Green IT

While conducting some research on Facebook’s upcoming IPO, I ended up on the Open Compute Project (OCP) website (Facebook’s a member). It turns out that a lot has been happening in the past several months, and most of it is great news for the future of energy efficient data centers and cloud infrastructures. Unfortunately, it [...]

Read more Patent war clouds Open Compute Project progress

by Pedro Hernandez on May 5, 2012 · 2 comments

When it comes to server efficiency, there are companies like Calxeda and SeaMicro — which was just acquired by AMD — that pack hundreds of low-power CPUs into servers that can handle massive workloads under relatively meager power requirements. But what about the standard, run of the mill box? It looks like Intel’s newest Xeons, [...]

Read more Intel envisions energy-aware servers with Xeon E5

by Pedro Hernandez on March 8, 2012 · 1 comment

The city of Indianola, Iowa isn’t the only municipal government that’s reducing paper waste by using iPads. The city of Vancouver, Washington is also saving lots of cash — and trees — by switching 54 city employees to Apple’s tablet. According to this post in The Verge, the city has cut printing for council meetings [...]

Read more Green Government: iPads cut Vancouver, WA paper use by 40 percent

by Pedro Hernandez on March 7, 2012 · 0 comments

It used to be that if you wanted to be a member of The Green Grid, you had to belong to a member organization. That’s no longer the case. The Green Grid is accepting individual memberships. Here’s what the $400 annual fee gets you: Admittance to the members-only Web site with exclusive, early access to documents before [...]

Read more The Green Grid welcomes individuals

by Pedro Hernandez on February 27, 2012 · 0 comments

With Windows 8, Microsoft is looking to make the operating system and the software that runs on it more efficient. This is important for this version of Windows because there will be a variant, called Windows on ARM (ARM), that runs on tablet-friendly ARM processors. In an MSDN blog post,  Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and Windows [...]

Read more ARM’s a good influence on Windows 8 power management

by Pedro Hernandez on February 17, 2012 · 1 comment

It’s the end of an era. “Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA’s last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe,” says Linda Cureton in her NASA Blog post. The powerful, refrigerator-sized computers that were once a hallmark of corporate and research data centers have steadily lost ground to off-the-shelf servers over the years. Mind you, mainframes still alive and kicking, [...]

Read more NASA jettisons mainframes, looks to the cloud

by Pedro Hernandez on February 12, 2012 · 3 comments

What a week for storage, specifically for flash vendors. It started early in the week with news that EMC’s officially unveiled VFCache (formerly “Project Lightning”), a PCIe add-on card for servers. That’s right, EMC’s is entering the flash cache field pioneered by Fusion-io. But rather than targeting web and cloud services providers, EMC wants those [...]

Read more Flash fever strikes the data storage industry

by Pedro Hernandez on February 11, 2012 · 5 comments

Not that I planned it this way, but yesterday I wrote two articles for the IT Business Edge network, each with a neat little Green IT component. The first is about Nicira, a startup that emerged from stealth this week despite offering a product that’s been commercially available since July 2011. But let’s not get [...]

Read more Green IT: Nicira intros network virtualization tech, EMC follows flash startups

by Pedro Hernandez on February 7, 2012 · 0 comments

This is an interesting turn of events. Lately, startups like Calxeda and SeaMicro have been making waves by enticing data center operators with the promise of potent yet power-sipping servers using low-watt processors that are decidedly non-standard on servers. Namely, ARM- and Intel Atom-based chips, respectively. Now it turns out that SeaMicro sees some value, or at least [...]

Read more SeaMicro looks beyond Atom for more server sales

by Pedro Hernandez on February 4, 2012 · 1 comment

This is awesome. NYT Bits Blog has a story today on Silicon Valley startup DrChrono and how it raised $2.8 million from Yuri Milner, in addition to the $1.3 million funded by Y-Combinator and 500 Startups, among others. DrChrono is an electronic medical record (EMR) platform that’s taking advantage of the growing popularity of iPads in [...]

Read more iPad EMR startup DrChrono attracts $2.8M

by Pedro Hernandez on January 26, 2012 · 0 comments