In fact, server farms require a half-watt in cooling for each watt of processing.
The complementary assets tend to be generic, between the server farms, marketing and advertiser relationships.
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One London-based computer expert said the development should help light-based data transmission go mainstream in server farms.
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The company does not disclose how many computers now populate its server farms.
Server farms built to support all these new devices, meanwhile, will thrive.
Typically, when we think of hacks, our minds conjure images of compromised security systems, personal computers or server farms, but printers?
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It uses standard Internet protocols, which means it can take advantage of the many server farms around the world that offer up Web pages.
Businesses with server farms or massive data centers could eliminate performance bottlenecks and ensure long-term upgradability while saving significant operational costs in space and energy.
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For a company that sells and manages servers, Sun Microsystems is in the midst of an unexpected move: getting rid of its own server farms.
With all this reliable power, no wonder the internet search giants like Google and Yahoo have for years built their biggest server farms in the Northwest.
The other possible reason for resistance that that the bureaucracy in the IT world gets built around the big server farms that a lot of these companies run.
Capellas is also banking on a shift toward simplified product lines as software moves off of the desktop and on to "server farms" connected via high-speed Internet lines.
The prospect of giant Google-server farms built next to power plants makes executives from IBM to Accenture (nyse: ACN - news - people ) sit up straight.
Ordinary databases and grid may be too slow, but ScaleOut Software stores data in memory on server farms or uses distributed caching on compute grids, to eliminate bottlenecks and reduce latency.
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And the environmental group has stepped up its campaign as Apple increasingly integrates Macs, iPhones and iPads into its iCloud service, which is powered by massive electricity-consuming server farms in coal states.
Right now economic growth in the First World is being overwhelmingly driven by innovative ideas and people well skilled in deploying those ideas throughout other businesses (think: consulting, software platforms, server farms, etc.).
And while a boutique mobile OS serving a few hundred million users might be enough for Microsoft, BlackBerry, or Jolla, the simple fact is that (server farms aside), Facebook is not a hardware company.
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"CLB is basically a routing service, and now with AppCenter, you have the tools to manage server farms from one console, " says Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software, which has been putting CLB through its paces.
For example, cloud computing could benefit startups by making it cheaper to start a company, but this could put IT professionals who work at local offices out of work if servers all move to server farms.
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Online toolkits like Google Apps and Six Apart still seem more like gimmicks than real competitors to Microsoft Office today, but as server farms grow and become more efficient, the browser will evolve into the world's workspace.
It wants to be the brain in your washing machine, your microwave and your car, not to mention the giant server farms dotted around the planet that will power cloud computing as more of our day-to-day work gets stored online.
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But if you take into account the use of open source products like Xen and KVM in massive data centers, web server farms, and by web application providers like Google and Salesforce.com, the CPUs running open source virtualization likely dwarfs the commercial market.
Sun's announcement marks the information technology industry's latest step toward "utility computing, " a grid system in which companies pipe in data processing and storage from faraway server farms, says Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this week.
By enabling applications to both scale in capacity and provide non-stop availability, server-farms have played a major role in the rapid expansion of Web-based computing.
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The emergence of hardware and software IP load-balancers in the late 1990s catalyzed the development of server-farms by transparently distributing incoming client requests among the servers of a farm.
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When Salesforce.com signs up a new client, it simply creates an account on the software platform that ties together its farms of server-computers.
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