Energy Efficiency

In last week's Gearhead I discussed, in part, the science of electroencephalography or EEG … the detection and measurement of the neurological activity of the brain via electrodes attached to a subject's scalp.

Supercomputer company Cray has created a new division that will sell big-data systems, the company has announced. The division will market its offerings to large enterprises, which will be a new kind of client for the company.

The Phoenix Suns have deployed more than 100 Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets over Verizon Wireless' 4G LTE network for use by the team's business personnel, players and managers in the current basketball season.

Sprint is rolling out one of the lowest cost tablets on the market -- a ZTE tablet with midrange specs -- but you'll have to sign a two-year service contract to get the low US$100 price tag.

Amazon will announce fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday on the heels of what analysts called stronger-than-expected fourth quarter Kindle Fire tablet sales.

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.

Although heavy-handed messaging has led to a great deal of scepticism in the market, there’s no doubting that environmental concerns are creating serious market opportunities. ARN recently brought together a group of IT industry thought-leaders to talk about myths and margins.

The Gillard Government’s carbon tax has provoked varied and, in some cases, extreme reactions but the message from the channel is simple - bring it on.

Power management guide

It was 2006, and Tom Noonan had it all. Internet Security Systems (ISS), the company he co-founded and led as CEO, was pulling in $US400 million in annual revenue and on the verge of being acquired by IBM for a whopping $US1.3 billion.

Servers get most of the glory when it comes to energy management, but networking gear is about to catch up.

Reducing power usage and cutting carbon emissions is probably the right thing to do for the future of the planet. But keep this is mind: Green is a powerful marketing term right now and cost-savings promises are part of the marketing pitch. Like all marketing promises, results vary. One example: The amount of money a typical consumer can save by using or powering down energy-efficient computers, printers and the like is often small--in the case of an up-to-date laptop, the energy savings add up to perhaps just $10 a year.

With the evolving needs of regional management, Emerson Network Power is transitioning to dedicate and focus on growth in its specific organisations within the Asia-Pacific. ARN spoke to the company’s new president of the Asia market, Anand Sanghi, about his recent promotion, company strategy and recent acquisitions.

Juniper Networks datacentre solutions director, Bobby Guhasarkar, spoke with ARN about where the datacentre is headed and the way market conditions affect strategy.

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.

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.

Data center managers and equipment vendors looking for greener alternatives will begin to benefit this year from a major initiative aimed at reducing the power consumed by Ethernet equipment. IEEE 802.3az, or the Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard, will implement low-power idle (LPI) modes for the full range of Ethernet BASE-T transceivers (100Mb, 1GbE and 10GbE) and the backplane physical layer standards (1GbE, 4-lane 1GbE and 10GbE).

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.

Evidence is mounting of a growing cynicism regarding green initiatives within the IT infrastructure space. We may be reaching a point where vendor hype has hit a saturation point and beginning to meet with customer resistance. While there is a genuine concern about data center power consumption, particularly with regard to accommodating increasingly dense technology footprints, the larger concern for most, particularly in the current climate, is controlling costs.