Green Channel

Adelaide-based green technology developer, Ember Technologies, has secured $750,000 in investment funding to brings its power-saving solution to market.

The 'Computers Off Australia' (COA) campaign and labeling initiative was launched nationwide in Sydney today, with the aim of encouraging organisations and individuals to implement power management practices on their home and office computers to reduce the carbon footprint of ICT.

Putting data centers on decommissioned ships and reusing hot water from cooling systems to fill the town swimming pool were among the wackier ideas floated at the Data Center Energy Summit last week.

Sharp plans to partially power a new solar panel factory with energy generated from a solar installation on the plant's roof, it said Monday.

A study into "Green IT" within Australian and New Zealand organizations reveals that a majority have a strong mandate from the executive to reduce the environmental impact of IT but not that many are offering a budget for IT to achieve this.

When Enterprise Rent-A-Car completes a move from PCs to thin clients this season, as part of the rollout of a new rental transaction system, it expects to cut internal energy consumption by 5 million kilowatt-hours.

The grass is always greener on the other side. And in the datacentre neighbourhood - whichever fence you peek over - there are bound to be tracts of lush playing turf that appear more attractive than your own. That's why global IT vendors often ply the fence sitting art in intractable debates like managed versus internal datacentres.

According to IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano the client PC era is over, dead and buried, and not just because the vendor sold its Thinkpad business to Lenovo. Cloud computing is the future, and to underline the point Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt shared the keynote stage at Big Blue's partner leadership forum in the US last week.

Bluetooth's low-power variant could be everywhere starting next year, and other low-power networking options had better watch out, say the new standard's backers.

Spurred by business needs as well as environmental concerns, green IT projects blossomed in datacenters and on desktops throughout the world in 2007.

The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop/s, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Rackspace provides datacentre facilities under a managed hosting scheme. It is building a new UK datacentre and has had a green aspect to its business for about a year and a half. How is that affecting its operations?

Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons for companies to go green. The first is to reduce energy costs, thereby saving the company money. As one IT executive put it to me recently, "Green computing is all about saving greenbacks."

Organisations are investing in green computers -- that is, machines that are energy efficient and built in an environmentally responsible manner -- at ever-increasing rates. Sometimes they pay a small premium to do this. Is it worth it? They seem to think so.

All datacentre products claiming to be green are not created equal. That's because metrics to determine how green equipment is usually are vendor-driven and measuring energy efficiency can be a chore for network architects.

Measure, measure, measure: It's one of the pieces of advice repeatedly doled out to companies looking to make their datacenters more energy-efficient. Without question, it's a sound suggestion; if you don't know where you're starting from, how do you know where you should go or whether you've made any progress?

The IT industry must smooth the transition path if CIOs are to stop thinking of green initiatives as an inconvenience.