Plastic, oil, natural gas, paper, solar panels, analytics, semiconductors, blimps, mobile phones, wind turbines, smart grid. These were some of the words tossed around by the six teams presenting at last night’s Cleantech Open Northeast Regional Finals. Three companies were selected to go on and compete in the Cleantech Open Global Forum in California next month. Interestingly, a few of the semifinalists are also part of the local startup program MassChallenge, which like the Cleantech Open, models itself as a startup accelerator and mentoring program with a business plan competition tucked into it.

Can you guess which of the words above apply to the three winning teams below? Take a look and see if you were right.

—PK Clean (a MassChallenge 2011 finalist) is “converting mountains of trash into barrels of oil.” The company has developed and tested a process that converts plastic waste into oil, using a proprietary catalyst. PK’s CEO Priyanka Bakaya, an MIT Sloan MBA, says the 45 million tons of plastic occupying landfills per year can be turned into about 9 billion gallons of oil (representing 25 percent of annual U.S. auto consumption). The company has already tested the tech at a pilot facility in India and is targeting the metal recycling industry as its first customers. After taking apart old cars, metal recyclers are left with plastic remnants that they have to pay to get landfilled. PK will take that away for free to turn into oil. There’s other competition in the field, namely from Portland, OR-based Agilyx (which recently raised $22 million in venture funding), but Bakaya says PK’s catalyst and cheaper process give it an edge.

—Qado Energy, a smart grid analytics startup, was the big IT play in the bunch. While maybe not as sexy as turning plastic to oil or printing invisible solar panels on paper (seriously), it’s aiming to solve a big problem for utilities and energy developers: accurately predicting the distribution and effect of new cleantech sources plugging into the grid. As co-founder Lorraine Wheeler explained, when wind or solar developers want to add their technology to the energy distribution grid, utilities have to perform studies analyzing the impact of the new tech on the grid, and produce a list of needed upgrades that the developer must pay for. Qado’s technology is designed to make this planning process more accurate and efficient, with software that pulls in utilities’ data from different sources and converts it to a standard format. From there, the potential effect on the grid can be modeled and analyzed in displays for utilities, regulators, and energy developers.

—Last up was fabless semiconductor developer Arctic Sand. The company is making smaller, more efficient power converter chips designed to cut down on the electricity needed to run traditional data centers. The company, whose team comes from MIT and Harvard, aims to design the chips for other applications like powering mobile phones and hopes to get its tech to the market through licensing deals with existing computing players, says CEO Nadia Shalaby. Arctic Sand was also a participant in MassChallenge earlier this year.

There were some familiar faces among the other three semifinalists. OsComp Systems—developers of a more efficient natural gas compressor—took home a check from MassChallenge last year and presented at our XSITE Xpo this year. Altaeros Energies also talked about its blimp-hoisted wind turbines at our Xpo. The last Cleantech Open Northeast semifinalist, Ubiquitous Energy, is working on the aforementioned printable solar photovoltaic cells for paper and fabric. The cells are designed to power mobile phones for owners in areas that aren’t even plugged into the power grid, and even further down the line, could enable dynamic displays on surfaces like cereal boxes (think digital display expiration dates). We’ll still have to keep an eye out for those teams.

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Redwood City, CA-based Sentilla, which makes data center analysis and planning software, said today that it has collected $15 million in Series C funding. New investor SingTel Innov8 Ventures led the round, which was joined by existing backers ONSET Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures. The company said it will use the funds to expand sales and marketing efforts.

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Plexxi, an aggravatingly stealthy networking startup in Nashua, NH, said today it has raised a $20 million Series B equity round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Previous investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners also participated in the financing. The company has raised a little over $28 million to date.

According to its sparse website, the company is trying to solve “the problems faced in building state-of-the-art enterprise and cloud datacenter networks with 20th-century networking technology.”

So it sounds like the team is working on a more efficient technology to help businesses and IT departments manage the growing mess that is the modern data center. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

Plexxi is led by founders Dave Husak (formerly of Reva Systems) and Ephraim Dobbins (formerly at Acme Packet). Perhaps their past companies serve as clues to what the future holds.

