New way to save on data center costs: Low-power servers

You've no doubt heard about Intel's Atom chip, used for the newest generation of tiny, inexpensive laptops often called nettops.

Here's a twist: the UK hosting company Bytemark is using Atom-based servers to run low-powered Linux-based servers, and in doing so, saves a tremendous amount of energy.

Bytemark's Matthew Bloch told the Register that Bytemark uses Atom-based servers with 2 GB of RAM and a pair of 100GB SATA drives each.

"When it comes to pricing servers in the data centre, where electricity prices are still marching north," he said, "the Atom’s 6W board is king."