May 14, 2013, Uptime Institute Symposium, Santa Clara, CA—Andy Lawrence from 451 Research evaluated trends and drivers to consider which ones will be significant over the next 5-20 years. The difficulty is taking such a long-term focus is that the technologies can change very dramatically even within the lower-end of the range. To demonstrate this [...]
May 14, 2013, Uptime Institute Symposium, Santa Clara, CA—Matt Stansberry from the Uptime Institute shared the results of an on-going survey of data center managers. The available results represent one thousand responses, mostly from the US. Other areas are being added as the survey is translated to other languages. Respondents indicated that 82 percent are [...]
April 3, 2013, Ethernet Technology Summit, Santa Clara, CA—John D’Ambrosia from Dell and the Ethernet Alliance described the efforts to develop 400Gbps Ethernet. These efforts are the start of something that will lead to improvements for everyone. The industry is getting involved in early standards developments and research. The ecosystem of Ethernet will change to [...]
February 20, 2013, ISSCC, San Francisco—This session looked at sensors and displays in various fields. Three of the papers from KAIST in Korea addressed sensors as a part of a touch panel. The other papers covered gravity, sound, current, temperature, and light. Delft University in The Netherlands and Infineon produced a micropower battery current sensor [...]
November 27, 2012, Server Design Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Austin Hipes from NEI talked about the transition to 380VDC in the data center. Based upon a Lawrence Berkeley study in ’08, the change will result in a 28 percent reduction in power compared with AC power. Data centers need more efficiency and a power source that [...]
November 27, 2012, Server Design Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Akhil Docca from Future Facilities presented concepts for using data from the servers to control the cooling for the systems. Some of these data are already used for monitoring and control, so this is mostly a redirection of data from other purposes to cooling. Current chips have [...]
November 27, 2012, Server Design Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Phil Hughes from Clustered Systems described the capabilities for cooling very high power density systems. The driver for changes in cooling technologies is the relative inefficiencies of air cooling. As data centers add more computers and GPUs to the mix of servers, the power per slot is [...]
November 2012, At this year’s Samsung CIO Conference, held in San Jose, the focus was on the global issues of ubiquitous connectivity through data centers and service providers in an environment that is constrained by the universal resources of power and pollution. The event open with an intro from SJ mayor Chuck Reed who was [...]
October 24, 2012, Renesas Devcon, Anaheim, CA—We talked with Nelson Quintana from the building automation group about smart homes. The drivers for this area are energy management, connectivity, changes in user interfaces, and networks of sensors. One area that people are starting to look at for smart home is safety and security. Safety must accommodate [...]
October 23, 2012, Renesas Devcon, Anaheim, CA—we talked with Tad Keeley and Tsutomu Aoki about the various products and functions in analog and power. The smart society will require lots of power controls to manage the energy efficiently. The analog and power devices for smart infrastructure is expected to exceed $10 billion in 2015. All [...]