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Just this February, Mountain View, CA-based Violin Memory raised $35 million in Series B funding to scale up manufacturing of its Flash memory arrays for data centers. Today the company announced that it has collected another $40 million. The group of unnamed Series C participants includes “several of the largest public companies in the computer industry” as well as “new cross-over public market investors,” the company said. Violin’s known backers including Toshiba America Electronic Components and Juniper Networks.

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Infineta Systems of San Jose, CA, said today it has closed a $15 million Series B funding round led by new investor Rembrandt Venture Partners. Existing investors Alloy Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners also took part. Infineta makes switches that facilitate the movement of data within and between data centers; it has now raised $30 million all told.

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Dan Reed heads a crew within Microsoft that may have the coolest name of any division in the company: the eXtreme Computing Group, or XCG. Formed a little less than two years ago, the group is part of Microsoft Research, but its mandate goes beyond R&D: it’s to help the company as a whole look into the future and question its assumptions about the nature of computing.

Which makes Reed the perfect panelist for Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, Xconomy San Francisco’s marquee information technology event this spring. Set for next Tuesday, May 17, on the campus of SRI International in Menlo Park, this evening forum will give audience members a chance to interact with Reed and a cast of brilliant thinkers, researchers, and entrepreneurs on a question we’re all usually too busy to think about: just where is all this technology taking us? Given the current pace of progress in semiconductor and software technology, what sorts of capabilities will computers have 10 years from now? And what can we do now to plan for the entrepreneurial opportunities—and social and political challenges—that these capabilities will create?

Reed—a former UNC Chapel Hill professor and a onetime member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—is uniquely qualified to talk about those questions, because he’s not just a technologist. He’s also Microsoft’s corporate vice president of technology strategy and policy, meaning he spends a lot of his time thinking and talking about how trends in computing technology translate into issues that politicians and businesspeople are going to have to work through at some point.

I spoke on the phone with Reed last week, getting his views on everything from smart radios to data center design to AI. We’ll delve even deeper into many of these issues at next week’s event, so be sure to get your ticket now. Meanwhile, as a preview, here’s an edited summary of my talk with Reed.

Xconomy: Being a futurist is notoriously hazardous. Bill Gates himself said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” What do you do in your own work to try to work around all the uncertainties and biases involved in technology forecasting?

Dan Reed: One of the things I do is look at exponentials that have been in flight for a long time and ask how long they can continue. I think our semiconductor roadmaps are an example of that, looking at transistor size and some of the quantum-mechanical issues that are starting to rear their heads, and the power issues. When people start to struggle with something, then there is a chance that a phase transition is about to occur. It doesn’t mean that some breakthrough won’t occur to obviate the conventional approach. But when you see the bag of tricks starting to look empty, then I ask questions. It’s time to point out that this field may be in for a disruption.

I also talk to people outside technology. I talk to my friends in the arts. What do they find interesting? I try to listen to users of technology who aren’t technologically sophisticated to see what unexpected things they’re doing. And I do a lot of general-interest reading and trying to understand societal trends, and looking at where some of our social structures are being challenged.

X: What benefit do you get from talking to people outside of technology or engineering?

DR: I think sometimes people outside a domain are actually better at predicting than people inside it. They’re usually less technologically knowledgeable, therefore they can make wildly inaccurate assumptions. But at the same time, they are not encumbered by the conventional wisdom that those of us in the discipline may have.

X: How would you describe the mission of the eXtreme Computing Group?

DR: Craig Mundie [Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer] and Rick Rashid [senior vice president of research] originally asked me to come to Microsoft to take a blank sheet of paper on how to build a data center. They said, “Don’t take any of the … Next Page »

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As this week’s massive failure of Amazon Web Services cloud-computing infrastructure continued to roil the Web today, a few things were sadly clear. Perhaps most striking of all: Major service providers and websites—companies with enough money and talent to avoid the problem—didn’t spend nearly enough energy planning for the inevitability of a breakdown.

Yes, it’s probably asking too much for many small startups to double up their cloud-computing spending to prepare for what has been, up to now, a very rare outage from one of the biggest players in IT infrastructure. But what about the service providers that harvest money from that long tail of little companies?

