Las Vegas, Nevada -- The flexibility of software and the desire for simplicity continues to drive changes throughout the IT world. Managers want fewer servers and boxes from fewer (but not a single, sole-source) vendor and the ability to add, subtract, and move around functions between servers without having to lock those functions onto one platform. At CTIA this week, Ciena is preaching “consolidation” for network operators with a data center twist. Service provider are currently operating parallel optical and packet (IP) networks, said Ciena’s Industry Marketing Director Barry Zipp. If you’re into the 7 layer model, one layer is optical transport with IP stacked on top of it.

Are data center operators burned out from working on energy efficiency? A survey from the Uptime Institute suggests it. About 50 percent of respondents in North America said they consider energy efficiency to be very important in their companies, according to a summary piece published by IDG News. Last year, the number was 52 percent while in 2011 it was 58 percent, with the decline bigger at smaller data centers. An Uptime Institute spokesperson attributed the lack of interest to a combination of factors, including less resources (people, money) to devote to energy efficiency projects, and some "sick of hearing" about success stories with big budget projects.

Being green is old. It doesn’t matter if it is saving energy and water within the data center or finding renewable power, the sizzle that once surrounded green has been slowly eroded by the fact that the most practical and reasonable near-term solutions are dull and boring. I say this all against the backdrop of Europe and Japan back-peddling on cutting carbon emissions because they’re trying to ditch nuclear – a “grey” power choice, given the consequences of a major accident. The U.S. steadily grows its production of natural gas through fracking and may even end up as an oil exporter while the developing world uses a patchwork of fossil fuels and renewables to run its data centers and broadband infrastructure.

If you aren't hip to the latest fad of building/moving your data center to some northern climate for free cooling and renewable power, you can relocate right next to a liquified natural gas plant for a reduction in power usage. I myself am leaning towards more software tweaks as a better solution for most cases. TeraCool, as described in this DataCenterKnowledge piece, has come up with a way to use waste heat from a data center to warm natural gas. This would generate power -- liquid to gas spins a turbine to get electricity. Excess cooling from the LNG infrastructure is applied to data center operations. The various techniques are all patent pending, of course.

New research out of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and MIT claims data energy usage can be cut by 35 percent by simply storing fewer copies of files. I’m having some déjà vu all over again since de-duping has been proposed before. It’s all on paper (well, disk) at the moment, with plans to test network coding next year with “eventually” commercializing the software technology – and hey, if it’s that great, why not simply open source it rather than take 5 years to implement?

A recent news glut about green data centers popping up in Northern Europe is overshadowing more fundamental changes on green energy costs. Incentives to go north for carbon credits may not as great since Germany is backing down on its investments, causing investor concern, according to the Financial Times (FT). "...[J]itters are clearly growing about the cost of talking climate change and building a green electricity infrastructure in the world's oldest industrial powers," says Pilita Clark, Environmental Correspondent at FT.

ARM and TSMC announced the first tape-out of an ARM Cortex-A57 processor on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process technology, hitting the first milestone to roll out a 64-bit ARMv8 processor on TSMC's technologies. A 64-bit ARM is expected to give Intel a run for its money in the power-efficient server race. The Cortex-A57 is ARM's highest performing processor while FinFET technology is a process to cram more transistors onto a chip by using 3D structures. FinFET will cost 2 percent to 5 percent more to produce than existing "flat" silicon production, but could yield up to 37 percent faster performance while using less than half the dynamic power - Hello! Less power AND more performance per watt -- according to a Synopsys.com primer. Designers can choose between either running transistors faster at the same amount of power or run them at the same performance using less power.

Will Apple’s latest “reveal” of its new data center secrets bring others to go green? I know how Apple likes to imply it invented the graphic user interface (GUI), mouse, PC, tablet, and smartphone, so I won’t short them on a try at popularizing themselves as the experts in the green data center field

Countries around the globe are thinking and rethinking their energy policies. No nukes have become maybe nukes in Japan, the glut of U.S. natural gas may turn into a leaking problem, and Germany isn't getting green fast enough while it plans to shut down its nuclear power plants. Do you have some quick energy policy angst at your organization?

Last week, eBay rolled out its Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) metrics and dashboard. It looks good, provides power and CO2 metrics tied to transactions, and allows the company the ability to measure and fine tune improvements to its data centers.  Can't wait to see the open source clone!

DSE, shown for the first time at The Green Grid Forum, provides eBay a way to see the cost, performance and environmental impact of customer buy and sell transactions.  The new cliché for DSE is a "miles per gallon" metric for technical infrastructure, allowing eBay to observer the cost, performance, environmental impact, and revenue on customer transactions.  For the online auction company, transactions are straightforward: bid, buy, sell.

Now that eBay has DSE, it can make what the company calls more informed decisions on how to optimize everything in its technical infrastructure, including the sourcing of electrical power, data center infrastructure ...

Icelandic President Olafur Rangar Grimsson says its low-carbon economy helped it recover from the country's banking collapse in 2008 and its lessons could help other European countries as well, reports oilprice.com. Speaking before members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at a February 27 meeting in Paris, Grimsson held up his country's move into 100 percent renewable power as a reason why the country made it through the its catastrophic 2008 banking collapse.

With Amazon, AOL, Google and Facebook building their own server hardware and even low-profile shops (i.e. little fish in the sea) like Backblaze are starting to bolt together their own hardware to save money and energy says one thing: Major hardware manufacturers are lazy and too enthralled by Intel calling the shots for so long. This failure to innovate is hurting everyone -- including the environment. Facebook and Google started the trend of do-it-yourself (DIY) server hardware as the companies realized they needed to pack more computing power into a rack footprint, along with the ability to efficiently power and cool all servers and network hardware necessary to run a large scale data center.

Fewer companies are opening un-green data centers these days, if my non-scientific trend browsing through Google News key word searches is any indicator. If it's a new-build facility, odds are it is green labeled in some respects, boasting "free" cooling, hot-and-cold aisles and PUEs of less than 1.3. Meanwhile, those who already own and operate big data centers are busy trying to re-invent the server by building very customized hardware. Las Vegas is the latest area bragging about data center growth, with Cobalt, Switch, and ViaWest all touting they're in a "safe zone" away from the earthquake prone regions of California and bad weather along the East Coast and Southern regions of the U.S.

During President Barak Obama's 2013 State of the Union address, climate change got top billing for the first time.  Obama called upon Congress to act to produce a "bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change."  If it doesn't, expect a series of executive orders, but unlike the threat of sequestration to the nation's budget, the President didn't set a deadline.