Friday, September 12, 2008

Cache & Packets

MTI bumps up grant money to boost Maine tech

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

The Maine Technology Institute, Maine’s equivalent of the quasi-public Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, has launched a new program called the Cluster Initiative Program, aimed at spurring intrastate collaboration among the state’s technology clusters.

The program is the most recent in a series of initiatives spawned by a cluster report commissioned by the state and released last spring. Among the calls to action was the need to spread knowledge and skills from the state’s traditional industry clusters, to emerging clusters, such as clean technology and advanced materials.

The Cluster Initiative Program will replace the existing Cluster Enhancement Program, shifting focus toward emerging clusters, as well as increasing the amount of funding awarded through grants. The maximum award has been raised from $200,000 to $500,000, and will be awarded two times per year, as opposed to the previous program’s three times. Smaller awards, aimed at feasibility and planning studies for upstart projects, will remain at $50,000. All award recipients will be required to match the grant funds.

The MTI will unveil its first awardees under the new program in February 2009, with deadlines for submissions coming in November.

While the new program will have that “new-grant smell” at least through the first round of awardees, the types of companies that will be involved are expected to remain similar to the recent winners under the previous program, which has increasingly been targeted at what officials consider emerging-technology sectors.

Last year, recipients of the Cluster Enhancement Program’s larger awards included peptide-based drug developer Biousian Biosystems Inc. in Biddeford; health-care product developer Manchester Group LLC in Freeport; mobile phone applications maker Foneshow Inc. in Portland; financial-reporting software maker Quantrix Inc. in Portland; web-based music site Goombah.com from Brunswick’s Emergent Music LLC; and navigation-system developer CrossRate Technology LLC in Standish.

Green lip service
It’s no surprise that the “greening of the data center” has become a hot topic as energy prices have gone up and interest in alternative fuels and energy efficiencies has spread to almost every industry.

But a recent survey from Billerica-based InfiniBand switching technology maker Voltaire Ltd. indicates that while a majority of CIOs believe a green data center will become mission-critical, many of the plans for such initiatives are less than concrete, and the budgets for such improvements are still in a state of flux.

The survey was taken in conjunction with the 2008  MIT Sloan school CIO Symposium, and queried CIOs, CTOs and senior IT executives. The raw numbers show that 90 percent of the executives believe the greening of their data centers  will be “crucial to meeting their business objectives for 2009,” yet 76 percent did not have a budget for a greening policy.

Reading between the lines, it seems that most companies want to make their data centers as energy efficient as possible, but few know what it is going to cost. According to Patrick Guay, Voltaire’s general manager of U.S. operations, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is the misnomer that green initiatives will present considerable costs, particularly in the short term, rather than providing a competitive advantage.

Naturally, Guay and Voltaire point to their InfiniBand switching fabric as a way to reduce power usage and generate savings that can be poured back into the operations of the data center. By using InfiniBand, said Guay, data center managers can reduce the number of ports needed for server connections, saving 50 percent on the power and cooling systems related to server interconnections, as well as 50 percent on hardware allocation. Switching to an InfiniBand (as opposed to gigabit Ethernet) fabric can also improve application performance by 300 percent, said Guay.

But the ramifications of the survey go beyond a decision on switching fabric, or any other specific technology. The fact of the matter is, until companies allocate specific funds to making their data centers more energy efficient, the  truly “green data center” will remain, with a few exceptions, in the future.