IT professionals implementing energy efficient solutions in the data center are realizing big savings, and many report it has been easier to do than they thought it would be. In its fourth year, the CDW Energy Efficient IT Report found that implementing energy efficient solutions is easier than the typical organization perceives. Even better, "green" initiatives are gaining respect in the IT world, with 43% of survey respondents identifying green initiatives as a top driver for data center conso

However, despite these Green IT initiatives, Foster could not say if Fujitsu would be forced to pass on costs associated with the carbon tax to customers once it comes into law after 1 July this year. “There are always variants in energy costs that ...

If you've read this blog for a while, it's no secret that I believe that one aspect of cloud computing is a dramatic drop in the cost of computing. While many discuss cloud computing's cost advantage in terms of better utilization via resource pooling and rapid elasticity, we believe that there is a more fundamental shift going on as data centers are redesigned to focus on scale, efficiency, and a shift to commodity components. Put another way, the former cost advantage (utilization, etc.) relies on more efficient use of existing data center design patterns, while the latter relies on transforming the cost basis of data centers by creating new design patterns. I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a post entitled "Are You Making Your Data Centers Cloud-Friendly?" In it I discussed trends evinced at the San Francisco DatacenterDynamics conference: energy efficiency, raised operating ...

In business discussions around technology, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. As IT departments and media try to forecast the next new wave of applications, the viability of one platform over another gets put into question, as does the hype cycle around emerging technologies. Society's tendency to focus on the micro trends puts the industry at risk of ignoring larger, more urgent technology issues. And at present, there is no technology discussion bigger than cloud computing. The media has covered cloud debates to the point of saturation. Is cloud is hype or reality? How do you define cloud computing? What applications are best suited for the cloud? In truth, the question we should all be debating is what major challenges can cloud computing solve. The answer is the IT energy crisis.

NextDC chief executive, Bevan Slattery, has predicted that it may be incurring costs of "2.7 cents per kilo watt" at its Melbourne facility once the Gillard Government's carbon tax comes into affect on 1 July, 2012. Speaking to Computerworld Australia, Slattery said the company's calculations show that the carbon tax will create further incentives for it and fellow data centre providers to pursue energy efficiency measures.

The explosion of giant Web properties has server vendors building a new kind of machine that is stripped down to the bare essentials and optimized for cost- and energy-efficiency, analysts say. The latest entry comes from HP, which on Wednesday introduced a line of x86 servers designed for what HP calls "extreme scale-out" environments. The HP ProLiant SL servers have a layout that lets fans run at lower speeds, and omit features that HP says often aren't required by large Internet companies, such as redundant power supplies and advanced management software. But HP is not the pioneer in this scale-out server market, with companies such as IBM, Sun, Dell, Super Micro, and Rackable offering products of their own. Each vendor has its own approach, but in general these are "systems optimized for large homogenous application scale-out deployments, an application that spans 1,000 servers," says Forrester Research analyst James ...