IO Data Centers has raised $90 million for its suite of offerings that rethink the way data centers are built and managed. Its IO.Anywhere units are fully contained data centers in a small package, and its OS software can manage a data center from a smartphone. Read more »
Autodesk now offers a cloud-based version of its simulation software for a fraction of the cost of most similar on-premise options. While large enterprises might not being willing to make the jump yet, some innovative startups are already on board and testing the future. Read more »
A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you? Read more »
Elliptical Mobile Solutions is hardly a household name in the data center world, but don’t bet against it. While bigger data centers seem to be better for webscale companies such as Google and Facebook, many are happy to grow about 105 cubic feet at a time. Read more »
AOL is taking its flexible infrastructure strategy to a whole new level of flexibility by building data centers that are about the size of French door refrigerators. Now, AOL will be able to deploy infrastructure where needed with little more than an electrical outlet required. Read more »
eBay and Facebook are among the winners of this year’s Green Enterprise IT Awards, which the Uptime Institute doles out for advancements in the world of energy-efficient data centers. eBay won for its Project Mercury data center, while Facebook scored with its Open Compute Project. Read more »
While webscale data center operators such as eBay are deploying custom-built data center containers designed for maximum performance and efficiency, IO Data Centers is pushing modular data centers for the rest of us. Its IO.Anywhere modules aren’t designed for HPC, but do promise flexibility. Read more »
In a webscale data center, peak efficiency feels like a blast furnace. I stepped into the hot aisle of Dell Modular Data Center and 1,920 servers blasted 115-degree air right in my face. If eBay’s Dean Nelson has his way, that was just the beginning. Read more »
What you should be reading and thinking about this week, courtesy of Adam Lesser, GigaOM Pro’s Green IT analyst. Read more »
Forget the hardware. It is becoming abundantly apparent that what will matter for smart meters is how well data can be used to manage demand response, outages and balance load while also being secure, says Adam Lesser, GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst. Read more »
The Nest thermostat — designed and created by the iPod architect Tony Fadell — stands out among the crowd of home energy products, says GigaOM Pro’s Green IT analyst Adam Lesser. Why? Design matters. Read more »
Will Apple embrace solar in any meaningful way? Seems like even Apple is realizing that it needs to hedge its brand against being labeled anti-environment. Now that Apple is the 800 pound gorilla of tech, managing negative publicity surrounding its sustainability practices will matter more. Read more »
The third quarter’s numbers are out from the Green IT section of GigaOM’s research subscription service GigaOM Pro. Solar is struggling, while IT-based systems like car sharing are soaring. Dig into the details with us. Read more »
GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser asks should we be measuring the success of a cleantech investment purely based on IPO exits, in his weekly column? Read more »
Our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser points out that U.S. solar manufacturers are preparing a complaint against China to be filed with the Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission. Read more »
Cleantech, meet mobile. The intersection between these two industries has grown over the past twelve months as companies increasingly look to use smartphones as a platform to enable their services, according to a new report from our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser. Read more »
Now for Today in Green IT, news, notes and musing from our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser. Nuclear power is falling in Germany and Japan, as corporations follow suit from country-wide protests and anti-nuclear politics. Read more »
Google has aggressively argued that PUE (the measurement of how efficient a data center is) must be constantly measured to be accurate. But there is a need also to go beyond PUE. For our Today in Green IT, here’s how to go beyond PUE: Read more »
It’s time for Today in Green IT! Another bit of interesting info from Google’s new green site is how aggressively Google argues that PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) needs to be measured as often as possible, points Adam Lesser, our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst. Read more »
Corporate venture capital plays a key role in the startup world, including the cleantech sector. In his Today in Green IT post, the curator of our research service, Adam Lesser, highlighted the role of corporate venture capital and pointed to an article in the Detroit Free Press […] Read more »
With the stock market in flux, do tech startups stand a chance when it comes to luring investors? To find out, we polled GigaOM readers on what’s hot, what’s not, which sectors might favor buyouts versus IPOs and how it all will change in the near ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Honing the right message about the benefits of clean power is harder than it looks. That’s the theme for Today in Green IT — our daily look at what the curator of our research service, Adam Lesser, has been reading and thinking about. Read more »
And now for Today in Green IT, a daily blurb from the curator of our research service. Today’s topic: the modular data center continues to pick up steam as a solution to the growth of cloud computing and the need to produce energy-efficient data centers. Read more »
We’re still a long ways from an ARM-based low power server world, but the idea is making baby steps. Here’s the Today in Green IT, brought to you by the curator of our Green IT section for our subscription service GigaOM Pro. Read more »
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 »
Introducing a new daily spot from our research service, the Green IT section of GigaOM Pro, and our Green IT curator Adam Lesser. Here’s Today in Green 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 »
Low solar prices and global competition continue to rock solar manufacturers. On the heels of Evergreen Solar filing for bankruptcy on Monday, on Tuesday, German solar maker Solon announced that it will shutter a Tucson panel factory and cut 60 jobs. Read more »
It’s not a startup, but it’s the latest member of the cleantech graveyard. On Monday, Evergreen Solar filed for Chapter 11 and announced it will be selling its assets, laying off 65 people and suspending operation of its Midland, Mich. filament factory. Read more »
More solar panels are sprouting from the rooftops these days, along with an increasing number of equipment models and installers. Yet there is no good consumer guide to help people compare shop and avoid scams. The time has come to create one. Read more »
The emerging web-sharing movement, which includes startups like Airbnb, RelayRides, and ThredUP, has its roots in the maturing way that people use the Internet and cell phones, and its future economy will rise around location, niche groups and capital-intensive, under-utilized and time-sensitive objects. For entrepreneurs looking ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The California Energy Commission on Wednesday filed a complaint against a wind turbine maker, contending that the company has exaggerated the performance of its equipment and caused the commission to overpay in rebates. 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 »
Last week’s Verdantix and AT&T report on the energy and carbon emission savings to come from cloud computing is the latest in a long line of studies stating the obvious: Shifting computing from inefficient, dispersed data centers to highly efficient, centralized cloud data centers should save ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
DuPont announced on Monday that it has bought Innovalight, a Silicon Valley startup that makes silicon ink that solar-cell makers can use to improve the amount of electricity that the cells can squeeze out of sunlight. DuPont declined to disclose the purchase price. Read more »
The second quarter brought a slew of greentech developments: We saw near-record investment in utility-scale clean energy projects but falling valuations for clean-energy stocks; big investments in solar thermal projects but struggling markets for solar photovoltaic systems; and rising private equity green investment while green VC took ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
GE backs startup Nuventix, which has developed a cooling technology for LEDs and electronics. The tech can help LED-makers cool lights without using a larger fixture size. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Initially, I was excited to see that someone else sees Las Vegas as the green data center hotspot it should be. But pair Networks’ new Las Vegas data center that runs entirely off the grid does so with relatively little solar power. Read more »
Trying to use green marketing to sell cell phones is a misplaced effort by the phone companies. There, I said it. I’m not even going to do a light-hearted lead into the thesis of this post. Read more »
