• shorter lead times
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• reduced cost
• increased profit
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Mr. Matsumoto passed the torch to Mr. Kimura (in the next picture), the new CEO of Fujitsu America Research Labs, who opened the conference.

Yasunori Kimura, new CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of America.

The conference included very interesting information about Fujitsu itself and its take on Big Data. In addition, there were expert speakers in the Big Data segment. Fujitsu also exhibited 19 of their technologies at the conference. The agenda and other information are here. As in previous years, most presentations will be posted here.

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There were several presentations from Fujitsu, but I show only the slides, with my comments, that I found most interesting. A complete set of slides will be sent to all the participants and will be posted here soon.

In this slide, three basic research areas are shown with the core strategic R&D expanded. Cloud fusion and next-generation green data centers are the most directly related to Big Data. By the way, I do not see much use of the term cloud fusion by others, except for Fujitsu. Looking at their explanation (the 11th slide in here), it seems to be similar to cloud federation, which includes multiple private and public clouds. Such a federation will make it easier for enterprises to use multiple kinds of public and private clouds on-premise, or it may pose extra problems, such as identity management and interoperability of virtual machines (VM).

In the next slide, Fujitsu showed where data are coming from to form Big Data.

Fujitsu is serious about riding the Big Data wave. Their specific project areas are in the next slide.

I bumped into Dave Ohara, who has been writing a lot on data centers.He is now into Big Data, and his report on it will come out soon and be available at GigaOM’s website (for a fee).

Unless I make an energy-related comment, this blog is not complete. The current focus on Big Data is pretty much on how to exploit it. It is important to utilize “data exhaust,” similar to exhaust from cars, and make good use of it. Even in this instance, a large amount of data is created 24×7 in almost every corner of the world. Much of it is created via machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions. Some of it is discarded as exhaust, without any processing, while some is stored and accumulated with very little processing. Only a small percentage of it gets processed to produce useful information to improve our lives and accelerate smarter use of energy, as by smart grid.

Come to think of it, this is very scary. Many kinds of waste, including garbage, as long as they’re biodegradable, go back to nature. Of course, some do not. GHG disappears from our sight quickly but accumulates high up in the atmosphere and impacts the earth. But unused but accumulated Big Data will never leave us unless we delete it. It usually takes energy to collect and store Big Data. I wonder whether this will become a problem sometime soon. There are certain aspects of Big Data we can control, but we cannot control all of them. Am I worried about something that will never happen?

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Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new method for creating elastic conductors made of carbon nanotubes, which will contribute to large-scale production of the material for use in a new generation of elastic electronic devices.

“We’re optimistic that this new approach could lead to large-scale production of stretchable conductors, which would then expedite research and development of elastic electronic devices,” says Dr. Yong Zhu, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, and lead author of a paper describing the new technique.

The buckled nanotubes look like squiggly lines on a flat surface.

Stretchable electronic devices would be both more resilient and able to conform to various shapes. Potential applications include devices that can be incorporated into clothing, implantable medical devices, and sensors that can be stretched over unmanned aerial vehicles.

To develop these stretchable electronics, one needs to create conductors that are elastic and will reliably transmit electric signals regardless of whether they are being stretched.

One way of making conductive materials more elastic is to “buckle” them. Zhu’s new method buckles carbon nanotubes on the plane of the substrate. Think of the nanotubes as forming squiggly lines on a piece of paper, rather than an accordion shape that zigs up and down with only the bottom parts touching the sheet of paper. Zhu’s team used carbon nanotubes because they are sturdy, stable, excellent conductors and can be aligned into ribbons.

The new process begins by placing aligned carbon nanotubes on an elastic substrate using a transfer printing process. The substrate is then stretched, which separates the nanotubes while maintaining their parallel alignment.

Strikingly, when the substrate is relaxed, the nanotubes do not return to their original positions. Instead, the nanotubes buckle – creating what looks like a collection of parallel squiggly lines on a flat surface.

The carbon nanotubes are now elastic – they can be stretched – but they have retained their electrical properties.

The key benefit of this new method is that it will make manufacturing of elastic conductors significantly more efficient, because the carbon nanotubes can be applied before the substrate is stretched. This is compatible with existing manufacturing processes. “For example, roll-to-roll printing techniques could be adapted to take advantage of our new method,” Zhu says.

A paper describing the new approach, “Buckling of Aligned Carbon Nanotubes as Stretchable Conductors: A New Manufacturing Strategy,” was published online Jan. 23 in Advanced Materials. The paper was co-authored by Feng Xu, a Ph.D. student at NC State. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

In another new paper, Zhu’s team has demonstrated for the first time that carbon nanotubes can be buckled using a technique in which the elastic substrate is stretched before the nanotubes are applied. The substrate is then relaxed, forcing the nanotubes to buckle out of plane. The nanotubes form a ribbon that curves up and down like the bellows of an accordion. This second technique has been used before with other materials. This second paper, “Wavy Ribbons of Carbon Nanotubes for Stretchable Conductors,” was published Jan. 19 in Advanced Functional Materials.