Exhibit A is San Francisco-based Heroku, the hugely popular development and hosting platform that relies on Amazon’s service. When Amazon went down, Heroku went with it—taking along more startups than it had to, if the middleman had hedged its bets more effectively. It’s possible that Heroku had plans to move in that direction eventually, but that obviously that hasn’t happened fast enough to avoid a devastating outage.

That’s not to excuse Amazon’s meltdown or spotty communication with affected parties, which has magnified the problem. But remember that Heroku is no scrappy little startup—the company was purchased just a few months ago by Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) for more than $200 million.

“For someone like Heroku, which literally hundreds of startups use—Heroku should start thinking about, ‘OK, what can we do to spread the risk?’” says entrepreneur Shyam Subramanyan, whose San Francisco Bay Area startup list.ly was shut down by the outage. “A lot of people are paying them money.”

Scott Sanchez from CloudNod.com pointed to Los Gatos, CA-based Netflix as a good example of a large company making sure it had redundant protection. “They’re charging half the world $9.95 a month. It’s important for them to stay available, and they invested in the proper architecture. And they didn’t have to point any fingers,” Sanchez says.

On the other side of the coin were companies like popular content-aggregation website Reddit, which was still in a bare-bones mode Friday afternoon because of Amazon’s cloud problems. Reddit, … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Tier 3, a cloud-computing service for businesses, said Wednesday that it has raised $8.5 million from Ignition Capital and Madrona Venture Group.

This is the company’s first publicly announced round of financing. Tier 3 was founded in 2006 and counts Microsoft among its nearly 100 clients. In a release, Tier 3 said it plans to use the money to move more quickly into new markets.

Tier 3′s chief executive is Adam Wray, a veteran of Limelight Networks, PeerApp, and Amazon.

The company presently runs its “core operations” out of server farms in Seattle and Salt Lake City, with plans to expand to four more facilities, according to the company’s website.

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The Boston area gets plenty of attention for the software, Web, hardware, and mobile firms it serves as home to. It also has a crop of companies working on renewable energy and efficient battery technology. But it turns out those IT and energy areas aren’t mutually exclusive, as there’s a growing cluster of companies who overlap both these big fields, and they seem to be the shining stars of the cleantech sector, both regionally and nationally, experts say.

Indeed, there’s a bright future for companies that can use information technology to gather data on energy and help businesses and consumers be efficient with their energy usage, says Jon Karlen, a general partner at Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners and board member of the New England Clean Energy Council.

“Ways to use information, content, and services, [and] media properties that consumers can go to live a more sustainable life—those would all be great things to develop in the U.S.,” Karlen says. As one example, he points to Digital Lumens, a Boston-based firm (and Flybridge portfolio company) that’s marrying networking technology with LED lighting systems to help big industrial-scale facilities cut down on unnecessary energy costs. (Check this out for more information on the company.)

Boston has actually got quite the population of startups developing IT to help companies and consumers get greener. Read below for a list of those we have identified so far, and some milestones those companies have achieved in the last year:

—Boston-based Ember, a maker of wireless networking technologies for helping consumers and utilities manage home energy consumption, saw its first profitable quarter in the first three months of 2010.

—Newton, MA-based Powerhouse Dynamics, a maker of software for showing homeowners which appliances are guzzling the most energy, raised roughly $1.4 million in 2010.

—GroundedPower of Gloucester, MA, which uses energy monitoring software and online community-based goal setting to get homeowners to lower energy consumption, took in about $1.3 million across two different financings last year.

—Boston-based Web startup Practically Green is using gaming elements, social networks, and expert content to help consumers determine how “green” their lifestyles are and take steps to make greener choices. The newly launched startup (CEO Susan Hunt Stevens is an Xconomy board member) raised $750,000 in its first round last year.

—Burlington, MA-based Viridity Software attracted an $8 million Series B round to put toward its technology for helping customers improve energy efficiency in data centers.

—Boston’s Next Step Living is focused … Next Page »

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Four examples is enough for a bona fide trend. Joining its Bay Area neighbors Facebook, Salesforce.com, and Zynga, San Francisco-based Splunk plans to announce this week that it’s opening a satellite office in Seattle. To be led by former Microsoft engineer Brad Lovering, the office will be an R&D outpost for the fast-growing company, whose real-time data center monitoring software bridges the business-intelligence and security markets.

