How Nanosys Could Make Data Centers Greener

nanosysNanosys, an 8-year-old startup that uses nanotechnology to develop many different type of materials for various industries, has developed a way to help make data centers greener. At the AlwaysOn GoingGreen Conference on Tuesday, Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove, explained to the audience that his company is producing a low-cost metal nanobased material that can be used to develop solid state drives. Those drives store data without using any moving parts (in contrast with a spinning hard drive disk), and thus use significantly less energy than traditional storage hardware. Hartlove said Nanosys’ material can help solid state drive makers produce their hardware for significantly less cost, which could help convince more data center operators to embrace the technology.

Implementing energy-efficient solid-state drives in data centers is becoming an increasingly attractive choice for data center operators as servers continue to consume more and more power and the costs of powering the data centers continue to rise. The electricity used by the world’s servers alone doubled between 2000 and 2005 to about 123 billion kilowatt-hours, and if current trends continue, data center power use is likely to increase another 76 percent by 2010 according to the EPA. Research firm iSuppli (via eWeek) notes that deploying more solid-state drives in data centers could lead to the world’s data centers cutting electricity consumption by 166,643 MW hours between 2008 and 2013.

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