Iceland’s citizens were given a chance to help forge a new constitution for their country through Facebook and Twitter, so it’s not surprising that they backed the resulting draft. Now it’s over to the politicians. Read more »
Much of the data center industry is upset about a recen report exposing some wasteful energy practices. However, eBay’s Dean Nelson says the data center industry isn’t perfect and it’s up to companies like his to lead the charge on bringing everyone else up to speed. Read more »
Twenty-one cleantech startups from across the U.S. competed for a grand prize of $250,000 in investment and services at this year’s Cleantech Open Business Competition. And the winners are . . . Read more »
James Hamilton, VP and distinguished engineer for Amazon Web Services, has some hot tips on building or running a cooler, and more energy-efficient data center. Hamilton, something of a data center rock star, spoke at a recent Open Compute Project event. Read more »
In a shift that’s analogous to the movement toward cloud computing, work is changing from a place to a network armed with collaboration tools, and this change raising questions about environmental impact. But are we underestimating the green benefits of new ways of working? Read more »
The trials and tribulations of the solar industry dominated the third quarter as warnings about a storm of dangerous market forces in the industry finally reached an outcome with Solyndra’s bankruptcy. But not all was dismal for the cleantech industry during the quarter. Car sharing continues to reduce resource consumption, and much capital flowed to that sector. On the data center side of the industry, Google provided insight into exactly how much energy the tech giant uses, as well as the carbon footprint of its data centers. Companies mentioned in this report include Solyndra, Zipcar, Airbnb and Silver Spring Networks. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The latest idea from Facebook on how to revolutionize the data center is elegant in its simplicity: put a switch on hard-disk drives that slows their speed when their data is no longer hot. I wonder if Facebook will take up the cause and build it. Read more »
Achieving the ultimate in green building badges — the LEED platinum certification — is pretty rare and is particularly unusual for data centers. But on Thursday GE showed off its new LEED platinum-certified data center in Louisville, Ky. Here are some photos from the green facility. Read more »
After a century of making tabulation machines IBM has come up with a new chip that marries our brain’s architecture with silicon guts. The goal is to create a new style of computing aimed at making sense of big data without consuming a lot of power. Read more »
A report from data center energy expert Jonathan Koomey, published on Monday morning, gave a rare glimpse into some educated estimates for how many servers and how much electricity Google uses, and how energy-efficient those custom servers are. Read more »
Silicon Valley’s fuel cell maker Bloom Energy continues to add customers looking to power part of their data center operations with distributed, cleaner power in California. NTT America plans to install five Bloom fuel cells at one of its data center facilities in San Jose, Calif. Read more »
A common misperception is that the bulk of the energy consumption associated with the Internet and connected-computing comes from massive data centers. In reality, the billions of end devices — computers, set-top-boxes — are currently the bigger and more wasteful culprits. Read more »
While Google has been at the forefront of cutting-edge green data center technology, with experimental projects like its seawater-cooled data center, Google’s big message at its second data center efficiency summit: There’s no magic involved with greener data centers. Read more »
For this year’s Green:Net, a team of GigaOM editors and industry insiders chose 10 innovators in the digital energy space to present their “big ideas” for using information technology to fight climate change. Here are some of the insights they shared. Read more »
Today, at our third-annual Green:Net event, we’re looking at digital energy: how technology can reduce energy consumption and help the environment. The livestream begins at 8:25 PT, and we’ll update this post throughout the day with the liveblogs from the event. Read more »
Do you have any idea what your incessant status updates require Facebook to do on the back end? Supporting 100 million photo uploads each day and as many as 18,000 comments requires the social network to perform 24 billion calculations a second at peak times. Read more »
Facebook has shared the details of its server and data center design, taking its commitment to openness to a new level for the industry by sharing its infrastructure secrets like it has shared its software code.And that data center? It has a PUE of 1.07. Read more »
Here’s an interesting take on green data centers: servers that use thermoelectrics to turn their own waste heat into power. Applied Methodologies Inc. has been working on the concept since 2007. Read more »
HP researchers this week put forth an intriguing idea for powering data centers: harvesting and processing cow waste. Under their setup, dairy farmers get an additional revenue stream and data center operators get a clean and cost-effective source of energy. Sounds like a solid win all ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new aspect of data center energy use is getting increasing attention lately: software. If the code running on all the servers in a data center was inherently more energy-efficient and governed by its own energy-aware logic, IT managers could have another, less costly option to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
