Fujitsu Siemens Announces Green Makeover

Fujitsu Siemens Computers continues to bang the green IT drum after unveiling a number of green IT initiatives and predictions at its VisitIT forum in Berlin.

This is not the first time the company has touted its green offerings, but it now offers a monitor consuming no power in sleep mode, and the company has made a commitment to an energy-efficient product line at no extra cost. It has also predicted that flash drives could sweep across data centers.

Bernd Bischoff, CEO of Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) said that the company's entire product line would have an energy efficiency make over. He said: "We will be the first IT vendor to completely move to energy-efficient products. We will be the first to offer them without additional expense to the customer."

This ties in with the recent IDC finding that customers are changing strongly to a proactive green IT buying policy.

The company demonstrated a new monitor at the IT Forum, which automatically goes into a sleep mode with zero activity. In that mode it consumes no power.

The company's chief technical officer, Joseph Reger, thinks that the performance and economics of flash memory-based solid state disks (SSD) would result in substantial data center take-up as soon as 2010.

"Within two to three years, it is quite feasible that many data centers will use flash drives rather than traditional hard discs," he said. "This takes up a lot less space and therefore needs less cooling, and is now as quick as traditional drives."

Samsung has just announced much improved 64GB flash SSDs with greater capacity and speed. Their sequential read and write speeds are 100MB/s and 120MB/s respectively. Random read and write speeds are slower. We might expect 256GB flash SSDs to be available in 2010 from Samsung.

In effect, Reger is predicting the potential wiping out of the data center hard drive business, a surprisingly aggressive prediction.

At CeBIT earlier this year he predicted the replacement of desktop computers by thin terminals or similar networked devices. He thinks that virtualized PCs run off server blades would be a good way to reduce electricity usage.

Reger also said facilities and IT management ought to work more closely together so as to monitor energy usage. He said: "I challenge you to ask how many CIOs know their electricity bill. They often won't know because facilities management receives that bill, even though IT plays a huge part in generating it."

His view is that by working together it would become obvious that installing technology to control electricity use would result in much lower consumption.