November 2008 Archives

Care for a swim?

Kudos to HSBC for their clever take on the climate change issue and science fiction staple: the underwater metropolis. Check out io9 for more info and shots of the bank's creative swimming pool.

Sad news for all of us hoping to pick up the new version of Amazon's e-book reader.

While it is generally accepted that a new Kindle looking very much like earlier spy shots will appear soon, it won't make it in time to outshine the millionth sweater you'll be getting this year.

Now word has it that we'll have to wait until Q1 2009 to get our mitts on it. Sad, but another interesting tidbit was revealed. Amazon is developing a student version with a larger screen.

Interesting...

[via Engadget]

It been a long time since we've spotlighted some decidedly un-green behavior. And this short item on solar panel theft from the Daily Camera is definitely one of them. It's enough to make you want to take measures to secure your solar panels (if you're lucky enough to own some).

Investigators from the Boulder County Sheriff's Office are trying to figure out who made off with $11,800 worth of solar panels from Walden Ponds north of Boulder.

Sgt. Brian Lindsey said the panels, which measure about 5-feet by 4-feet and weigh 107 pounds each, were in crates awaiting installation.

In this case, it was an easy score since they were yet to be installed. But that doesn't mean that thieves won't scramble up onto your home. This reminds me of The New York Times story from a couple of months ago about people that had their solar panels ripped from their roofs by thieves. Adding insult to injury, the pricey solar gear is showing up on eBay.

Police departments in California — the biggest market for solar power, with more than 33,000 installations — are seeing a rash of such burglaries, though nobody compiles overall statistics.

Investigators do not believe the thieves are acting out of concern for their carbon footprints. Rather, authorities assume that many panels make their way to unwitting homeowners, sometimes via the Internet.

Last November, someone tried to sell solar panels stolen from a toll road in Newport Beach for $100 each on eBay. Detectives from the local police department entered the bidding and won the panels, which were worth nearly $1,500 apiece, according to Sgt. Evan Sailor, a Newport Beach police spokesman.

No good deed goes unpunished, unfortunately.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Samsung made good on its promise to release a 256 GB solid state drive this week. Beyond the capacity bump, Samsung promises some significant performance gains:

The new 256GB SSD more than doubles the performance rates of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs to become the SSD with the highest overall performance in the personal computer industry, combining sequential read rates of 220MB/s (megabytes per second) with sequential write rates of 200MB/s. This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 and 70 percent for other SSDs. In addition, erase cycles are a rapid 100GBs per minute, allowing the entire drive to be re-written much faster, when needed.

Plus, the 2.5-inch drive consumes just consumes 1.1 watts.

As Engadget points out, there's no word on pricing. You can rest assured, however, that it won't be cheap.

Green gamers, when they're not too busy checking out NXE on the Xbox 360 or playing with sack people on the PS3, really care about the toll their hobby takes on the environment. So the following should be of interest to a growing number of you...

The Natural Resources Defense Council today released a report on the carbon output of the current generation of game consoles: Sony's Playstation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. Unsurprisingly, the Wii consumes the least amount of electricity among the three, even less than its predecessor, the Gamecube. The same is not true for the PS3 and Xbox 360 with their multi-core processors...

On average, the report found that Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 use large amounts of electricity – 150 Watts and 119 Watts respectively – including much more power than their prior generation of game consoles. These two systems can each consume more than 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year if left on all the time, which is equal to the annual energy use of two new refrigerators. The Nintendo Wii, however, uses significantly less power when on – at less than 20 Watts – and actually uses slightly less power than the previous generation of their console.

Interesting comparison, but it's doubtful that even hard core gamers leave their machines on all the time. And indeed, the report (PDF available here, 316 KB) does offer a chart early on that illustrates the huge difference in energy costs between turning the console off after playing a game (PS3 rev.2007: $12/year) and leaving it on 24/7 (PS3 rev.2007: $134/year). It also comes to a determination of just how much electricity is wasted -- $1 Billion, FYI -- and how much the consoles are consuming, "an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year--roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego."

There's tons more data and statistics, so grab the PDF and see for yourself.

[via Slashdot]

Panasonic's move to buy Sanyo is mildly interesting to gadget fans. It turns out that the company's latest corporate maneuver is even more interesting to folks that follow green technologies. According to this AP report in The Japan Times, what's really driving the takeover is Sharp's cleantech catalog.

