Kindle greener than paper books

According to an analysis by the Cleantech Group, the Amazon Kindle electronic reader is more environmentally friendly than paper books, states CNET News.

The research and media company drew on existing studies to do a life cycle analysis and found that the carbon emissions from electronic books are far lower than traditional book publishing.

"The roughly 168kg of CO2 produced throughout the Kindle's life cycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1 074kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26 098kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX," wrote the study author, Emma Rich.

Hitachi Data Systems in Yokohama, Japan, has powered up what is claimed to be one of the most robust and energy-efficient data centres in the world, designed to curb carbon emissions by as much as 20%, says Computer Business Review.

The newly-opened 10 750 square metre green facility is designed to achieve a Green Grid benchmarking rating of 1.6 PUE (power usage effectiveness), while offering among the industry's highest level of reliability, availability and data security.

Hitachi's Yokohama Third Centre is rated as being as robust and reliable as a Tier IV data centre, which according to the Uptime Institute is the current highest level of availability.

At the VMworld show being held in San Francisco this week, IBM will roll out the updated version of its iDataPlex server array, which is designed to pack as much compute power as possible into standard 42U servers, says eWeek.

The updated model includes support for VMware's vSphere 4 platform and offers greater performance and energy efficiency than previous versions.

At the show, IBM will also unveil new virtual networking technologies and a power metering offering developed with VMware for virtualised environments.