Credit: North Caroline State University

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The biggest challenge with hydrogen-powered fuel cells lies in the storage of hydrogen: how to store enough of it, in a safe and cost-effective manner, to power a vehicle for 300 miles? Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is aiming to solve this problem by synthesizing novel materials with high hydrogen adsorption capacities.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded Berkeley Lab a three-year, $2.1 million grant for the project, which will also include contributions by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and General Motors (GM). The grant was part of more than $7 million awarded by DOE last month for hydrogen storage technologies in fuel cell electric vehicles.

“We’re working on materials called metal-organic frameworks to increase the capacity of hydrogen gas in a pressure cylinder, which would be the fuel tank,” said Jeffrey Long, a Berkeley Lab scientist who co-leads the project along with Berkeley Lab chemist Martin Head-Gordon. “With these materials, we’re working on storing the hydrogen without the use of very high pressures, which will be safer and also more efficient without the significant compression energy losses.”

Berkeley Lab scientist Jeffrey Long co-leads a project to develop novel materials for hydrogen storage. (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab)

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are three-dimensional sponge-like framework structures that are composed primarily of carbon atoms and are extremely lightweight. “What’s very special about these materials is that you can use synthetic chemistry to modify the surfaces within the materials and make it attractive for hydrogen to stick on the surface,” Long explained.

Separately, Long is also using MOFs in a carbon capture project, in which the material would selectively absorb carbon dioxide over nitrogen. For the fuel cell project, the trick lies not in getting the MOF to select hydrogen out of a mixture but to store as much hydrogen as possible.

Currently, vehicles using hydrogen fuel cells can achieve a range of close to 300 miles—but only if the hydrogen is stored at extremely high pressures (600 to 700 bar), which is expensive and potentially unsafe. It is also energy intensive to pressurize the hydrogen.

So far Long has succeeded in more than doubling hydrogen capacity, but only at very low temperatures (around 77 Kelvin, or -321 Fahrenheit). “It’s still very much basic research on how to create revolutionary new materials that would boost the capacity by a factor of four or five at room temperature,” he said. “We have an idea of what kinds of frameworks we might make to do this.”

Long’s approach is to create frameworks with lightweight metal sites on the surface, making it attractive for hydrogen molecules to bind to the sites. “Our approach has been to make some of the first metal-organic frameworks that have exposed metal cations on the surface,” he said. “Now we need to figure out ways of synthesizing the materials so that instead of one hydrogen molecule we can get two or three or even four hydrogen molecules per metal site. Nobody’s done that.”

This is where Head-Gordon, a computational chemist, comes in. He will work on theoretical understanding of MOFs so that he can try to predict their hydrogen storage properties and then instruct Long’s team as to what kind of material to synthesize. “He can do calculations on a lot of different target structures and say, here’s the best one for you guys to spend time trying to make, because synthetic chemistry is very cost and labor intensive,” Long said.

The scientist at GM will aid in providing accurate high-pressure measurements. The NIST scientist is an expert in neutron diffraction and neutron spectroscopy, which will allow Long and his team to pinpoint where exactly the hydrogen is going and verify that it is binding to the metals.

Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Apple Marketing chief Phil Schiller at a news conference introducing a digital textbook service which will change the way the world works

Apple, with a war chest over $100 billion in cash, has demonstrated that while the past may have found them shying away from taking on the enterprise markets, their plans have developed brand new amazing ecosystems that consumers have adopted and they are piercing the corporate veil from every direction. The idea of forcing those consumers, who also work in the enterprise, to ignore their new playing fields and lose the productivity that comes with Apple’s innovations, strikes this writer as hokum. Productivity rules investment, and, if you think you can rest on your laurels, just ask “Research-In- Motion” how they’re plans are working out.

Steve Jobs evolved from a perfectionist with proprietary propensities, to a “New Economy” entrepreneur and collaborator with a vision for not only the next generation of computing, but with an eye on what the next generation of users will decide to do with his ecosystems. If only Apple would buy out the Department of Education and take charge of educators, we might even compete in global activities in the future.

Yet over at Infoworld they are calling the perceived threats from the piercing of the corporate veil coming out of the IT market “fearmongering” referring to it as “scareware.” Steve Jobs would have gotten a chuckle out of that but the tack at Apple isn’t focused so much on competing, especially, since they prefer to watch the evolution of the user and now understand that the user will decide how information technology evolves, not those holding on for dear life to their past achievements.

Surveys abound saying that fears of security issues caused by mobile devices are unfounded, and that IT concerns are not based on actual issues, but perceived dangers. As phones are being used more and more for identification and password tools, the question remains, will the IT landscape adapt or continue to cringe?

