green

Overheard: Energy efficiency is a relative term

If you are reading this, odds are that you’re doing it on what used to be an Energy Star compliant computer. With the roll out of Energy Star 4.0 as its being called, odds also are that your machine no longer qualifies. “Whoa!” You might be thinking, “How did that happen, I just bought the thing!” Well, here’s the deal: ‘Energy Efficiency’ is a relative term. Aaron Max Fein, Energy Star Redefines Its Shine

Overheard: Need more electricity to power your datacenters? Make it yourself!

“Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades. (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.) If we meet this goal, and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.” Larry Page, Google’s Goal: Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal

Google’s putting a new slant on the phrase utility computing.

There should be a sexy word for “monetizing your infrastructure.”  Then we can call it the _______ Revolution and compare it to the Industrial Revolution.

Overheard: Google’s Larry Page is modern day Andrew Carnegie

But when I saw the icons I remembered a dinner with Larry Page at the Clinton Global Initiative in NYC last September when I asked him what he thought was the limits to growth of Google and much to my surprise he did not say servers, or people, but he said electricity. It turns out that Google is by now the largest owner of computers in the world and that computers are consuming more and more of the electricity that is used in the world. Therefore Google has the largest utility bill in the planet. And Larry is concerned about this. Martin Varsavsky, April 25 2006

I just finished a biography about Edith Roosevelt and when I heard about Google’s plan to make their own electricity yesterday, all I could think of was “How American!” It’s just like the turn of the last century with Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Need a reliable, cheap source of steel to build your railroad cars? Tired of being jerked around by market prices? Buy a steel plant and make the raw product yourself.

Overheard - Larger capacity disks = green?

“Last week at SNW, one of the hottest topics was “Green”. Every vendor promoted their “Green” technology, which often was nothing more than the use of larger capacity disks or tapes to replace lower capacity disks.” Hu Yoshida, Sustainable Data Storage Services - Data Islandia

Hu Yoshida writes: While I agree that any thing that enables us to store more data capacity for less power consumption can be considered “Green” technology. However, this technology alone does not enable sustainable data storage.