So Greenpeace laid out the stairway to a coal-free iCloud, stressing that Apple should not rely on Renewable Energy Credits, or RECs, purchased from clean energy producers far from its data farms to green up its operations.
Among today's data-storage devices, magnetic tapes can degrade within a decade, while hard disks are expensive and need a constant supply of electricity to hold their information, creating huge need for power for the "data farms" behind cloud computing.
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IBM's "brick" initiative which creates data storage farms out of cheap blocks of hard discs and the broader push for "blade" servers that make adding computer power easy to add were evidence of this move to commoditisation, said Mr Findlay.
Businesses with server farms or massive data centers could eliminate performance bottlenecks and ensure long-term upgradability while saving significant operational costs in space and energy.
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Ordinary databases and grid may be too slow, but ScaleOut Software stores data in memory on server farms or uses distributed caching on compute grids, to eliminate bottlenecks and reduce latency.
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But if you take into account the use of open source products like Xen and KVM in massive data centers, web server farms, and by web application providers like Google and Salesforce.com, the CPUs running open source virtualization likely dwarfs the commercial market.
One London-based computer expert said the development should help light-based data transmission go mainstream in server farms.
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Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.
To compile our list of the most value-packed green cars, we used cost-of-ownership data from Vincentric, which is based in Bingham Farms, Mich.
The study used satellite data to show that the building of huge wind farms in west Texas over the last decade has warmed the nights by up to 0.72C.
We actually have pretty good census data for the average numbers of rats on each of those farms where rats are present.
Their current farm data has been crowdsourced over the past 2.5 years from Real Time Farms users and from their Food Warrior interns, who personally interview individual farmers.
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