More Sustainable IT News

Swedish data center saves $1 million a year using seawater for cooling

A data center in Sweden has cut its energy bills by a million dollars a year using seawater to cool its servers, though jellyfish are an occasional hazard.

Data centers show signs of 'green fatigue'

A new survey from the Uptime Institute suggests fatigue is setting in when it comes to making data centers greener, and it may be partly due to overachievers like Google and Microsoft.

Networks in 2020: More traffic, less energy

Networks could use far less energy by 2020 even though they'll be carrying much more traffic, an industry group says.

Harvard aims to help developers make cheaper solar panels

Hoping to usher in an age of low-cost solar power, Harvard's Clean Energy Project in June plans to release a list of 20,000 organic compounds that could be used to make cheap, printable photovoltaic cells.

Sandy begets tree-hugging companies

Severe weather shifts are forcing companies to rethink their energy strategies; they're using both technology and geography to become more energy independent.

New data center survey shows mediocre results for energy efficiency

A new survey suggests that large data centers might be less energy efficient than was previously thought.

Nanowires could boost energy in solar cells by 15x

Building solar voltaic cells from nanowires instead of standard metal conductors can increase the amount of energy that can be captured by a factor of 15, according to a new study by scientists from the Nano-Science Center in Denmark.

Trade groups look for uses for recycled CRT glass

An electronics and a recycling trade group are looking for ways to reuse recycled cathode ray tube (CRT) glass from computer monitors and television sets, with a US$10,000 prize for the best proposal.

eBay develops metric for data center performance

There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with a new measurement for doing both.

EBay develops 'miles per gallon' metric for data centers

There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.

Top tech companies plug into renewable power

Leading tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple are making huge inroads in the use of renewable energy for corporate facilities and data centers, but cost and delivery challenges remain.

New SPEC tool to ID most energy-efficient servers

SPEC, the standards body for performance benchmarks, has released a new toolkit that should help customers choose the most energy-efficient server for the workloads they need to run.

Iceotope plumbs in immersively cooled servers for first customer

Iceotope's immersively cooled server racks are now in production, and the company has named its first customer, the University of Leeds, in the north of England.

HP's first 'Project Moonshot' server due next quarter

Hewlett-Packard's first low-power server for hyperscale computing environments, developed under a project it calls Moonshot, will go on sale next quarter, CEO Meg Whitman said on Thursday.

Beijing's heavy pollution a boon for air quality monitoring apps

On Jan. 13, local developer Wang Jun found that downloads for his app had suddenly skyrocketed, totaling 58,000 in a single day.

Facebook pushes a new model for buying servers

Facebook has proposed a new model for designing servers that it says will give businesses more choice in selecting components and a smarter way to upgrade systems when needs change, though it remains to be seen how widely its method will be adopted.

Smart energy IT market growing quickly

Revenue in the IT segment of the world's smart electricity delivery industry is likely to have grown by 23 percent, to US$9.4 billion, in 2012, in support of smart grid deployments, according to a new study.

Google invests $200M in Texas wind turbine project

Google will invest $200 million in a wind farm project in west Texas, part of the Internet giant's continuing interest in funding renewable energy projects, the company said Wednesday.

E-waste firm convicted of falsely promising to recycle in the US

Electronic waste recycling firm Executive Recycling has been convicted of multiple crimes, including environmental violations related to illegal disposal of e-waste overseas, mail and wire fraud, and smuggling and obstruction, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

NEC data center units to use convection to cut power use by 30%

NEC is working on a new type of small data center unit that uses convection to slash power usage by a third, even in Japan's hot, sticky climate.