Yet those same surveys claim that “60 percent of companies are now adapting their IT infrastructure to accommodate employees’ personal devices,” “73 percent of C-level executives reported that the growing use of employee-owned technology is a top priority in their organization, and 88 percent said employees are already using personal technology in the business,” and “91 percent of C-level execs and 75 percent of IT leaders said their IT department today has the staff and resources needed to manage the use of consumer technologies.” Most executives, according to these surveys, now say it is simple to integrate consumer devices, and many have actually figured out that instead of punishing employees from interacting with the outside world during business hours, productivity improves from embracing these employee benefits and, if they are really honest, they will admit they have little choice but to hire folks who are savvy about the new relationships they must foster.

Apple continues to open up its ecology and expand its carrying capacity and developers are madly in love with the new approach. The iPad now has released more than 100,000 new apps for the tablet and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight or anything but an eager audience to be part of the New Economy thinking.

WHAT STEVE JOBS CAN STILL TEACH US
Over at Fast Company, they credit Apple’s success with the fact that Jobs was the “greatest user” of technology who actually got the UX and lived with technology, rather than using it. His enthusiasm for his ecosystems was authentic because he was the number one fan. No one will ever accuse Steve Ballmer or the open source community of embracing the products or applications they produce with that sort of reality.

Attitudes are changing for many reasons but don’t think for a second it isn’t related to a changing of the guard at the helm of many corporations who have grown up in the new world of ecological thinking. While Microsoft seems destined for extinction and Google cringes behind a monoculture that pits itself against allies, are there any other players out there to be taken seriously? By the same token, Apple’s eye is on the future as they are laser-focused on what the kids in grade school are saying and doing and when they officially take over the text book business, look for a sea change in the way the world works.

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• Tools Needed to Manage Data Centers
• The New Data Center Infrastructure Management Segment
• Chatting with Sherman Ikemoto of Future Facilities

As most people in the data center market know, both facilities and IT folks consider monitoring one of the most important elements in operating data centers. Smaller companies were the first to provide monitoring and reporting functions. Although this is not an exhaustive list, I had a chance to talk to some of these vendors and write about the meetings:

• Visit to OSIsoft
• Visit to Sentilla
• Visit to Modius
• Visit to Arch Rock

I understand their services and their usefulness. Some provide sensor hardware and software, but others provide only software. They all monitor, aggregate, and report several parameters relevant to data center operations, such as temperature, humidity, and power consumption. Some deal only with facilities equipment, and others handle data coming from both facilities and IT equipment. There are no standards by which to measure the data—no standard for frequency of measurement, data formats, or protocols. Each vendor has their set of customers, and they seem to be happy with the solutions they purchased.

Then there are Power Assure, Romonet, and Future Facilities. Power Assure does monitor, but that is not all. It also optimizes the use of power at your data center. Romonet is for capacity planning. Future Facilities provides an electronic version of a data center that you can play with before implementing your design physically. These three cannot be classified as monitoring and reporting vendors. But their functions are important to operating data centers, in addition to monitoring and reporting, so a new term has been introduced to describe a new segment, which is DCIM.

Clearly, DCIM should contain several categories of tools, including those for monitoring and reporting, capacity planning, and simulation. As I said before, this segment is in its infancy; there are no standards or actual-use information. Those who combat day-to-day operation problems would be confused about which tools to select. Do they want to buy one tool at a time or buy a suite of tools? But wait. There is no suite of tools yet, although Future Facilities (for example) has begun to partner with other DCIM vendors to share data.

If we were to develop a suite of tools or a framework or platform for DCIM tools, what would the requirements be? It would help if there were some information from actual use by someone other than the vendors. Because DCIM tools are at a very early stage, there is very little information about them.

To fill that gap, I put together a panel discussion on DCIM at Teladata’s Technology Conversion Conference to be held on February 2 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.The program is here.

Because the needs of operators can be quite different from one data center to another, we will have a good assortment of panelists from different environments:

• Chuck Rego, Chief Architect, High Density Data Centers at Intel Corporation
• Pam Brigham, Director, Global Technology at Equinix
• Phil Reese, Research Computing Strategist at Stanford University

Chuck develops Intel’s DCIM tools for their own and partner use and use commerical ones as well, while Pam at Equinix has homegrown tools. Phil at Stanford is starting to use a commercial tool. I will ask them what problems they perceive as the most important to solve at their data centers and why they chose their solutions, whether their own or commercial tools. Are they quite happy with the tools they are using? If not, what is missing? What additional work is needed to make them work? Conversely, were there any extra benefits they did not expect in applying their DCIM tools?

If you are interested in the answers to these questions, join me and the panelists at the panel and other sessions at the conference.

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