HP turns up the jets to go green

I bumped into a bonus moment yesterday while I crossed the vast acres of the HP Technology Forum. Locating my last elevator, I held the door for an HP employee. He trundled an HP blade unit on a luggage cart behind him while he juggled a small metal component that looked like the service end of a blow-dryer.

"That's some pretty interesting gear you've got there," I began.

As the elevator started to move, he looked up. "Oh darn, I thought we were going down. Oh well." He saw me staring at the blade and the blower end.

"It's our new cooling units," he explained, cutting across miles of PR and media relations tape with a friendly comment. "It's great." He beamed a wide smile. "My team helped develop it."

The engineer was holding a crucial component in HP's speed toward green computing: new cooling components that get rid of fan propellers to use a jet engine design instead. Runs quiet, draws less juice. HP is looking at many ways to keeping the power bill down in lots of IT operations, even its own. On Monday CEO Mark Hurd said HP's own datacenters will save enough electricity to power Palo Alto for a year, once all the new green engineering is in place.

Later that day I heard another story about the new jet coolers. An HP customer in the Bay Area had seen a video of HP's design engineers hooking the new cooling components up to model racecars with wireless controls. The new coolers were acting like afterburners on the racers.

Now that's cool.

Comments

HP turns up the jets to go green

I bumped into a bonus moment yesterday while I crossed the vast acres of the HP Technology Forum. Locating my last elevator, I held the door for an HP employee. He trundled an HP blade unit on a luggage cart behind him while he juggled a small metal component that looked like the service end of a blow-dryer.

"That's some pretty interesting gear you've got there," I began.

As the elevator started to move, he looked up. "Oh darn, I thought we were going down. Oh well." He saw me staring at the blade and the blower end.

"It's our new cooling units," he explained, cutting across miles of PR and media relations tape with a friendly comment. "It's great." He beamed a wide smile. "My team helped develop it."

The engineer was holding a crucial component in HP's speed toward green computing: new cooling components that get rid of fan propellers to use a jet engine design instead. Runs quiet, draws less juice. HP is looking at many ways to keeping the power bill down in lots of IT operations, even its own. On Monday CEO Mark Hurd said HP's own datacenters will save enough electricity to power Palo Alto for a year, once all the new green engineering is in place.

Later that day I heard another story about the new jet coolers. An HP customer in the Bay Area had seen a video of HP's design engineers hooking the new cooling components up to model racecars with wireless controls. The new coolers were acting like afterburners on the racers.

Now that's cool.