Lovering is a big catch for Splunk. At Microsoft he was one of about 20 Technical Fellows, a distinction saved for senior engineers who drive innovative projects that shape Microsoft’s business strategy. Lovering worked on Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Visual Basic products, Biztalk Server, and the .NET framework. Within .NET, Lovering led work on the Windows Communication Foundation, a programming model for cloud-like applications, and Windows Workflow Foundation, an approach for scaling up server applications. He left the Redmond, WA, giant last October.

The opportunity to hire Lovering was the “immediate driver” for Splunk’s expansion to Seattle, according to John Connors, a partner at Ignition Partners who led that firm’s investment in Splunk and sits on its board of directors. But the move would have come sooner or later anyway. “The company had plans to expand to Seattle, and Brad joining accelerated those plans,” Connors says.

In a statement, Splunk co-founder and chief technology officer Erik Swan said Lovering’s job would be to help Splunk’s customers—which include almost half of the Fortune 100—build new applications on top of the company’s “operational intelligence” software, which can be used to index huge data files and spot business-relevant correlations in the data as soon as they emerge. For that role, “There is no one better suited than the person who helped Microsoft become a leading development platform,” Swan said.

Lovering himself says the focus of the Seattle office will be on “enabling developers to build custom solutions using Splunk technology. That is possible today in some limited ways and our focus will be on systematically enabling Splunk to be used as a platform by developers. The developer work has been on the Splunk roadmap for some time and the creation of the Seattle office puts a team in place that is dedicated to driving it.”

In addition to Silicon Valley companies like Splunk, Facebook, Zynga, and Salesforce.com, Google has been beefing up its presence in Seattle. And meanwhile, Twitter bought Seattle-based startup Cloudhopper last April, so that’s one to watch as well. But there’s movement in the other direction, too: Intel plans to close its research lab near the University of Washington in Seattle and open a new science and technology center at Stanford University.

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Violin Memory, a Mountain View, CA-based maker of Flash memory arrays for enterprise data centers, announced today that it has collected $35 million in Series B funding. Strategic investors Toshiba America Electronic Components and Juniper Networks led the round, which was joined by “other corporate partners, crossover investment funds, high net worth industry leaders and private equity general partners,” the company said.

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Voltaire, a maker of server and data center technologies based in Chelmsford, MA, and Ra’anana, Israel, said today it has agreed to license certain software products to IBM (NYSE: IBM) in exchange for about $17 million in fees through 2012. Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) develops switches, server adapters, and network management software for industries including financial services, media, education, government, and life sciences. The company was founded in 1997 and is in the process of being acquired by California- and Israel-based Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ: MLNX).

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Rackitivity, a Belgian startup that just opened its U.S. headquarters in Redwood City, CA, said today that it has raised $8 million in Series B funding. Partech International led the round, which was joined by Big Bang Ventures. Rackitivity makes power distribution units that help manage energy consumption in corporate data centers. It said in its announcement that the new funds will be used “to accelerate Racktivity’s product, technology and market development initiatives.”

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Chelmsford, MA-based Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT), a developer of servers, switches, and software for high-performance and cloud computing environments, announced today that it has agreed to be acquired by Mellanox Technologies for $8.75 per share, for a total equity value of $218 million. The deal is expected to close first quarter of 2011 and will help Mellanox (NASDAQ: MLNX) strengthen its position in the end-to-end connectivity for data centers and servers space, according to the announcement. The company said it will bring the Voltaire employees under its management team, retain existing product lines, and run both companies from its offices located in Israel, the U.S., and around the world.

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Dell, which made an $18-per-share tender offer for Fremont, CA-based storage virtualization company 3Par (NASDAQ: PAR) last week, now has a competitor. Palo  Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard announced today that it will offer $24 per share or roughly $1.6 billion, which is about $450 million more than Dell’s offer. HP executive vice president David Donatelli told the San Jose Mercury News that 3Par’s technology would bolster HP’s strategy to offer a “converged infrastructure” for corporate data centers. The news carried 3Par’s stock as high as $25.83 this morning, up more than 40 percent over Friday’s close.

