Power continues to be a top-of-mind issue for our customers. Most are either running out of power, or under the gun to reduce power consumption and power growth. To align with these trends, Force10 have released the following new white paper on Managing Data Center Power and Cooling.

FORCE10's Chief Scientist Joel Goergen has also been discussing power and cooling considerations for next generation 100 gigabit networks: http://www.force10networks.com/news/pressreleases/2007/pr-2007-03-26.asp 

Two key trends driving this demand are technology drivers like smaller, more powerful systems, and business drivers like automation and convergence. (For instance, we’re now seeing unheralded computing densities, such as 32 cores in a 5U box – a 7-inch-tall box driving 1600 watts of power!) Power considerations are also creating entirely new business models for data centers, as Force10 Data Center customer Terremark notes.
In a Computerworld article, Marvin Wheeler (Terremark COO) says that Terremark bills based on square footage, but collocation companies need a new model to keep up. "Pricing is going to be based more on power consumption than square footage", Wheeler says. See the complete story at: http://computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,110072,00.html

In addition to the white paper, Force10 will also be tracking and participating in the energy efficient Ethernet (EEE) study group in the IEEE (led by Force10 advocates/customers Mike Bennett and Bruce Nordman at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories). One of the goals of Mike and Bruce’s effort will be to get the popular Energy Star program that you see on refrigerators, etc. to certify data center equipment.

Force10 has also joinied the Green Grid http://www.thegreengrid.org/, so look for a continued string of releases, events, white papers, etc., that will showcase Force10's energy efficiency leadership.