Groves Green IT

Energy Summit and the Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC Santa Barbara

This blog includes notes from my interview with DanColbert, Executive Director of the IEE.    

1. Dan: you just held a very successful 1^st Summit on Energy Efficiency in Santa Barbara, CA in late May.  I was there for the entire two days and I found it to be valuable for its insights, its predictions, and its networking.  Do you feel you reached the milestones you had hoped? And what was the highlight for you?

Very much so.  The mission of this Summit was – in addition to creating greater awareness of the Institute for Energy Efficiency at UCSB and what we’re doing – to raise consciousness about the need for more and new technologies that enable greater energy efficiency.

2. When I hear most people talk about energy efficiency, one of the most compelling factors they cite – correctly so, as far as it goes – is that the technology is ready now; we don’t have to wait, as we do for many others, e.g., plug-in electric cars (battery technology), photovoltaics (lower cost), carbon capture and sequestration, etc.  Technologies for energy efficiency are here now, and we simply have to implement them.

This view is in a large sense correct, and has led on one hand to groups like the Energy Efficiency Center at UC-Davis, which does the important engineering work of studying systems of already-developed technologies.  Another outflow of this view – exemplified by work at the Precourt Institute at Stanford – is to study behavioral issues relating to the interaction between people and existing technologies.  Again, this is important work.

Both groups, however, focus primarily on existing technologies at a systems or behavioral level, while the Institute for Energy Efficiency is focused on pushing the boundaries to research and develop new technologies for energy efficiency.  This is critical because realizing the full scope of energy efficiency requires new technologies.  So, in order to make this point most effectively, we brought to the Summit speakers who have direct experience – whose job it is to know – what new technologies are needed in energy efficiency, what the state of the technology and markets are, what policies are needed or are getting in the way, to fully realize the promise of energy efficiency.  Without new, better, cheaper technologies, only a small fraction of this promise will be met, even with the best systems engineering and behavior studies in the world.  In this way, our Institute, Davis, and Precourt are highly complementary.

For me, the highlight of the Summit was the town-hall meeting, led by Forrest Sawyer.  It was a dynamic session, and the participation was great.  In particular, it was fantastic to get a great question from Mr. Naugles’ Grade 7 Honors Science Class, Fremont School, Oxnard, CA.
It’s so important to get kids excited and involved in this effort!

3. Readers of GrovesGreenIT are interested in data center energy efficiency in particular.  Could you explain what Fred Chong’s group is working on?

As computing and data storage increasingly become globally available, public utilities, the proliferation of large numbers of servers, and massive data centers will have a substantial energy footprint in our future.  The typical server consumes as much energy in one year as an SUV. Worldwide, businesses now spend $30 billion to power their data centers, and that cost is growing rapidly.  Energy expenditures have now become more significant than the cost of the equipment, making energy efficiency of critical importance to our future information technology infrastructure and natural environment. The Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing serves as a focal point for a vertically-integrated effort to drive key energy-efficient technologies in computing and electronics, and couples horizontally to the Buildings & Design group through its work on data centers.  Collectively, these technologies address very significant near-term and long-term energy challenges.

 Some projects within the Computing Solutions Group of the Institute, led by Prof. Fred Chong, are:

Ø       Emerging Technologies for Energy-Proportional Computation

Ø       Cooling Technologies

Ø       Energy-Aware Computation

Ø       Life-Cycle Analysis and Policy

Ø       Wireless Networking

Finally, cyber-security is an under-recognized area of energy efficiency.  Last year, $3 billion in electricity cost was wasted just by spam.  More importantly, as the smart grid is developed, it will be increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attack; we must develop solutions to enable and protect such energy-saving systems as the smart grid, else they aren’t truly available ways to save energy.  Fred’s group is a leader in this research area.

4. One of the conclusions that was hammered into the audience on Day 2, the Policy Discussion day, is that now is the best time ever to be involved in energy efficiency.  Do you have anecdotes from your own experience on the ease with which this topic is being discussed in Washington DC and elsewhere at a national level?

