My boyfriend doesn’t do well with silence. Waiting for me to finish up work the other day, he turned to me and asked “don’t you hear that buzzing?”  I stopped typing for a moment, cocking my head to one side.  “Well, sure,” I replied.  “But you’re the only one paying attention to it.”  In my library-quiet office, where a writer needs only to hear their own voice, my boyfriend couldn’t help but to be distracted by the buzzing of the ceiling fan, my laptop, and every other noise coming from the myriad of devices on which we now rely.  Like those “vampire” lights that blink throughout the night, reminding us that our televisions, microwaves and computers are always on, the room’s silence had revealed the presence of another set of power-hungry devices.

It’s not often we think about how noisy our devices are, until it’s brought to our attention.  And when device noise doesn’t bother us much at all, it’s because of improved technology.  Silentium is one company behind noise reduction technology, enhancing existing products from the enterprise level, all the way down to kitchen stove fans.  Silentium works behind the scenes, improving the cloud by improving its server farms, making them both quieter and more effecient.

“We’re not the traditional solution–we use a different structure,” explains Yoel Naor, director of products at Silentium.  “Using the same materials as ambience headphones, we reduce server noise at the source.”

When it comes to servers, Silentium’s technology centers around efficient air flow.  Most of the design at a server farm is inefficient around directing air.  The infrastructure you need to build in a traditional server requires hot and cold corridors, to keep the running servers cool.  What Silentium does is create a solution that works on the rack itself, cooling it and reducing noise, so that no additional infrastructure build-outs are needed.  It’s a pretty green effort, limiting large scale heating and cooling of an entire room of servers, focusing efforts on individual racks.

Silentium has some high profile clients using its technology, including Nokia Siemens, Huawei and Intel.  But a selling point for Silentium is that its technology is cost-effective for small- to medium-sized businesses as well.  “Many use it in their lab, where noise is an issue,” Naor tells me.  “Our cabinet is also used at trade shows, so companies can present the equipment and still have a nice conversation.”

When it comes to spanning the enterprise and consumer markets, Silentium accesses end consumers by direct publications to end user and reseller networks.  As an HP partner, Silentium is able to offer its solutions to HP branches, and connect to HP VAR’s, providing them an added feature to their product line.  This partner strategy is in line with what you’ll typically find in the cloud industry, though Silentium’s technology has quite a range of applications.

But fitting into the big picture of cloud computing is an important part of Silentium’s long-term strategy, aligning itself with networks and companies that expand its reach.  “Companies will never be able to completely outsource, due to security, regulations, responsiveness, latency, and compliance issues.  Many will prefer to move everything to the cloud internally,” Yoel continues, sharing his thoughts on virtualization.  “This strengthens the need for a solution to reduce the noise generated by IT equipment for SMBs in the office environment.  Therefore, the smaller footprint requires technologies like Silentium, which ensures they don’t need a server room for the significantly fewer pieces of equipment.”