Amazon Rival Brings Nuke Know-How to the Data Center Technology originally developed for nuclear facilities may help businesses build greener data centers. Photo by notnef . Joyent is best known for offering its own Amazon-like "cloud" services, but it also sells stuff that helps companies running cloudy architectures in their own data centers. On Tuesday, the company pumped up this side of its business, unveiling a partnership with electrical equipment giant Emerson meant to help companies track how much energy is consumed by their in-house cloud applications. Released in May, Trellis is based on technology originally developed by Emerson for industrial automation and nuclear facility management, and it's designed to give data center operators the same fine-tuned control over their equipment that technicians in other industries have had for decades. It's a software stack with a hardware component, and it provides real-time monitoring of network performance, temperature, power consumption, and more. Incidentally, Trellis was built in part with Node.js , the open source software development platform sponsored by Joyent. Node.js brings JavaScript -- historically a browser-based technology -- to the server, and it has become particularly popular in machine-to-machine communications. Through integration between SmartDatacenter and Trellis, which should be available for download today, Joyent plans to bring customers data on how much energy is used not just by physical servers but by virtual servers and processes as well. While not explicitly marketed as green data center technology, this combination could help companies reduce overall energy use through improved resource allocation.