Like you, I have attended several conferences on EE.  One thing that has interested me is that to a great many – especially those on the utility side – energy efficiency is equivalent to “demand-response.”  Another interesting aspect is how slow – although it is now accelerating – businesses have been to understand the financial benefits of energy efficiency.  There appears to be a fascinating psychological barrier (psychologists should study this!) to adopting an energy efficiency technology by a General Manager of a business unit when he or she thinks in terms of payback time. Historically, they require less than 24 months – more often 18 months! – payback before considering adopting it.  Requiring 18 months payback time is equivalent to an internal rate of return of 67% (!), which would be well above any CFO’s investment threshold.  Furthermore, this is just accounting for savings in energy costs – it does not account for productivity gains, which study after study have shown typically far outweigh direct energy cost savings.  So, the message is to think in terms of return on investment, rather than payback time.  Simple, but important.

More importantly, though, what has interested me is the very broad acceptance of the importance of implementing energy-efficiency technologies based only on the assumption of currently-available technology!  This view misses most of the e.e. boat:  much more will be gained by improvements in technology, and through wholly new technologies that save energy.  Finally, there is little awareness of unintended consequences. 

At the Institute for Energy Efficiency, we are studying the so-called “rebound effect” (aka Jevon’s paradox), which shows that in certain cases – depending on technology, market, and policy conditions – use of more efficient technologies actually causes greater overall use of energy (e.g., more efficient steam engines at the start of the industrial revolution caused hugely more coal to be burned).  This is a complex situation, in which technology, policy and economics all need to be considered in concert to fully understand the issues and fulfill the potential. HAVE A GREEN DAY!

 

 

Speaking from California: Interview with California State CTO PK Agarwal

I recently had the chance to speak with PK Agarwal, CTO of California.  In this role PK manages the State of California Consolidated Data Center used by various California governmental departments.  California has two large general purpose data centers and many large departments have their own dedicated data centers.  The State of California has 130 operating departments, boards, and commissions.

In a typical month, there are six million unique visitors to California state government websites.  Due to the recession, the demand for state services has skyrocketed and more and more people are looking for employment related services and other forms of social and financial assistance. 

California is going through a consolidation of IT and over time we will see a lot fewer networks and data centers.  When you remember that California has about 37 million people, and a GDP equal to the 8^th largest country in the world, then you understand the magnitude of the information to be processed. 

 DG:  I really enjoyed the talk you gave about multi-generational work forces (earlier this year at the Teladata conference in Santa Clara), and their various approaches to IT and social networking tools at work.  Could you summarize your thoughts about the younger generations (under 40) for the readers of this blog?

PK: The younger generation, historically sheltered by a strong economy, is now probably feeling some pain due to the US unemployment situation. This may result in a new appreciation and greater receptivity to older workers’ advice based on years of experience. Here is a critical issue worth considering.  Currently, 75% of California State employee managers are baby boomers, between the ages of 50 – 65. California’s managers in this age group are predicted to drop to 50% in 2014, leaving the baby boomer’s culture as the dominant management style. 

 However, in 2014, the dominant demographic group of rank and file workers will be Generation Y. There is the likelihood of a culture clash between the managers being dominantly baby boomers and workers dominantly generation Y.

We have to be sensitive to these culture differences.  You can make young people work but you can’t force satisfaction and contentment on them.  One big cultural issue is that these young kids want to communicate frequently and want continuous feedback as a part of their work environment.  This does not make them less productive or less security conscious.  It is just a different way of communicating.  So, we need to adapt to their needs.  Tools change, habits change, culture changes, that’s life.  For example, Gov Schwarzenegger now has a Facebook profile, and a Twitter account.  Both of these actions send a message:  social networks have a legitimate and recognizable value.  Also, President Obama’s staff has recently negotiated terms with four social networking sites so that there is clarity regarding the ownership of data on social networking sites.

DG: Forgive me for being blunt, but when I go to this website, http://www.cio.ca.gov/ it still looks like a traditional website for traditional people.  How can this be attractive to the under 40s we are trying to engage in state government? 

PK:  The primary customers for our CIO website are state staff and the IT vendor community.  Both of these groups are dominantly baby boomers and have some very specific data and information needs.  Accordingly this website is designed with that need and demographic in mind.  On the other hand, if you look at www.ca.gov, it has a very different look and feel.  We recognize that California’s increasingly younger and diverse population wants a certain ‘website feel’. We are also working on a version of www.ca.gov that is intended for our youths and has been designed by local high school students.

