little bits of greener chips - by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jan 15 2010)

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   Chip and sensor manufacturers are pursuing a variety of tactics to make the next generation of IT hardware more "green" beyond the usual practice of simply cranking out the latest designs on a smaller fabrication process.

    Teridian Semiconductor (www.teridian.com) provides chips to be incorporated into servers, power meters, power strips, and power supplies – as well more mundane applications like Ye Olde HVAC and power distribution units.   Monitoring is provided for AC line voltages, frequency and load current and the company is building in hooks to its chips to support networking standards like ZigBee and HomePlug. A typical chip prices around $2.89 in quantities of 100 and consumes about 25 milliwatts in operation.

    Since Teridian's silicon is starting to be integrated into devices, server OEMs should soon be touting the ability of their gear to provide stand-alone, automatic stats on power consumption with the (of course) value-added power monitoring software to provide lots of pretty graphs and numbers in real time. 

    The headache for IT and data center administrators is the potential that vendor A uses Teridian's solution and vendor B goes with someone else's integrated solution.  Or more likely, managing and integrating an embedded power monitoring solution with existing – it's too soon to call them legacy – data center monitoring sensors.

    For instance, IBM has just announced it will support Arch Rock's (www.archrock.com) PhyNet IP-based wireless sensor network technology within its' Systems Director Active Energy Manager (AEM) for monitoring and managing energy usage in corporate data centers.   Arch Rock's PhyNet sensors provide information on electrical, temperature or humidity data, so the sensors provide deeper-level data on server room conditions and equipment that doesn't have on-box monitoring. IBM and other solutions manufacturers will have to have modules to blend both types since there will be many monitoring wonks that want to mix and match sensor solutions with everything easily displayed on one cute GUI web page. 

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