Computer Green-Off – Earth911.com

According to a recent study, 70 percent of businesses are greening their efforts, and the leaders in the IT industry are no different as the industry’s top computer brands – HP, Apple and Dell – all claim to have the greenest computers and practices around.

But, how do their green efforts stack up when compared to one another? We decided to challenge these top brands to a computer green-off to see who really lived up to their own environmental hype.

Microsoft’s Hohm: First in the Azure Cloud – BusinessWeek

In the past, Microsoft would have allocated a couple of data centers to house Hohm, said Mundie. In that model, even if it were the middle of the night, the Web service would grind away in case there was a visitor. That meant it would be using more energy than needed. But with Azure’s setup, the servers are more like a car with different cylinders. “When they go uphill, we’ll turn them on, and when we’re coasting downhill, we’ll turn them off,” said Mundie.

Review: Intel’s X25-E SSD runs circles around rival drives – Computerworld

Unlike Intel’s consumer SSD, the X25-M, the X25-E is built with single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips, which store one bit per cell, unlike multilevel cell (MLC) flash, which stores two or more bits per cell. While MLC flash offers greater capacity natively, SLC delivers better performance, reliability and longevity. But it also costs: A 64GB X25-E goes for more than $800 on Pricegrabber.com. In comparison, Intel’s 80GB X25-M will run you around $360.

Amazon’s Golden Cloud – Forbes

But cloud computing is inherently more green than running your own data center. There are a lot of data centers that are not highly utilized. If they utilize their assets at 20%, they’re doing well. What we can do is aggregate a lot of demand across a lot of different time zones and use cases.

Sun, RingCube Integrate Desktop Virtualization Technologies – eWeek

The partnership will bring to enterprises that are using Sun’s Sun Ray VDI technology the ability to more effectively and cheaply roll out personalized virtual desktops, let users work offline and synchronize their VDI environment and portable storage devices, PCs or laptops.