DataCenter

Overheard: PCs can consume as much as 10% of your home’s energy bill

PCs can consume as much as 10 percent of a home’s energy bill and give off as much carbon dioxide as a family car. Martin LaMonica, Edison: Free energy-saving PC software

Verdiem offers a free download of their software that monitors desktop Windows PCs and puts them in low-power mode when they’re idle. It’s called Edison. Microsoft and The Climate Savers Initiative are both supporting the launch of Edison.

Overheard: HP container datacenter to be vendor neutral

Customers don’t want a container that only supports HP equipment. Customers want to be able to mimic their own data centers, so we’ve designed the POD to support any vendor’s hardware. Steve Cummings, as quoted in HP’s POD: The newest containerized data center

Another modular data center is on the way — this time from HP. Here’s the press release.

At one point Google tried to patent the idea.

Overheard: Positioning CherryPal as the first cloud computer

That’s because the CherryPal, set to begin shipping at the end of this month, is a true cloud computer, meaning almost all if its applications and data are stored online. Chris Morrison, Will CherryPal be the first mass-market cloud computer?

A cloud computer is desirable for a few reasons. One is that small chips like the CherryPal’s 400 MHz Freescale processor can handle more tasks with the help of an outside server. Individual devices almost never need upgrades, and are harder to infect with viruses. Upgrades are also possible without replacing the computer, and files are accessible from anywhere. And the CherryPal requires only two watts to run, much less than a normal computer.

If they’re positioning it as a cloud computer — why not name it Cumulus or Stratus or Cirrus or Nimbus? (The price for this little black box is going to be $249.)

Overheard: There’s money to be made building data centers

Data center construction is probably the only healthy segment of the building industry. Michael Kanellos, Data Center Power Consumption: By the Numbers

Overheard: EcoRAM is the perfect marketing name

Flash doesn’t need to constantly refresh the data on the chip the way that DRAM does, so it consumes about a tenth of the power when handling a gigabyte of data. Stacey Higginbotham, In a Flash Spansion Cuts Power

Traditionally, the way to handle more information has been to buy more servers in order to get more DRAM (Micron is offering lower-power DRAM as a “green” product). Spansion hopes to change all that by using a proprietary Flash memory called EcoRAM that replaces DRAM.

Overheard: The secret to Wikipedia is Squid?

“Down time used to be our most profitable product.” Domas Mituzas, as quoted in A Look Inside Wikipedia’s Infrastructure

Domas Mituzas works as a MySQL support engineer for Sun Microsystems in his “day job.” He says that Wikipedia has 200 application servers, 20 database servers and 70 servers dedicated Squid cache servers.

Guess we  need to define Squid!

Overheard: It’s official — IBM Roadrunner is world’s fastest computer

Perhaps surprisingly, more than 5 million PlayStation 3 owners in the U.S. have first-hand knowledge of at least one of the processors that carried the Roadrunner to victory. Walaika Haskins, IBM Roadrunner Meep-Meeps to Top of Supercomputer Rankings

The IBM supercomputer is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell chips similar to those found in the gaming console. The system’s 6,562 AMD Opteron dual-core processors handle the basic compute functions, leaving the Cell chips available to deal with the heavy lifting necessary for the math-intensive calculations in which the processors specialize.

Overheard: Facebook is loving Hadoop

Over time, we have added classic data warehouse features like partitioning, sampling and indexing to this environment. This in-house data warehousing layer over Hadoop is called Hive and we are looking forward to releasing an open source version of this project in the near future. Joydeep Sen Sarma, Hadoop

Overheard: Cloud computing too big a risk for mission critical apps

The nature of Grid/Cloud computing means a business has to migrate its applications and data to a third party solution. This creates huge barriers to the uptake. Paul Wallis, Is the Cloud There Yet?

Recently we’ve seen the London Stock Exchange fail, undersea data cables cut in the Gulf, espionage in Lithuania and the failure of the most modern and well-known data farm at Amazon.

In such a climate it will require asking the business to take a leap of faith to find solid footing in the cloud for mission critical applications.

And that is never a good way to sell to the business.

Overheard: Your PUE number is like golf

“Your PUE number is like golf — the closer to 1, the better. At least that has always been the common wisdom. The goal, says experts, is to reduce your PUE. But sometimes an IT energy efficiency project can play games with that number.” Mark Fontecchio, How a virtualization and server consolidation project could hurt your PUE