Green Channel

The energy cost of home appliances like washing machines and refrigerators could drop if a new microcontroller announced by Arm on Monday lives up to expectations.

A Silicon Valley start-up is getting ready to unveil an energy device this week that executives say could one day power individual homes and businesses while replacing the traditional power grid.

South Australian premier, Mike Rann, has signed an agreement to help reduce the state’s carbon emissions.

Intel’s research labs have prototyped a resilient microprocessor that delivers as much as 41 percent more throughput using the same amount of energy as a comparable conventional core.

While most of the conversation at ARN’s Sustainable IT roundtable focused on energy efficiency, a critical issue that can’t be forgotten is asset disposal. E-waste is a massive problem around the world and one that’s not easy to contain, Symantec’s Jose Iglesias said.

So how can the channel demonstrate environmental savings to their customers and drive interest in sustainable solutions? ComputerCorp’s Michael van Zoggel said integrators can only do what they can do and what they can measure and justify.

It’s one thing to talk about greening your own infrastructure by better utilising or buying more energy efficient assets, but what happens when those computing resources are being delivered by a third-party provider? Is outsourcing in fact, a way to minimise your carbon impact?

A collection of images and industry expert comments from ARN's sustainable IT roundtable.

IT buys the technology; facilities buys the energy. That's the way it's always been in corporate America. But that may be changing.

Sixty-five percent of consumers think some companies overstate their green credentials to sell more products, according to research presented by industry organization Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday.

Could saving the Earth – and your company's bottom line – be as simple as using fresh air to cool the datacentre?

The enterprise data center of the future will be a highly flexible and adaptable organism, responding quickly to changing needs because of technologies like virtualization, a modular building approach, and an operating system that treats distributed resources as a single computing pool.

Steady, incremental improvement has been the name of the game for Datacom, and is what led to the service provider winning the ARN Green Project of the Year award for the second time in a row.

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26 percent per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200 percent annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

Saving on energy costs is obviously a good thing, but to Larry Quinlan, CIO at the consulting firm Deloitte, green IT simply makes good business sense. "If you run green IT right, you will end up with a vastly superior IT organization," Quinlan said during his keynote address at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in the US, in which he described green IT as one of five technologies that will change IT. From reducing demand for IT resources to thin laptops, Quinlan has no shortage of ideas on how to make green IT deliver on multiple fronts.

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.

As the dust settles from the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, here are four trends worth looking at based on some products that were announced at the show. On my radar screen for the year:

The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.

Motivated to help the environment as well as their businesses, SMBs are increasingly embracing green practices. One of their primary approaches: employing green technology, according to recently released survey results from KRC Research.

While I applaud any company's attempt to be environmentally responsible and implement "green" projects, I remain skeptical of long-term commitments to green initiatives that don't decrease costs, fatten the bottom line, or polish the organization's image.