CeBIT 2008

Going "green" was already a popular topic before CeBIT, but this computer fair emphasized the green theme with green flashing lights and green clothing for pavilion staffers (Figure 1). Hype or no hype, all the major league vendors jumped on the bandwagon, with Fujitsu Siemens' zero watt display, Primergy's low-power industrial standard servers, and BladeFrame's 400 systems running RHEL 5.0, SLES 10, or Windows.

Lenovo's Marc Fischer presented a "Green IT Survey," showing that IT managers in Europe are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly hardware. Sun Microsystems even arrived with a completely solar-powered datacenter dubbed Blackbox.

LinuxPark

This year's CeBIT saw its eighth LinuxPark, a long-standing tradition in a fast-moving industry, which included talks on environmentally friendly IT, security, migration, and Software as a Service (SaaS). According to CeBIT organizers, "There is hardly a special event at CeBIT that has developed so rapidly as LinuxPark." In cooperation with Linux New Media AG – parent company of Linux Pro Magazine and Linux Magazine – and leading industry associations, the CeBIT organizers are working on a new Cebit track for next year that will feature open source topics.

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