Green Channel: Features

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

As an opportunity for new products and services, power management is about to explode. MATTHEW SAINSBURY discovers why.

Like the unfortunate person who continually diets but only seems to gain more weight, power-hungry data centers -- despite adopting virtualization and power management techniques -- only seem to be consuming more energy than ever, to judge from some of the talks at the Uptime Symposium 2010, held this week in New York.

I came across a link to a new report from IDC called the "2010 Digital Universe Study".

Virtual desktops-once the most rigid, least friendly way to put applications in front of end users-have become a hot topic by promising to deliver the security and easy maintenance that was always desktop virtualization's strength. The trouble: Desktop virtualization now comes in so many varieties that even vendors confuse terms referring to the flavors.

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.

We go through some top tips on how you can establish a more environmentally friendly network

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.

Despite enhancements on both cloud and virtual computing products, major vendors aren't taking into account many of the ways even a technology designed to save IT resources can unintentionally waste them.

New York City's Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers is saving power and money by replacing its desktop computers with thin clients running virtualized operating systems.

Even tech companies need an IT overhaul from time to time. Case in point: Last year, a Canadian software developer (who preferred to remain nameless for the purposes of this story) called my team at Microtek to give its server room a badly needed upgrade.

Faced with the continued commoditization of servers, IT vendors this year will try to differentiate their offerings by moving toward more highly integrated, unified compute platforms.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to moderate an HP-sponsored meeting on the subject of virtualization. Predictably, most of the discussion (attended by press and vendors including Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware) focused on cloud computing. It was a pretty lively session, but what I want to address here is an HP product portfolio called "IT Financial Management" that was discussed, along with its implications for cloud computing. As you might guess, the product focuses on financial analysis of IT operations, which is extremely relevant to the adoption of cloud computing.

In last week's post, I discussed why dev/test can be a good first use of cloud computing. Without rehashing the entire post, it's clear that dev/test is often hampered in its activities by the difficulty of getting enough computing resources to its job.

At Storage Networking World a couple of weeks ago, the focus was on solid-state drives and cloud technologies.

When Microsoft's storage service for Sidekick users broke down, cloud computing questions sprang up -- both fair and unfair.

Highlights and lowlights from this year's show: Cloud talk eclipsed by real-life rain, too many #oow09 tweets, not enough specifics about Fusion or Java plans, and an action-packed visit by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Did you think all those legacy apps would just float up into someone else's cloud infrastructure? Management, licensing and migration concerns highlight the list of troubles that vendors are now trying to address.