| October 23, 2009
Big guns join green program
Some big names in the consumer electronics field have joined a push to move away from the use of toxic chemicals in the manufacture of their products. The companies -- Apple, Sony Ericsson, Seagate, Iridium, plastics manufacturer DSM Engineering Plastics of the Netherlands, laminate manufacturer Nan Ya of Taiwan, and Silicon Storage Technology -- were featured in a report into measures to reduce the use of brominated and chlorinated chemicals. The report was prepared by environmental organisations ChemSec and Clean Production Action.
Bromine and chlorine are used in flame retardant and plastic resin applications, but have been linked to the formation of highly toxic dioxin compounds. www.cleanproduction.org
Green IT push goes wimpy
A fast but energy-efficient server architecture developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs goes by the somewhat improbable name of Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN). Tests have shown that an experimental computing cluster based on FAWN was able to handle between 10 and 100 times as many queries for the same amount of energy as a conventional disk-based cluster. Now a next-generation FAWN cluster is being built with nodes that include Intel's Atom processor.
"FAWN systems can't replace all of the servers in a data centre but they work really well for key-value storage systems, which need to access relatively small bits of information quickly," explained David Anderson, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/
Power management cuts costs
Ninety-three per cent of IT professionals believe desktop power management has the potential to reduce overall IT costs, according to a survey conducted for systems management appliance company Kace. The survey further showed that for IT professionals who manage computer power, desktop management has surpassed data centre power management in importance. Although the vast majority of survey participants believed there was an opportunity to save energy and reduce costs by practising power management, less than half actively did so. The main reason for not implementing a power management strategy was the need to keep computers running at all times for patching and upgrades.
|