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What do you get when you cross an MIT startup, a longtime public tech company, and three of the Boston area’s top VC firms? That sounds like a joke, but I’d argue that you get the makings of an interesting trend. The trend is that hardware—the actual machinery that powers our computers, phones, and other devices—is making a bit of a comeback around town.

OK, so maybe this region never really lost its hardware prowess. But it sure seems that software, cloud computing, and “virtual” this and that have ruled the tech innovation discussion as of late. For example, Sim Simeonov, the investor and founder of FastIgnite, argued in an Xconomy post in January that, in everything from mobile devices to corporate servers, software would dominate as an economic driver over hardware, which will become more commoditized over the next decade.

But maybe there’s more to the story. Although it’s anecdotal, I’m starting to see a micro trend toward hardware across different levels of the business community—usually a sign that something real is going on. Here are three examples of what I’m seeing:

—A high-powered Boston-area VC syndicate announced this week it has invested in a $48 million financing round for Smooth-Stone, a chip startup in Austin, TX. Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Highland Capital Partners are all betting on Smooth-Stone, which is looking to modify low-power semiconductor chips from the mobile-phone industry and put them into servers and data centers run by giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. ARM, the UK-based smartphone chip designer, is another investor in the company.

The idea is to develop chips that use less power and emit less heat than traditional Intel server chips—thereby saving big, IT-heavy companies tons of money. If the startup succeeds, look for the competition with the world’s biggest chip maker to reach biblical proportions. Smooth-Stone, after all, refers to the rock that David used to slay Goliath. (I guess its slingshot would be ARM.)

—Lyric Semiconductor is an MIT startup bent on overturning the world of computer chips—at least for certain applications that involve probabilities. I’ve been hearing things about this company, but haven’t had a chance to dive into the details yet. The New York Times ran a story yesterday about Lyric and its new probability chip (my term, not the company’s).

Lyric’s website says it is redesigning its circuits, chip architecture, and programming language to “natively process probabilities” (presumably this is not something like the hype over “fuzzy logic” all over again). The idea is that such chips could potentially use much fewer transistors than conventional chips to do the heavy lifting of computing—especially for tasks like finding patterns in data. Lyric has raised some $20 million in government funding and venture capital. Its lead investor and chairman is Ray Stata, the founder of Analog Devices.

—Speaking of which, Analog Devices (NYSE: ADI), the Norwood, MA-based semiconductor and electronics company, posted some notable financial results this week. Analog, which has been a New England institution since 1965, said its profits from the most recent quarter, ending July 31, had tripled (to $199.5 million) as compared to the same period last year ($65.5 million). The performance was partly driven by increased revenues (up 46 percent to $720 million). Analog has had its ups and downs over the past decade, but this year has looked strong so far.

Maybe there’s just more demand for electronics in general these days—which would bode well for all of these hardware-focused companies.

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Three Boston-area venture capital firms have led a new $48 million financing round for Smooth-Stone, a chip startup based in Austin, TX. Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Highland Capital Partners were joined in the investment deal by ARM, Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), and Texas Instruments. The financing news was announced in a press release this morning. As part of the deal, Battery’s Ken Lawler, Flybridge’s David Aronoff, and Highland’s Sean Dalton have joined Smooth-Stone’s board of directors. Smooth-Stone was founded in early 2008, and is focused on developing and adapting low-power semiconductor chips from the mobile-phone industry for use in servers and data centers.

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If Arbor Networks were a tree, its roots would be in Michigan. Its branches and leaves (and some of its caretakers) would be in Massachusetts. And its proud new owners would be in Texas and Washington, DC—with a lot to live up to.

Earlier this week, Chelmsford, MA-based Arbor Networks, a maker of software for network security and management, said it is being acquired by Texas-based Tektronix Communications, which is owned by Danaher (NYSE: DHR), the technology conglomerate based in the nation’s capital. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and at least at first the principals at Arbor and Danaher weren’t saying much beyond the platitudes that typically follow such a merger.

So I spoke with Arbor’s co-founder and chairman, Farnam Jahanian, and the company’s CEO, Colin Doherty, to hear about what the deal really means for Arbor, and to learn more about the company’s 10-year history. As I found out, its story is a pretty compelling case study of a university spinoff that got venture funding, got profitable fast, survived two recessions and a brutally competitive landscape, and emerged on the other side in a stronger position.

