Cloud Data Centers - NYT piece - and ARPA-E

So the Sunday NYT chooses as its quote of the day a reference to Egyptian president Morsi about residue from U.S. previous support of dictators in the Middle East.

My choice for geek/enviro quote of the day on the tech side would be from this great NYT piece by James Glanz about the cloud computing data centers that have gotten more press lately.  Power, Pollution and the Internet.  "Of all the things the Internet was expected to become, it is safe to say that a seed for the proliferation of backup diesel generators was not one of them."

So my question about these data centers is two fold:  

• First, has any process begun for swapping mechanical hard drives at these data centers for the SSD drives that are increasingly more efficient.  Even if the power consumption differences aren't yet marked, any marked difference in temperature could mean huge efficiencies in the current high demand cooling requirements.

• Second, and probably the question I will direct to James Glanz, is whether any projects now put active solar on the roofs of these data centers.  Thin film solar has brought down the costs so much that in addition to need for upgrading to smart grid will be the decentralizing of power generation by more ubiquitous solar installations.  For 24 hour operations like a data center, this would require battery storage but that too has leaped years ahead.

And on the subject of our energy future, if you're not familiar with what Arpa E at the Department of Energy is doing, go have a look - it's amazing.  Start with battery technology.