You can’t fail to notice that GITEX exhibitors are going all out for ‘green’ this year. Monitors, servers, printers, processors - if its on show, there’s usually a green version of it, with less power consumption, less toxic materials or some other tenuous claim to eco-friendly credentials.
Even the promotional materials have gotten in on the act - with Emirates Computers in particularly scoring green points for replacing the usual plastic bags with eco-friendly hand-woven yak hair bags or some such.
Posted by Mark Sutton
on
20 September 2008 at
11:54 UAE time.
Here’s one that’ll raise some eyebrows among CIOs - Intel has been experimenting with datacentre cooling - by turning off the air conditioning, and cooling high density racks just with fresh desert air.
In the ten month experiment, which ran til August in the New Mexico desert, Intel researchers used an air economizer - which simply pumps in outside air with only a basic filter - to cool a data centre. Unlike a typical air conditioner which recycles the same ‘inside’ air for cooling, the economizer pumps in outside air, and expels it out the other end.
The results - the economizer, which was used for 91% of the time during the experiment, gave an estimated 68% power saving over a comparison air conditioner which was used to cool another compartment in the same data centre.
And while the economizer pumped in air at up to 90f (32c) and 30% humidity, with just a standard filter that didn’t catch fine dust, Intel says it recorded no consistent increase in server failure.
Although the desert climate in the experiment location was described as temperate desert, without the same extremes of humidity and temperature we get in this part of the world, the conditions were not so different. Intel stresses that this was just an initial experiment, so perhaps its not a good idea to go opening windows in the data centre just yet, but if the results can be replicated, who knows what it might mean for datacentre deployments?
This week I’m in San Francisco for the Intel Developer Forum, (IDF), Intel’s half-yearly showcase and talking shop of all that’s new from them. For those that don’t know, IDF is one of the biggest events on the tech calendar, a mix of the highly technical sessions on a very narrow focus, and a platform to show off some new directions and new thinking for IT.
Posted by Mark Sutton
on
2 July 2008 at
12:46 UAE time.
We asked visitors to itp.net to complete a spot poll on how long they have had their current mobile phone - here’s what you told us:
No great surprises that almost exactly half of respondents have had their phones for less than a year, and a quarter for less than six months. Likewise, just 16% of respondents have kept hold of the same phone for more than two years, which would seem to be about the outer edge for serviceable life for many handsets these days.
Of course, there is a good proportion of mobiles that get lost, stolen, left in taxis, dropped down the toilet and so on, but one quarter of us changing our handsets every six months is a hell of a lot of handsets going into landfills.
And aside from the Nokia Communicator junkies, who always used to have at least two handsets so that one could get serviced while the other one was in use, does anyone ever get a mobile fixed if it goes wrong? Or even replace the battery?
