Google I/O is getting most of the attention this week, but a conference at the other end of Silicon Valley showed there's plenty of innovation happening in the word of data centers, too.

Employees at the Chinese factories of Apple supplier Foxconn continue to work beyond the country's legal limit of 49 hours a month, according to a report from the Fair Labor Association (FLA). But the Taiwanese manufacturer is making overall steady progress in improving the working conditions at a select group of factories in China, it said.

A data center in Sweden has cut its energy bills by a million dollars a year using seawater to cool its servers, though jellyfish are an occasional hazard.

A new survey from the Uptime Institute suggests fatigue is setting in when it comes to making data centers greener, and it may be partly due to overachievers like Google and Microsoft.

Networks could use far less energy by 2020 even though they'll be carrying much more traffic, an industry group says.

Ericsson and Vodafone in Egypt have successfully tested a new way to build more energy-efficient networks in rural areas, and make it possible to build networks where they previously could not be built, according to the vendor.

An electronics and a recycling trade group are looking for ways to reuse recycled cathode ray tube (CRT) glass from computer monitors and television sets, with a US$10,000 prize for the best proposal.

While technological progress and the environment often seem to be at odds, many tech companies are working hard to lessen the impact their businesses have on the planet. Over the last several years, Apple has released an annual progress report about its environmental status, and this year is no different.

IT has gotten a bad rap when it comes to energy consumption. Walk into any datacenter, and you can almost feel the carbon emissions leaking into the atmosphere. However, research shows that the datacenter actually accounts for a very small percentage of a company's overall energy usage. And businesses are missing the other significant opportunities where they could cut energy usages -- and costs. Ironically, the same IT department that is reducing energy usage in the datacenter could lead the energy-savings initiatives across the enterprise.