 DG: When do you think that the California website www.ca.gov above will include facebook, twitter, 2nd Life or other kinds of new media as part of the content? (for employees and state residents)

 PK: We are already using many of the tools you mentioned.  Many of departments are incorporating web 2.0 tools as a part of their communication and service delivery strategy.  However it is important to note that government websites cater to a very wide array of demographics.  Accordingly our websites are designed with an understanding that we will be serving power users as well as digitally challenged.  It is somewhat easier for a company such as Amazon because they can choose a single channel to serve their customers.  With a government entity, we have to be multi-channel because one size will not fit for all for our constituents.  We will continue to have walk-in, mail, telephone, FAX, and Internet as the service options.  www.ca.gov is the entry point into the State system but you can go directly to a department as well.  How do we get you from www.ca.gov to where you want to be?  We try to get you there in the fewest number of clicks.  Plus, we have seasonal variation in our web strategy.  During March and April (when it is the tax season), a lot of people want to deal with tax issues.  Another popular service all year round is that of automobile registration.  Lately we have been seeing a lot of activity around employment, social services, or programs for refinancing, etc.   California's first lady, Maria Shriver, also sponsored a website called www.weconnect.net and that is also getting a lot of traction with people in need.

DG:  Budget constraints aside, how do you translate your knowledge into a better place to work and a better site to resource?

 PK:  We continue to use technology to better serve Californians.  Come back around mid-June and look at www.ca.gov.  You will see our new website design intended to improve the user experience.  We have been thrifty and careful, but really focusing on the usability and the customer experience.  By contrast, our 2006 design would look primitive. 

 Also, we want to ensure that transactions are processed on our websites efficiency and quickly.  Unlike a commercial website stickiness is not as critical to us.  Often people want to conduct their transaction such as registering their car quickly and that is all they care about on that particular day.  So we try to find a balance between “bells and whistles” and functionality. 

 DG: Last question, PK:  I am sure that all the readers of this blog care a lot about your operations focus:  on how you perceive Green IT and sustainable computing to be a significant part of your agenda.  Are you going to recommend a 30% reduction in energy use throughout State data centers as the federal government has done?

 PK:  Yes we are very “green” conscious in our computing practices.  As you know our governor is recognized globally as a pioneer in setting the agenda for climate change and energy issues.  For instance we reduced the utilization of natural gas in one of our data centers by 90% and electricity usage by 9%.  We are looking at consolidating many of our data centers which should give us a lot to brag about in the area of energy efficiency.  Server consolidation and virtualization is among our key strategies for energy conservation.

DG: Thanks so very much PK.  Have a GREEN Day!

 

UC Santa Barbara 1st Summit on EE

 

In foggy Santa Barbara today, a group of scientists and industry leaders has gathered to discuss new technologies, policies regarding energy efficiency, and the research environment at universities contributing to both.

As we all know, 80% of energy needs are now supplied by burning hydrocarbons (oil, coal, and natural gas). 

Fred Chong, Computing Solutions Group Head, at the Santa Barbara Institute of Energy Efficiency laid bare his plans for his 20 plus team and how they see their research mandate.

“We want more than Moore. We’d like exponential gains of 1000x more efficient computation in 10 years and 100x more efficient cooling in 10 years.”he said, and went on to define his goals.

Goal #1  is 10x more efficient data centers within the next 5 years, by making energy use proportional to load.  The pathway is virtualization and consolidation software, energy aware data management and network protocols, new server architectures.

 Goal #2 is 100x more efficient servers and datacenters with new computing and communication technologies using optical signaling, nanoscale devices, new computing architectures, in a timeline of 10x bin 5 years and 100x in 10 years.

 Goal #3 is more efficient cooling of data centers of 10x in 5 years and 100x in 10 years.  Their pathway is liquid/vapor cooling technologies integrated with scheduling of computations, precise airflow management, and new sensors and control.

 A data center is a prototype of what we’d like to see in buildings in general. So the efforts are to build experimental infrastructure that will flow over to all buildings, percolating down to embedded systems in pcs and pervasive computing.” said Fred.

in a description of the milestones achieved at Google, Luis Barroso talked about Energy Proportional Computing.  It  says the following:  no work,  no power consumed. some work, some power consumed, and lots of work, lots of power consumed. Therefore, since we know that processors are idle, energy use could be halved and peak data center power could be as well. we get there with better designed energy proportional components.  He concluded by saying that energy proportionaly should be a first-order design goal because data centers have different needs than handhelds.

