear and tear and carbon footprint.

Neat, right?

If you're weighing your Internet options in the area, and uptime is critical, add North Idaho Connection to your list.

It seems that just about every post deals with a Silicon Valley startup, an innovation at schools like MIT or green computer moves at the likes of IBM, Dell and Microsoft.

So it pleases me when a note hits my inbox on more modest--but no less important--endeavors from Anywhere, USA. In this case, Idaho.

Backwoods Solar Electric of Sandpoint, Idaho specializes in off-the-grid solar installs. Their site is like a treasure trove of equipment (not just panels) and advice to help wean homes and businesses off the grid.

I've been informed that one of those businesses is the North Idaho Connection, an ISP that serves northern Idaho with broadband and wireless Internet (you can see the wireless coverage map here).

What local options are available to you? Sound off in the comments.

Thanks Alex!

Bigger than a Microsoft/Yahoo flameout (or a GTA IV hangover) here are today's highlights.

SAS Applies Business Intelligence To Environmental Performance - InformationWeek

SAS for Sustainability Management applies business intelligence capabilities to environmental performance. It includes a performance management app with metrics established by the Global Reporting Initiative, a 10-year-old group that has a framework used by 1,500 businesses to measure the economic, environmental, and social impact of their operations. It also includes SAS's activity-based management app, which tracks factors such as how much carbon emissions facilities produce and develops models that show how changes would affect costs and profit. In addition, SAS predictive analytics and risk management apps forecast trends related to sustainability, such as the possibility that government fines for environmental violations could go up in the future, raising costs.

Do We Need Reusable Paper? - InternetNews

Paper is often used for all of a few minutes and tossed out. That's a waste of more than just the paper, but the power used to create it. It takes 204,000 joules of power to create a new sheet of paper and 114,000 joules to recycle one.

So what if you didn't have to make new pages but could reuse the old ones? To reduce that waste, PARC has among its many projects a reusable paper where the printout fades away after 24 hours, allowing it to be reused.

LED lighting a green investment - The Arizona Republic

Cree has developed a recessed LED-lighting fixture that sells for about $130 and can last up to 25 years.

That LED fixture is a popular alternative to compact fluorescent lights in California, which requires high-efficiency lighting in new homes, said Gary Trott, Cree vice president of market development.

Currently, LED lights account for less than 1 percent of the ambient-lighting market but within the next three years, light-emitting diodes will reach the mass market, Trott said.

Study Recommends CAFE-like Standards for Green IT - Matter Network

It may now be a common fact that the price to store or transfer a megabyte of data is quickly approaching zero, but in many ways the cost of IT is still going up. The installed server base is expected to reach 41-43 million by 2010 and energy consumption per server is growing by 9% per year. Spending on equipment, energy, and maintenance is growing so quickly that it has the potential to reduce profits among major companies.

Green technology: hype or must-have? - Computerworld.co.nz

A vendor might be tempted to take an old product out of the closet, dust it off and claim it's the new green tool for the datacentre, Staten acknowledges. He thinks few vendors are guilty of going that far, however. Instead, he says, they develop one green product and call their entire portfolios green, even if the rest of the product line is inefficient.

IT vendors might be taking a cue from car companies that boast about selling one or two eco-friendly cars while selling millions of gas-guzzling SUVs. Dell, for example, has lots of ads talking about the greenness of their servers and PCs, Staten notes. While Dell's blade servers are very efficient, on the whole the company's "servers are not a whole lot different than other people's", he says.

Chevy Volt in 2010? GM's Wagoner is leaning toward "definitely," which beats the "definitely, maybe" talk of just a few short months ago. Motor Trend weighs in.

Engineers at GM's Milford Proving Ground are working six-day weeks to bring the project in on time, and recently the automaker loosened its purse strings to give the team whatever it needs to make the deadline. Though all that extra cash could raise the Volt's sticker price by up to $18,000, apparently it's working -- speaking to reporters in San Francisco, Wagoner said "so far we're on schedule" and that "optimism is building" about the project. Motor Trend technical editor Frank Marcus recently witnessed the Volt's development team in action, and it's clear that GM is undertaking a massive operation to complete the revolutionary machine over the next 20 months.

Just don't expect it to look exactly (if at all) like the concept car pictured above. Word is that it was as slippery as a cynderblock with a sail attached in wind tunnel testing.

Tech sites and blogs are buzzing with the latest innovation out of HP Labs. Sought after for 30 years, the group has finally cornered the science to make the memristor a reality. It's significant because for decades, three building blocks governed the capabilities of integrated circuits.

HP give us this short history lesson:

The memristor first appeared in a 1971 paper published by Professor Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California Berkeley.

Chua described and named the memristor, arguing that it should be included along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor as the fourth fundamental circuit element. The memristor has properties that cannot be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.

Although researchers had observed instances of memristance for more than 50 years, the proof of its existence remained elusive - in part because memristance is much more noticeable in nanoscale devices. The crucial issue for memristance is that the device' atoms need to change location when voltage is applied, and that happens much more easily at the nanoscale.

Now that nanoscale sciences are advancing, the memristor joins the fold and the impact to IT can be significant. There's already talk employing the technology as a possible replacement for DRAM. This layman-friendly article discusses how the technology can help drive up energy efficiency in the data center:

One application for this research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Computers using conventional DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system.

In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power and wasted time.

This functionality could play a significant role as “cloud computing” becomes more prevalent. Cloud computing requires an IT infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of servers and storage systems. The memory and storage systems used by today’s cloud infrastructure require significant power to store, retrieve and protect the information of millions of web users worldwide.

Memristor-based memory and storage has the potential to lower power consumption and provide greater resiliency and reliability in the face of power interruptions to a data center.

Remember, building out that 24/7, all-encompassing "cloud" is going to take a whole lot of data centers...

If this post at Engadget is to be believed, solar may be well on its way.

Two organizations, SUNRGI and the University of Tel Aviv are claiming some pretty big advances in solar efficiency. SUNRGI claims power generation at 7 cents per kilowatt hour by mid-2009. That's their component on the right, and as you can see, it uses lensed glass to concentrate those sweet rays.

The University of Tel Aviv, on the other hand, has some even loftier claims. Get this: highly efficient solar cells a fraction of the cost of silicon thanks to photosynthesis, genetic engineering and nanotechnology.

Now that your attention is piqued...

The reactive element in the researchers' patent pending device is genetically engineered proteins using photosynthesis for production of electrical energy.

The scientists applied genetic engineering and nanotechnology for the construction of a hybrid nano -- bio, solid state device. According to the researchers, although using photosynthesis for photovoltaic application is not new, their specific technique is the first to enable the production of useful photosynthesis-based photovoltaic cells.

They're discussing some pretty short time frames here. Hopefully they can deliver.