Green' tech shops have a way to go by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu

Extremely air-conditioned data centers seems to require 40 or 50 times more power than a comparably sized office space. As enviromental issues become more and more the center of media's attention, companies have no other choice than to reduce this power consumption by "greening" the data centers that support Web pages, Internet traffic, etc. The process is easier said than done and even with improvements in new technologies that reduce power consumption, electricity usage is expected to double from 2006 to 2011 due to increasing demand. Why are data centers so hungry for power? That's easy. Only 30-40% of the energy is used on running the computers but in order for these to function properly and at optimum speeds, they need to be cooled, so the rest of the resources go to cooling and A/C systems. In this spirit, some of the biggest data centers can devour several megawatts of power, enough for a small city. A solution to power saving would be a spacing for the room, as to allow better circulation for air, while an even better solution is even using the outside temperature in different areas and times of year. Only problem is most of these mainframes are built too deep inside buildings to have a chance at fresh outside air. Not until recently have the industry's concerns about the issue crystallized. Chip manufacturers such as Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have ratcheted up the electrical efficiency of their microprocessors â€" a metric that no one cared about until the past few years. IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. have invested in better ways to manage cooling systems. Another commonly talked about effort is virtualization, which means that one computer could handle functions for multiple machines at once. For example AISO, with it's solar powered system, mimics the function of 120 computers with the use of only four machines - clear save of energy. IBM also claims that it will save $250 million by taking 16,000 servers out and replacing them with only 30 big mainframe computers. Dave Douglas, vice president of Sun Microsystems Inc. stated : "We view green as a destination, in which case we focus on what we have left to do. When we look at that, we say, geez, we're not really green yet. We're greener â€" but we're not green",after managing to cut energy usage with a few percents last fiscal year.

by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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