Feng Zhao, Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia began with The Power Spectrum. he said that computing on a dime (10 to the minus 2 in watts) has 9 orders of magnitude in power difference with computing in a warehouse (10 to the 7th power in watts) with tradeoffs in energy and performance across the scale. He talked about an ongoing Microsoft project called "Data Center Genome" focusing on software and hardware sensors. The wireless sensors, 10,000 manufactured for Microsoft are deployed across MS data centers to save energy and improve operation efficiency by collecting, archiving and understanding operations data.  

Tens of millions of concurrent users are on Windows MSN Messenger Connection Services at any time. The backend servers in clusters of 60, are doing authentication, address book etc, concurrently before a connection is established. This means that server loads fluctuate over time and they need to handle peak load worldwide. provisioning those machines for peak or very low power states is the goal to yeield significant energy savings.  "It is tricky to do.  To repurpose and consolidate workloads is difficult.  while average utilization is predictive, black swan events where everyone goes online at once, requires a robust buffer and requires load-balancing and load-skewing strategies. We can save 30% in energy when we get the algorithms right," Feng Zhao said.

Software activity and hardware components have been detailed in an energy profile in Microsoft's "Joule Meter". Different models for different machines have been tried. These include trace collection, and resulting profiles for estimation errors, application energy, componentenergy  and application/component.  Having these models makes virtualization strategies more successful.

For Feng Zhao, making energy a 'first-class citizen in design' implies considering energy complexity, racknowledging that there are many opportunities to exploit relevant power knobs at multiple layers of systems and apps, and to think holistically across workload, performance and energy.

Have a green day!

WHAT: Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency, by the Institute for Energy Efficiency - http://iee.ucsb.edu/sbsee

 

WHEN: May 20-21

 

WHERE: UC Santa Barbara

 

WHO: Other presenting organizations include:

+ U.S. Department of Energy

+ Intel Corporation

+ Sempra Energy

+ Southern California Edison

+ UC Davis

 HIGHLIGHTS:

+ May 20 Special Energy Leadership Lecture by Time magazine's "Heroes of the Planet" award winner, William McDonough, architect, designer & author.

 + May 21 Town Hall Meeting: "Policy and Technology: Conflict or Synergy?" Moderated by Forrest Sawyer, Emmy Award-winning former ABC, NBC and MSNBC news anchor, with panelists from Kleiner Perkins, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and United Technologies.

soundbites: useful quotes from the sustainable computing circuit

I have to admit that I have a lifelong obsession with taking notes - and then forgetting to go back and review them for long periods of time.  Sometimes when I look back at my notes, their significance eludes me.  Sometimes there is some value to be gleaned from my notes.  Upon rereading some of my notes from the last year, I realized that occasionally presenters at workshops or conferences say something with enough clarity that the phrase retains its meaning even if the rest of the content is no longer that urgent.  Therefore these are the ones I saved before discarding the paper it was written on:

In 2008, 70% of TV audiences had their pc open at the same time.

In 2008, 11% of the online minutes in the USA were spent on Myspace.

Virtualization is just a feature set.

Mobility changes everything (with reference to the power of virtualization)

SOA: consumption happens in ways you didn't anticipate.

In SOA the service becomes the atomic unit of service to monitor and policy. 

Decouple your services and put them in the cloud. The value is in the connection, not the individual service.

Separate, consolidate, aggregate, automate (your virtualization mantra for sequencing processes)

If you set up a virtualized data center, you’d have a mini-cloud in your data center.

In 2012, 1 gigabyte will cost $1.

IT headaches are unmanaged pcs, data leakage, disaster recovery, and security vulnerabilities - unless you can separate the system data from the user data. 

Virtualization is a quality of life tool: you can do fixes, patches, upgrades, etc. during business hours.  It is an insurance policy for IT staff.

It takes twice as much energy to manufacture a computer as it will use in its lifetime.
HAVE A GREEN DAY!

Michael Patterson of Intel weighs in on thin clients

I am interviewing Michael K Patterson, PhD, PE, Senior Power/Thermal Architect, Eco-Technology Program Office, Digital Enterprise Group at Intel.  (That’s quite a title - I am glad I was able write that rather than say it outloud…)   Michael:

 

 1.    I understand you have written a white paper about the energy efficiency of thin client desktops.  Can you briefly talk about that? (when it was published, where it can be found, etc.) 