The ability to acquire Sanyo's two green-energy pillars, solar-cell technology and rechargeable batteries, are what drove Panasonic to announce this month it would negotiate a deal with Sanyo's main stockholders, Goldman Sachs Inc., Daiwa Securities SMBC and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Co.

As profits generated by personal electronic continue to erode, Panasonic seems to be looking for other opportunities...

While Sanyo's solar panels are being used to generate electricity for homes and businesses — and are presumably going to enjoy higher demand because of climate-change fears — Panasonic does not have a solar panel operation.

Sanyo also leads in rechargeable batteries, widely used in laptops and mobile phones. Their uses are expected to grow in cars, including hybrids and electric vehicles, as emissions standards tighten. Panasonic makes batteries for Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles, but picking up Sanyo would be key because it supplies batteries for Volkswagen AG, Honda Motor Co. and Ford Motor Co.

So there you have it. Should we expect similar moves by other electronics giants?

Will you look at that. The storage option that jacks up the price on that notebook/netbook you've had your eye on is making a play for enterprise storage systems.

Seems like a no-brainer. Lower power requirements, faster data access... what's not to like?

The price, that's what.

Don't mind that, however. You're paying a small fortune on that storage array anyway. Sun this week unveiled that it was cramming solid-state drives (SSDs) into its Unified Storage Appliance (Sun Storage 7410) to improve performance and keep critical data at the ready.

Somehow overlooked was startup Violin Memory (blame Sun's glare). According to InternetNews, they have an all-flash appliance.

The Violin 101 Flash Module, available in a 2U chassis, comes with 4TB of Flash storage capacity. It also can be configured to support up to 504 GB of DRAM -- for enterprises in need of far faster speeds, at the cost of capacity. The appliance includes four 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel connections and up to four 10Gbit/sec Ethernet ports.

But it's not cheap. The 2TB Violin system costs in the neighborhood of $120,000. And it has to win over some skeptics. That's because 15K drives, while comparatively less energy efficient, didn't earn their enterprise-class reputations for just showing up to the party.

...But Krishna Chander, senior analyst with iSupply, begs to differ on some of these claims. For starters, he has never heard of high failure rates for 15,000 RPM drives; instead he says they have the same failure rates as other drives.

The real shortcoming for SSDs is their write performance. Major datacenter OEMs tell Chander SSD can't match the 15k drives. "It's not prime time yet for fast writes at this point," he told InternetNews.com. "The OEMs are saying they got a ways to go. But they are certainly considering them and certainly deploying them in high-read applications."

Looks like we'll be wrestling with this for a while, at least until flash prices tumble to within firing range of traditional, platter-based drives. Then, the real pew-pew begins...

Cisco's ASR 9000 is here, and despite meaty specs that make Web video streaming a snap, what we really want to know is how the new massive edge routers (ASR 9006 and 9010 so far) fit into the green datacenter plan.

Fortunately, Cisco is happy to oblige:

Reduced carbon footprint
Modular power is designed to scale with system capacity, allowing the service provider to tier the amount of power used. The six-slot unit has design advantages utilizing a patent-pending side-to-back ventilation scheme that helps service providers free up side-by-side rack space. When compared with competitive offerings, every 6.4-terabit unit deployed is estimated to save service providers the carbon equivalent of 88 tons of coal, 164 transpacific passenger flights or 16 around-the-world car trips per year.

Enhanced edge services with Cisco QuantumFlow Processor
The Cisco ASR 9000 has unsurpassed capacity and has been designed to offer advanced subscriber management as well as use the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor to deliver silicon-based security services and video like the Cisco ASR 1000. By eliminating numerous single-function network appliances, the Cisco ASR 9000 substantially reduces a service provider's carbon footprint, resulting in greater efficiency to its networks, lower operational costs and greater environmental stewardship.

Here's a narrated Flash persentation that outlines some of the power saving features like variable fan speeds, side to back airflow, integrated video streaming blades and integrated transponders.

Remember when the economy was good (relatively speaking) and green buildings seemed to be all the rage?

This year it looks like fewer organizations are willing to pay a premium for green office space.

Despite the fact that corporate real estate executives support the idea of energy efficient and sustainable buildings, only 42 percent of those surveyed said they were willing to pay a premium to lease green space. Another 53 percent said they would pay a premium to retrofit property they own. In 2007, 77 percent of real estate executives surveyed said they were willing to pay a premium for green space.

