February Technical News

Virtualisation cuts carbon & servers, but watt's the cost?

Now virtualisation is mainstream, fears about putting too many apps on the same server are evaporating. That just leaves the problem of calculating power consumption.

Computing may drive efficiency but the data centres that run business are often far from efficient. Servers haven't traditionally used all of their spare CPU power, because reliability concerns stop administrators running lots of applications on one box.

Working out a company's potential carbon savings from virtualising servers requires a before-and-after calculation of energy usage. This also happens to be a useful metric for those trying to quantify energy savings. To speak to a DTP Specialist about Virtualisation and the energy savings you could benefit from click here.

Source: www.silicon.com

CEOs & CIOs need to walk the green walk

A new survey just released shows that while CEOs and CIOs may be championing green IT, the reality is that many companies are still in the talking phase or still have no plans to green up their data centres. Tony Sceales, Celona Technologies CEO, looks at the key findings and examines what this means for business and wider communities.

We’ve heard so much about green IT initiatives recently you'd be forgiven for thinking that everybody had this under control. You might be surprised to learn that storage vendor ONStor found that 58 per cent of the companies they surveyed were either still talking about what they were going to do, or still have no plans as yet to do anything.

Green IT hasn't had the headline profiles of recycling carrier bags, or not using your car, but the fact is that IT is a major contributor to CO2 emissions. The UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) estimated last October that the UK’s PCs and servers were already consuming 14 per cent more power than the entire power consumption of Luxembourg, and of course the figure is still rising.

Source: www.bcs.org

HP to Reduce PC Energy Usage by 25%

HP committed to reduce the energy consumption of its volume desktop and notebook PC families by 25 percent by 2010.

HP also now leads the industry in the number of Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT™) Gold listed products with the introduction of more than two dozen PCs registered in North America at either the Gold or Silver rating levels.

“HP for decades has been integrating environmentally responsible components and processes across the entire product lifecycle,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP. “We are dedicated to meeting our energy consumption goal of 25 percent reduction by 2010, and these additional EPEAT-Gold registrations exemplify how HP leads the IT market in reducing the environmental impact of its products and business processes.”

Source: www.hp.com

Flash drives scale to 128GB

Flash drives will take the leap to mass storage in the first half of this year when Samsung releases a 128GB drive for use in PCs and mobile devices and threatens to make the hard drive redundant for some systems.

The solid-state drives will be offered in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch formats. Demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the drive will write data at 70MB/s and read at 100MB/s, thanks to an optimised controller and firmware, Samsung said. Transfer speeds are aided by a 3Gbit/s SATA II interface. Click here to read more

Source: www.itweek.com