http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=2008072
2005178&newsLang=en

RICHARDSON, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CommScope Enterprise Solutions, a division of CommScope, Inc. (NYSE:CTV), has joined The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. As a general member of The Green Grid, CommScope will collaborate with other member companies and gain access to a wealth of information about energy efficiency advancements within data centers.

Over the last decade, CommScope has taken the initiative to significantly reduce its carbon footprint when manufacturing its premier network infrastructure solutions. Its award-winning ReelSmart® cable reel recycling program, EcoPower™ cabinets and continued use of renewable material are a few ways CommScope is helping to safeguard the environment through its own best practices. In addition, CommScope voluntarily reports its greenhouse gas emissions, numbers that have steadily decreased since 2002.

CommScope’s green efforts also include passing energy-efficient and energy-saving practices on to its customers. For example, CommScope’s Intelligent Building Infrastructure Solutions (IBIS) employs a single backbone that supports building systems such as security, lighting, HVAC and communications in order to supply greater efficiency and higher productivity with increased comfort.

“At CommScope, we advocate and support The Green Grid’s efforts to unite and work toward energy-efficient, eco-friendly solutions,” said Luc Adriaenssens, senior vice president, Research and Development and Technology, CommScope Enterprise Solutions. “We understand the importance of safeguarding the environment and are committed to making a difference while setting a strong example for others. While we continually focus our efforts on superior product manufacturing, outstanding customer service, employee excellence and company value, environmental stewardship has been and will continue to be a top priority.”

Very cool, the more we discuss the issues, establish best practices and communicate ideas, the more we can innovate, share knowledge and empower people to deploy energy efficient IT solutions which has to be a good thing for the industry and the end users.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080721005340&newsLang=en

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–VMware, Inc., (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that VMware Infrastructure 3, the industry-leading virtualization and management suite, was named the winner of the Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Award in the virtualization category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. The winners were announced at the Tech Ed 2008 IT Professionals Conference in Orlando, Florida last month. More information is available at www.WindowsITPro.com/awards.

The Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Awards recognize companies who offer the most innovative products in the industry and who are leading the charge in their category. Entrants were judged based on strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage, and value to customers. The judges reviewed more than 220 products and services submitted for the contest and chose 29 finalists, from which one winner was selected for each of the 10 categories.

“Choosing from such a wide variety of outstanding entries is a challenge every year, and the quality of this year’s entries was particularly high,” said Karen Forster, group editorial and strategy director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. “The winners clearly reflect our judging criteria: innovation, strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage and exceptional value to customers.”

Well done to VMWare, virtualization of the desktop and the server continues to bring new opportunities for business, for platform innovation as well as enabling and empowering the end user to have a more adaptive infrastructure. Whether you choose VMWare, x-VM, Hyper-V, Xen or the others, that you realize the objectives you set out to, that technology can act as an enabler to your business is key.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1321416,00.html

Hewlett-Packard Co. has announced plans to offer container-based data centers similar to those offered by Sun Microsystems Inc., Rackable Systems, Inc. American Power Conversion and IBM.
Interest in containerized data centers stems from companies with significant data center footprints that have run out of space and/or power capacity.

“As we talk to customers, we hear more and more concerns over power and space limitations, and [the time it takes] to build out brick-and-mortar space — it is costly and can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to complete,” said Steve Cummings, the director of scalable computing infrastructure at HP.

Very cool, do check out this interesting article talking about HP’s data center container solution. I can certainly see the reasons why this might be something of interest to different user groups. It will be interesting to see the different solutions, uses and organizations that adopt these solutions, what configurations will they use?

Could the data center in a container be the ultimate virtualization platform for the enterprise or consultancy? Want your data center virtualized, we just need to plug in our container, get the virtualization disk out and press go.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/07/17/world_pc_market_keeps_growing_despite_recession.html

Worldwide PC shipments grew 16% to 71.9 million units in this year’s second quarter, according to Gartner, or by 15% to 70.6 million units according to IDC.

Hewlett-Packard held on to the top spot, growing slightly faster than the market (17.1% versus 16.0%), according to Gartner. However, Dell closed the gap slightly with 21.9% growth as it moved into retailing notebook PCs. Garter says: “Preliminary results showed Dell achieve over 40% year-over-year growth in mobile shipments for two consecutive quarters.”

The demand for worldwide pc’s seems to be continuing, I wonder if this is in new markets? If it is also related to Vista having been being out for a while now and people seeking to upgrade? Those new games/applications coming online that are optimized for the new platforms?

How many of the old pcs will be recycled or re-used?  We’ll have to see, do check it out, it’s an interesting read.

I have a problem. No let’s step back as my father always says, it’s a challenge.

We have decided to replace my relatives laptops, they’ve got a mixture of IBM ThinkPad X30’s and a few Dell D600’s, they’re working fine, don’t get me wrong. But they’re approaching the high maintenance stage, Windows could probably do with a rebuild, the hardware is fine, but there have been comments about Vista, about upgrading memory or disk space, and I feel now is the time to consider selling the old ones on ebay and buying some new ones.

At this point I have a few confessions, we have a budget of about £400 a laptop and I need to buy four of them.

Realistically they’re being used for typing, Internet, maybe a little digital photo editing and that’s it. Decisions, decisions.

Should I buy them an iBook each? That would work perfectly, but then they’re used to Office to Windows, that might be a ’step too far’.

I’ve looked on google, cnet etc, and a few ideas came to mind:

• Dell Inspiron 1525 or their Vostro - the Studio looks really cool
• Acer Aspire
• HP 530
• Lenovo 3000
• Samsung

So I’m off to do some research. The last time I bought a laptop it was a relatively simple decision (ThinkPad or Powerbook), now there seems to be so many options: “AMD sir, is that an, “Athlon, Sempron or Turion you want?” or “Intel sir, would you like a Celeron, Pentium Dual Core or Core Duo?”, I know I want Vista on them, so I need 1GB probably 2GB, what about integrated video, is that a thing?  Vista basic or Premium, I’ll have to check it out.

Anyway, when I make my successful purchase, I’ll post a quick write up of why I bought it and what it’s like, and if you do have any comments/advice do write a comment.