Ouch.

[Source]

Sun today announced new Unified Storage Appliances, the 7000 series (a.k.a. Amber Road). Comprised of the Sun Storage 7110, 7210 and 7410, the new systems have the distinction of being the "first three appliances in the Open Storage portfolio," according to the company.

Here's a quick breakdown of the new gear:

• Sun Storage 7110: Ultra compact model with two terabytes (TB) of storage;
• Sun Storage 7210: Mid-range storage featuring up to 48 TB of storage capacity in a highly dense four unit form factor; includes support for write-optimized solid state disks (SSDs) that leverage Sun's unique Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology;
• Sun Storage 7410: Highly configurable storage system with support for up to a half petabyte (PB) of capacity that includes support for read and write optimized SSDs and Sun's unique Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology; These systems are also available in clustered configurations for added high availability.

This being a green IT blog and all, my interest was piqued by mentions of Solaris ZFS Flash Hybrid Storage Pool technology. According to the company:

Sun's unique Hybrid Storage Pool technology uses the 128-bit ZFS filesystem to transparently manage DRAM, read-optimized Flash devices and low-cost, low-power disk drives as a single caching hierarchy. The Hybrid Storage Pools deliver greater performance than traditional storage systems at significantly lower power consumption and reduced cost per gigabyte. Hybrid Storage Pools are then used to store data for file and block protocols, like CIFS and NFS, and can deliver a rich set of enterprise data services, including clustering and data replication.

Or put simply by Jonathan Schwartz, "the net result is a massive speedup in storage performance, with an equivalently massive drop in power consumption."

On the surface and from a technical perspective, it makes a lot sense. You can see why Sun is pursuing SSD storage in a talk delivered by Andy Bechtolsheim at SNIA SDC in September.

It's true, the virtual machine universe is teeming with life, if you can get beyond the black hole-like gravitational pull of industry titans VMware and Microsoft.

Among the several virtualization projects, some are small-scale, specialized or strictly limited to the command line crowd. Others, though, are growing into their own.

Take the case of Virtual Iron. Amy Newman of ServerWatch gives us the lowdown.

Last week, Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, called Virtual Iron "a top five virtualization vendor." EMA is not alone in its accolades. Gartner also praised Virtual Iron for delivering much bang for its buck.

As a result, Virtual Iron has been getting more press coverage than normal recently. Just last week, Datamation took a deep dive into Virtual Iron to see what the company has been up to and where it's going.

Virtual Iron is in a unique spot. It leverages Xen's hypervisor, yet has built an ecosystem around it, which is where much of its value lies. It considers itself technologically on par with VMware, yet the price point is significantly lower. Although it pursues many of the same customers as Microsoft, it brings more value to the equation, at least in CEO Ed Walsh's mind.

Even if no one gets fired for buying VMware or Microsoft, IT folks never like feeling boxed in by technology. Indeed, choice in virtualization platforms was a major focus of my talk with Virtual Iron a couple of years ago. That, and easy-on-the-budget software.

Peer over the edge of an abandoned mine, and you'll be immediately struck by the environmental damage caused by all that earth moving equipment. Less obvious is the huge amount of emissions released when the ore is processed.

Now, researchers and Chilean mining concern BioSigma are employing some of our tiniest neighbors to suck high grade metals out of low quality ore using a technique called bioleaching.

National Geographic has the story.

An acidic solution containing bacteria is applied and allowed to percolate through the heap, draining into a collecting pool.

In a few months, the bioleaching is complete, with 80 to 90 percent of copper extracted from the ore. The process can be used on ores that contain only 0.5 to one percent of copper, too little for conventional refining.

The kicker: "A typical operation costs only half as much as conventional smelting and refining."

How much more battery life can you expect out of Windows 7 versus Vista? At least 11 percent, says Jon DeVaan, Microsoft's senior vice president of the Windows Core Operating System division.

That's good news for laptops and indeed for all PCs. According to ComputerWorld, it looks like Windows 7 will be an all-around lower maintenance OS, resource wise.

Windows 7 will use less memory than Vista as more application windows are opened up by "letting the video card do its job so we don't have to manage" the windows, DeVaan said.

Vista also "didn't do a good job of letting the CPU get to idle and stay idle," DeVaan said. Windows 7 has improvements in the kernel so that the CPU runs at a lower frequency and stays idle longer.

