Computerworld - May 23, 2011

Micro
Burst

BETWEEN THE LINES

By John Klossner

PAPERLESS? HA!

In a survey of 1,480
people who use
smartphones for work,

52%

said they can’t print from their device but want to.

SOURCE: U. S. SURVE Y B Y IDC, MA Y 2011

DATA CENTERS

Capacity Crunch Leads to More Outsourcing

PROCESSORS

3D Chips May Help Intel Go Mobile

INTEL’S NEW 3D transistor technology could position the chip maker to grab a piece of a burgeoning business that it’s been missing out on: the tablet market.

On May 4, Intel announced a major leap in chip technology: 3D transistors that could make PCs, smartphones and tablets faster and more power-efficient. The 3D transistors are slated to make their first appearance when Intel moves to 22-nanometer chips next year.

Instead of building traditional, flat, 2D transistors, Intel will build the new transistors upward, making it possible to squeeze in more transistors while maintaining density and a small chip size.

That means new chips using the 3D transistors, which use less than half the power of 2D transistors, will be as much as 37% faster than Intel’s current 32nm chips.

The development represents a huge boost
to the company’s efforts to keep up with
Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore’s 1965 prediction
that the number of transistors on a chip will
double about every two years.

More large companies are turning to collocation providers to relieve capacity constraints in their data centers and avoid the high cost of building their own brick-and-mortar facilities, according to two studies released this month.

The Uptime Institute reported that 36% of the 525 large companies it surveyed expect to run out of capacity in at least one of their data centers over the next 18 months.

Consolidating servers and upgrading power and cooling equipment are the primary ways the companies surveyed said they would boost their capacity. But 29% said they plan to lease collocation space, while 20% will move workloads to the cloud.

A separate study commissioned by Digital Realty Trust, which builds and operates data centers, showed a similar shift toward data center managers leasing space from third parties rather than building their own data centers. That study surveyed 300 IT executives.

“Increasingly, enterprises appear to be favoring the lease model, as fewer companies are choosing to go it alone on these capital-intensive projects,” Michael Foust, Digital Realty’s CEO, said in a statement.