HP Targets Data Centers' Carbon Footprint

Hewlett-Packard announced its intention to push the development of technology to cut power use in data centers and otherwise reduce their carbon footprint by up to 75 percent.Part of the effort is HP's Sustainable Data Center project, which will study energy use over the entire lifetime of a data center, with the intention of reducing energy usage while improving the total cost of ownership.

Another element is the Photonic Interconnect project, aimed at replacing copper wiring in servers with laser-based communications. "We want to dematerialize the data center," said Chandrakant Patel, HP fellow and director of HP's Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab. "Imagine circuit boards in close proximity that communicate with light." Optical laser connections within server equipment would be 20 times more efficient than standard copper wires, he explained. "We believe we can scale to data center scale, which is easily 100 to 200 racks."CNETNews.com