Tom Friedman to data centers: ‘Get ready for carbon tax’ – TechTarget

If there’s anything a data center manager can take from a Tom Friedman talk on disappearing sea ice and petro-dictatorships, it’s this: A carbon emission tax on data centers might not be far off.

The New York Times columnist and author spoke at the Uptime Institute’s conference in New York last week, addressing data center facility managers on the dangers of climate change in a world that’s getting increasingly crowded.

HP’s New Unix Includes Green Power Control – eWeek Europe

The new OS, through HP’s Green Active Processors technology, also can dynamically control the power needed by processors based on workload requirements, which will reduce power costs. A feature called Disk Scrub also overwrites and erases disks, protecting sensitive data.

3Com’s high-end switch: A fast, green alternative to Cisco – Network World

Our results validate 3Com’s claim that low power consumption is a key differentiator for the 3Com/H3C device. We measured power usage three ways: When the switch was idle (but with cables connected to all 288 gigabit Ethernet SFPs); when the switch forwarded traffic across all ports at line rate, as in the OSPF tests; and when the switch forwarded traffic with an IP option field set in every packet (thus forcing traffic up to the CPU in the switch’s management module).

Total power consumption when idle was 927 watts, but this number jumped 25%, to 1,159 watts, when we offered data-plane traffic at line rate. With IP options set, consumption was slightly lower, at 1,101 watts, probably because this test exercised the management module’s CPU far more than switching silicon on each line card.

One Analysts’s View Of What IBM’s Smarter Planet Means – The Forrester Blog

Intelligence and network connections are embedded in physical systems. Chips and bandwidth have helped optimize business processes and make information workers more productive. But information technology hasn’t yet really helped optimize our physical systems. A company on a smarter planet will put computers and connections into every physical system so that machines can phone home, operating problems can telegraph themselves, and power grids and distribution systems can be monitored, controlled, and optimized. (Forrester first identified this trend of an extended “Internet of things” in 2001 with a report entitled “The X Internet.”)

Technology options for ‘green’ storage – InfoStor

There is a myth that SSDs are only for databases and that SSDs do not work well with file-based data. The reality is that, in the past, given the cost of DRAM-based solutions, specific database tables or files, indices, log, or journal files, or other transient performance-intensive data, were put on SSDs. If the database was small enough or the budget large enough, the entire database may have been put on SSDs. Given the cost of DRAM and flash, however, many new applications and usage scenarios are leveraging SSD technologies. For example, NFS filer data access can be boosted using caching I/O accelerator appliances or adapter cards.

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