Power Down for the Planet

A competition called Power Down for the Planet is pitting several US universities against one another to reduce as much carbon emissions as possible by setting the students' PCs to energy-saving modes, says The Michigan Daily.

If all students and faculty at the University switched their computers to power-saving modes, they could conserve as much energy as removing 4 500 cars from the road. By pledging, computer users agree to set their computers on sleep mode when not in use and turn them off at night.

The US Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star programme and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative are sponsoring the contest, which runs until 17 April. It has the potential to save more than 1.6 billion kilowatt hours of energy, equating to a $150 million saving.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has released its energy-efficient second-generation small form factor enterprise hard drive, the 10K RPM Ultrastar C10K300, says FoxBusiness.

The new Hitachi drive is optimised for the power and performance requirements of rack-mounted servers and networked storage arrays. The Ultrastar C10K300 delivers low-power specifications for data centres.

Brendan Collins, vice-president of product marketing, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, says: "Space constraints and low-power considerations in data centres have driven the transition to blade servers that rely on small form factor enterprise hard drives”.

Lenovo has released two energy-efficient workstations, the ThinkStation S20 and the D20, designed to meet the requirements of specialised professionals, states SoftPedia.

In addition to the new ThinkStation models, the company also reveals that it will showcase its new e-commerce platform, the Lenovo eLounge, designed to provide its customers with a new, interactive way to experience Lenovo computing solutions online, from anywhere in the world.

According to the PC vendor, the new ThinkStation systems have been turbo-charged for performance, providing users with a choice for the upcoming Intel Xeon processors featuring Intel Turbo Boost technology for extra performance in peak processing.