What does a former Apple exec that’s responsible for the iconic iPod do when the thermostats on the market are too lame for his new green home? He brings design and software savvy to bear on the problem. The result is the puck-like Nest, from Tony Fadell’s startup of the same name. It’s a learning, connected thermostat […]
Tech heavies team for SATA DEVSLP, a low-power SSD standard
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are pretty energy efficient, but there are those in the industry that feel that they can do a lot better and are partnering on developing a new standard called SATA DEVSLP. Who are they? They’re SanDisk, Samsung, Intel and Microsoft SanDisk. It’s important to note that three out of four of those […]
Stat of the day: 260 million watts
That’s approximately the amount of power required to keep Google’s data centers running. As this NYT piece mentions, all those searches, Gmail accounts, YouTube videos and tons of other services continually absorb 260 million watts, or about a quarter of the output of one nuclear power plant. There are two important things to note from this […]
DoD’s strategy for a greener military
It takes a lot of fuel to keep the U.S. military going, a fact that’s not lost on the Department of Defense (DoD). So the agency has crafted a plan called the “Operational Energy Strategy” that aims to dramatically improve efficiency and produce it own sources of energy — which includes renewables — both at […]
HP’s modular EcoPOD data center
HP’s taking its build-a-data-center business seriously. Today the company’s Converged Infrastructure division unveiled what it’s billing as “the world’s most efficient data center,” the HP POD 240a. Or the EcoPOD as the company has taken to calling it (a naming convention I fully support). As has become the norm for modular data center vendors, the […]
Infographic of the day: 1 data center = 25K homes
Cloud computing is taking the IT industry by storm but behind the technology are massive data centers that consume a lot of energy. How much? According to some of the opening stats in an infographic cooked up by ABB, a utility and industrial automation firm, the energy requirements of the world’s data centers are large […]
Uptime Institute reveals IT’s energy cost blindness… Can accountants cure it?
Last week’s Uptime Institute Symposium 2011 event not only brought together data center experts, it also delivered the goods for stat monkeys in the form of the group’s first-ever industry survey results. After a bout of “excitement” from the techies in attendance (riiiiight), the group let loose with the findings, which include… 74% of respondents […]
Infographic of the Day: Peer-1’s top sites online
I hope your mouse wheel’s up to the task because this one’s a scroll-a-thon. (That up there is a mere sampling.) Peer-1 Hosting, which knows a thing or two about green data centers, has cooked up a spiffy, super-sized infographic of today’s most visited online destinations and the power it takes to keep their IT […]
69 percent of American businesses had green programs in 2010
Buck Consultants, a subsidiary of Xerox, has released some data on the state of green programs among U.S. businesses. In its third annual “Greening of the American Workplace” survey for 2010, the firm reports that 69 percent of American businesses have instituted energy-saving and waste- and carbon-reducing programs, up from 53 percent in the prior […]
Stat of the day: 15,000 gigawatt-hours per year
Can you guess what industry lays claim to that energy consumption stat? It’s the telecom industry, specifically the 16,000 legacy TDM (time-division multiplexing) phone switches in the U.S. and Canada, which account for 15 terawatts of juice yearly or “roughly 0.4% of all electricity used in those two countries,” according to of Access Venture Partners’ […]