But what business travelers really want to know is how the savior of grueling flight delays, long train rides and crappy hotel entertainment options fares. Andy Patrizio of InternetNews puts us at ease.

There was also considerable talk on power consumption, especially for laptops. A command line utility called powercfg allowed for monitoring how each component is used in a system, perfect for the hardware developers at this show, and he showed how DVD playback on identical hardware consumed much less power on Windows 7 vs. Vista.

As we posted earlier, a lot of those savings come courtesy of Core Parking and Timer Coalescing APIs. (How's that for geek speak?) You can watch Windows kernel guru Mark Russinovich explain the features here.

Despite the renewable energy perks that were part of the massive bailout package and a very healthy VC scene in Q3, cleantech and renewable energy concerns have been nervously waiting to see the effects of a faltering economy and a contentious election.

Now that the election is behind us and Senator Barack Obama is President-elect, the analyses and predictions are flying fast and furious. Here's a sampling:

Obama May Put Renewable-Energy Plan Ahead of Climate Package - Bloomberg

``He will put forward an energy bill ahead of a climate bill,'' said Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, an energy advocacy group in Washington that represents 3M Co., Areva SA and Dow Chemical Co. ``That bill will stimulate the economy toward development and use of energy efficiency and clean energy sources and technology.''

Obama's advisers won't say which initiative he will push first. He has proposed a $175 billion economic-stimulus package and plans to revamp the energy economy as part of a separate climate bill, campaign adviser Jason Furman said in an interview.

Barack Obama Is President-Elect: What's The Play For Solar? - Solar Industry

Obama and vice president-elect Joe Biden have long claimed to have a "comprehensive energy plan" at the core of their platform. Perhaps most notably, their New Energy for America plan includes a provision for 10% of America's electricity to be derived from renewable sources by 2012. That figure will then jump to 25% by 2025.

In terms of delivering that level of renewable energy to the marketplace, Obama has noted that his administration would invest in a national smart grid that utilizes smart metering, distributed storage and other technologies to improve grid functionality and reliability.

European Clean Energy and Climate Change Interests Respond to Obama’s Rise - Green Inc., NY Times Blogs

“You could say that international climate talks have been on hold for the past few years with everyone in reality just waiting for a new U.S. administration to take office,” said Henrik Hasselknippe, the global head of carbon analysis for Point Carbon, a research company based in Oslo, Norway.

Mr. Hasselknippe said the victory for Mr. Obama was a boon for clean energy businesses because of an expectation that “it would be easier to get international negotiations going with a Democrat in the White House.” He noted that Mr. Obama had proposed more ambitious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions for U.S. industry than John McCain, the Republican candidate who conceded defeat.

The Obama White House – what can green business expect? - BusinessGreen

In just 13 months time, the world's leaders will gather in Copenhagen to try and agree a successor to the Kyoto Treaty. If you believe the climate scientists, it is no exaggeration to suggest the future of the planet is at stake and all eyes will be on the new resident of the White House to take a lead and break the deadlock that has dominated talks to date.

Beyond this central question, countless other US domestic green issues ranging from nuclear to renewables, carbon trading to offshore drilling will jostle for attention, and given the US's position as the dominant player in the global cleantech sector, almost all of them will have significant repercussions for green businesses worldwide.

Under Obama, Dark Days Seen Ahead For Fossil Fuels - CNN Money

Sen. Obama's lynchpin policy is a climate change bill that would cap emissions such as carbon dioxide and auction greenhouse gas credits to encourage a fundamental transition away from high emitting industries to low-carbon alternatives. Obama said such a policy would be more aggressive than any other cap-and-trade system proposed.

As part of that policy shift, renewable energy, natural gas, plug-in hybrid vehicles, and advanced electricity transmission are forecast to receive a major boost. Sen. Obama has proposed using $150 billion from the emissions auction to fund such low-carbon alternatives over the next decade.

Amazon is embarking on a multi-year effort called Frustration-Free Packaging to eliminate plastic clamshells and wire ties and generally cut down on wasteful packaging.

As the poor woman in the above photo shows, many gadgets sold today are encased in scissor-killing, finger-cutting plastic. Making matters worse, they are hardly reusable once they are pried open. You also can bet that a lot of it never ends up recycled.

For now, the Frustration-Free Packaging page has an assortment of Fisher-Price toys. But a quick scroll down reveals Microsoft mice and some Transcend SD cards.

Here's hoping that it takes off!