IT

Nest Labs says it has sold out of its thermostats.

In response to the demand, Nest Labs has temporarily shut down the online store on Nest.com and plans to reopen it in early 2012, Erik Charlton, vice president of sales and marketing at Nest Labs, announced yesterday via the company's blog.

Those who've preordered a thermostat via Nest Labs have nothing to worry about--the company says it will still be able to honor all original shipping dates on confirmation e-mails. Those who've only received a reservation number for a Nest Labs thermostat will now have to … Read more

IBM is bringing electric power--in the form of solar panels--to data centers with trouble getting power in the first place.

The company tomorrow will detail a pilot project that couples solar power with water-cooled servers that run on high-voltage direct current. The method results in about a 10 percent energy savings by reducing the losses that normally happen in converting from alternating power from the grid to the direct current servers run on, according to Kota Murali, the chief scientist of nanotechnology at IBM India who developed the pilot as a side project.

That level of energy reduction is significant … Read more

Start-up Calxeda is making an end run around the limitations of power in data centers by using chips normally used for mobile phones.

The company today is launching its EnergyCore "server on a chip" around the ARM processor, which yields a four-core server that runs at 5 watts and less than half a watt when idle. Hewlett-Packard plans to build a line of energy-efficient servers around EnergyCore.

The EnergyCore processing unit is well suited for "big data" applications that crunch large amounts of data in parallel, such as analytics, media streaming, or in-memory databases, according to … Read more

Facebook today created a foundation to lead Open Compute, borrowing the open source software model to advance a set of freely available data center designs in order to speed hardware innovation and reduce the environmental impact of cloud computing.

The company announced initial members and directors of the foundation at the second Open Compute Summit today in New York. It also intends to release details on its guiding principles and how projects will be proposed and handled.

Facebook launched the Open Compute Project in April under the idea that the designs and specifications of its data centers can be shared … Read more

In a classic pairing of IT and renewable energy, an IBM supercomputer will optimize placement of wind turbines to improve performance.

IBM and Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas yesterday announced that the Firestorm supercomputer will analyze petabytes of data to maximize energy output of Vestas turbines.

The supercomputer crunches through weather reports, moon and tidal phase, sensor data, satellite images, and deforestation maps to generate the best placement of turbines, IBM said. Once installed, Vestas engineers will use the software to predict future performance and figure out the best time to do maintenance.

Predicting energy output of turbines is vitally … Read more

Today's smartphones need to be charged far more frequently than older cell phones. But if it weren't for rapid improvements in energy efficiency, smartphones, laptops, and other mobile gadgets might still be on the drawing boards.

A paper published in the last edition of the IEEE's Annals of the History of Computing finds that there is a rough equivalent to Moore's Law when it comes to energy and computers. As computing muscle has increased over time, the amount of energy needed per computation has gone down, the paper finds. In fact, improvements in energy efficiency are … Read more

Before hauling new equipment to their boiler rooms, companies would do well installing software to improve building efficiency, a Microsoft pilot test found.

Microsoft is expected to publish a paper on a test done at its Redmond, Wash., campus geared at lowering the corporate energy usage with information technology. The premise of the project was straight-forward: does it make more sense to upgrade mechanical equipment, such as HVAC systems, or use software?

Coming from a giant software company, the results are perhaps not surprising. But the tests help validate the notion that information systems are an important ingredient to reducing … Read more

What happens when you let a group of crack developers and entrepreneurs direct their energies to environmental sustainability for a couple of days? As this weekend showed, you get some interesting apps.

Organizers this week hosted the first Cleanweb Hackathon in San Francisco this weekend and announced the winner of app development contest yesterday.

The overall winner for the event was team TACO (total cost of ownership) which showed a prototype of a Chrome browser plug-in that shows electricity use of electronics and other products to people when shopping, according to one of the organizers and investor Sunil Paul.

The … Read more

Google has another reason to lure businesses from running their own e-mail servers: lower energy use.

The Internet giant today released results from a study (PDF) which looked at energy consumption of hosting e-mail servers versus having Google run Gmail.

It found that large businesses do better compared to small businesses when it comes to the power needed to run e-mail servers. But Gmail blows away all types of in-house e-mail on energy-related metrics: it's as much as 80 percent more energy efficient.

"This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate … Read more