Cisco enlists greening wunderkind

Electrical engineering wunderkind and Green Grid co-founder Paul Marcoux has been charged with lowering the electrical charge requirements for a wide variety of products, and putting intelligence into energy management, says Eweek.

The data centre and power-supply industry veteran was hired to serve as director of all of Cisco Systems' green IT initiatives, and that's one tall order. Cisco Systems employs 68 000 people and owns dozens of workplaces around the world.

Marcoux, VP of Green Engineering at Cisco, says the first thing on his team's agenda is to analyse the strategic elements of the greening issue and work on more efficient power use.

Scotland is to host two pioneering data centres, with plans to build an eco-friendly cloud centre in Inverness, and the world's largest computing facility in Lockerbie, states InfoWorld.

A new business park, a sustainable village with hundreds of homes and what is claimed to be the world's largest data centre, are to be built in the south-west of Scotland under an ambitious £800 million development plan.

The Peelhouses data centre in Lockerbie, which is being built by Scottish firm Lockerbie Data Centres, will use green energy generated from wind turbines and a new bio-mass power station.

Gartner's 27th annual data centre conference has produced no shortage of research related to energy consumption, virtualisation, cloud computing and other hot enterprise topics, says Network World.

The company's research and polls of conference attendees found that 42% of IT professionals polled operate three or more data centres in North America, 45% are expanding or planning to expand data centres in the next two years, and 43% are consolidating.

It also found that 26% of conference attendees buy green products only when they lower costs, save space or defer data centre construction, while 34% will buy green products even if they increase costs.