Cisco in smart grid collaboration

Cisco and Landis+Gyr will work together on a "holistic" approach to smart grid communications infrastructure, states BizJournals.

Cisco, a major Raleigh-Durham employer with about 4 500 workers in Research Triangle Park, and Switzerland-based Landis+Gyr said they plan to help accelerate "standards-based solutions for the energy industry and facilitate the integration of existing capabilities with renewable power sources, plug-in vehicles and distribution automation functionality."

Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

On its Web site for IT professionals, Intel has introduced a calculator that customers can use to determine the performance and power efficiency of their servers, says eWeek.

The calculator takes into account everything from the age of the server to the number of cores on the processor to the energy consumption at both idle and full utilisation.

Many technology vendors, including Sun, AMD, VMware, HP and Dell, offer online calculators that help businesses measure everything from energy consumption to ROI.

The US could reduce energy demand by 23% and save $1.2 trillion by 2020 if it improved the energy efficiency of buildings, devices and manufacturing processes, according to a major report from consultancy McKinsey & Co, reports Computing.co.uk.

The report also argued that relatively simple energy-efficiency measures and investments could slash annual greenhouse gas emissions by 1.1 gigatons.

"Energy efficiency offers a vast, low-cost energy resource for the US economy, but only if the nation can craft a comprehensive and innovative approach to unlock it," says the report.