First, a few practicalities about the merger. Arbor will stay “whole and intact as an operating unit under the Danaher brand,” says Doherty. The company has 275 employees worldwide—about 90 in the Boston area, 90 in Ann Arbor, MI, and the rest in other locales like London and Singapore. Jahanian is exiting the company, while Doherty will stay on as president of Arbor, which will become part of Danaher’s communications and enterprise group (which comprises a half-dozen companies, including Tektronix Communications, Fluke Networks, and AirMagnet).

Arbor will provide its new parent company with deep Internet security knowledge—what Doherty calls a “security beachhead.” Now “they can detect, secure, and mitigate network security. It was a really good fit for them,” he says. And now, with Danaher’s size and influence, he says, “it’s a unique opportunity for us to change our model…and be part of a larger public vehicle.”

Arbor Networks was founded in 2000 by Jahanian, who is chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, and Rob Malan, who was Jahanian’s Ph.D. student at U-M and is now Arbor’s chief technology officer (he will stay on as CTO). The company’s core technology, based on Malan’s and Jahanian’s research, involves software that monitors entire computer networks—from data centers and Internet service providers to broadband customers and mobile interfaces—and protects them against all manner of security threats, most notably, denial-of-service attacks that can shut down big networks and popular websites. (Basically, this means there’s a good chance your Internet service … Next Page »

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Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, MA-based developer of security and network management software, has agreed to be acquired by Tektronix Communications, the Texas-based firm now owned by tech conglomerate Danaher (NYSE: DHR). Terms of the deal weren’t announced, but it is expected to close next month. Arbor Networks was founded in 2000 by University of Michigan professor Farnam Jahanian and U-M PhD grad Rob Malan. It makes security software primarily for Internet service providers and data centers. The company has a growing presence in Ann Arbor, MI. Meanwhile, Tektronix Communications is affiliated with Tektronix, the Oregon tech institution that was bought by Danaher in 2007 for $2.85 billion. Back in 2004, Tektronix had acquired Texas-based Inet Technologies as its entry into networking software.

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Remember last year when there was that flap about how much power it takes, and how much carbon is emitted, when you do a Google search? OK, so maybe you can do something like 15,000 searches before you reach the environmental footprint of a cheeseburger. But there are still a slew of companies tackling the broader problem of improving energy efficiency in data centers, and for good reason.

One of them is Viridity Software, a Burlington, MA, startup that has just raised $8 million in its second round of venture funding from existing investors Battery Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. The news was reported yesterday by Mass High Tech, based on a regulatory filing with the SEC. Viridity was founded in 2008 and previously raised a $7 million Series A round, as my colleague Wade reported, to develop software tools to help companies and organizations save money on the power bills for their IT operations.

An $8 million Series B is nothing to sneeze at, especially in this day and age where software startups are doing well to get follow-on funding of any kind. But what’s really interesting about Viridity is what it’s doing with the money. The company has what looks to be a unique approach to helping its customers get more power efficiency out of their current IT setups.

So I spoke with Viridity’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Mike Rowan, about the funding news and the company’s current plans. “Series A was all about building product, and the majority of the Series B is about going to market,” Rowan says. That means expanding the company’s sales, marketing, and tech support staff, as well as expanding the product line, he says. Viridity currently has about 30 employees; it has grown by 10 or so in the past four or five months, Rowan says.

Rowan understands the world of IT and storage software and hardware. He was previously the founder of Revivio (which was acquired by Symantec) and StorageCom (acquired by Vyant Technologies and then Mendocino Software). Before that, he helped start CLAM Associates, which developed products for IBM. Rowan first learned the inner workings of data centers as a systems administrator and programmer at Purdue University in the late 1980s.

Viridity is a bit of a new direction for him, but the opportunity to touch “every data center on the planet,” as he puts it, was too great to pass up. “It comes down to power or cooling at the core,” Rowan says. “How do you let someone live in their data center for longer?”

The answer, according to Viridity, is to understand at a detailed level how much power … Next Page »

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