 Yes, Lorie Wigle and I co-authored a paper for the Electronics Goes Green 2008 conference in Berlin last September.  The paper, titled “Alternative Compute Models: End-to-end energy impact”, looked at the total energy impact, including the servers and extra data center energy required for thin clients for a number of different compute models.  So we looked at thin clients, desktops, and laptops.

 2. Your research concluded that thin client desktops are not energy efficient when considered end to end, right?  It sounds counter-intuitive so perhaps you can help me out with this.

Well, no, that’s not exactly what we found.  The results showed that thin clients, laptops, and desktops all can be very energy efficient when done correctly.  The key finding was that thin clients are not always the most efficient model, even though there has been a lot of press claiming they are.  In fact the most efficient model was a laptop.  Of course to keep it fair, if you add an LCD display to the laptop for in-office use things are a lot closer.

 For desktops (and the laptop) the key is using the latest CPUs with the best efficient performance, LCDs instead of CRTs, and actively managing the clients and turning on power management features. 

 The thin client model energy efficiency depends on a couple of factors.  First, how many thin clients can be supported per server?  Second, how efficient is the data center that those servers reside in?  Let’s focus there a minute.  A typical data center Power Usage Effectiveness or PUE is 2.0.  That means that the total power going to the data center is 2.0X times how much goes to the servers.  That extra power goes to cooling, power distribution, and lighting.  All these energy uses need to be attributed to the thin client model.  As I started with, the other key factor is how many clients per server.  Our analysis showed that in an inefficient data center (PUE=3.0) you needed about 60 clients per server for the thin client model to be as efficient as the desktop.  In a very efficient data center (PUE=1.5) you only needed about 30 clients per server to make the thin client model equivalent.  Interestingly, when compared to a laptop, even with an LCD, you would need to run over 100 clients per server to have the same efficiency.

 And that’s the main issue for the thin client model.  It all depends on the work being done by the employee.  If it’s just data entry or terminal-like work, it can be fine.  But as soon as you ask the server to support 30 clients all running typical office applications like word processing or spreadsheets it really slows down.  Then if you get into any more intensive applications using graphics, streaming media, or advanced analysis, you really need to have far fewer clients per server.  It’s all in the paper and the references, but at a very high level a rule-of-thumb would be that for today’s knowledge worker, doing more than just data entry, a core-per-client is a good target.  So a quad core, dual processor server could support 8 clients with roughly the same level of performance as the managed desktop.  At these levels, thin clients are the least efficient model.

 3. Were you surprised by your own conclusions?

In any of this we should not judge what’s best until we do the whole analysis.  And of course, energy efficiency is only part of the analysis.  TCO, security, and manageability all come into play, as does the ability to work remotely.  When I presented the paper in Berlin I joked that I wish I had a thin client.  Everyone looked at me puzzled until I explained if I had a thin client I could have watched the movie on the flight over instead of catching up on my email. 

Each site needs to do their own detailed analysis.  But when you think of how precious the data center space is, these results shouldn’t surprise anyone.  I have heard people who have to build and pay for them say “let’s get the Powerpoint out of the datacenter”.  When you do the math, it makes a lot of sense.

4. Can you give specifics on better solutions for call centers, doctor’s offices, and other traditional thin client environments? 

 For these typical thin client applications, thin clients can be a great choice.  Again one needs to look at the whole picture.  In any situation where thin clients are being considered, my best advice is “pilot”.  Set up a pilot, at the proposed number of clients per server, and see how the employees fare. If there is no negative impact the thin client model should get a very strong look.  On the other-hand, if the thin client stalls, or can’t keep up with the dedicated desktop or laptop you need to be very cautious.  The productivity loss will far outweigh any energy efficiency or other TCO gains, particularly when summed over the life of the thin client installation.

5. What would be the best way to obtain energy efficiency gains throughout an entire IT life cycle, i.e., where the data center is just one aspect of the entire picture? 

 When one talks to someone about the possibility of a thin client application, the first question to be asked is “What’s the PUE of your data center?”  If they don’t know, there are a whole lot of areas for efficiency gains before they should even consider the thin client model.  The big challenge is not rushing into something that just sounds good.  And one of the problems here is that the impact, once it’s been implemented, may never be measured.  The impact to the site energy can be very difficult to determine.  The data center energy use and the office space energy use are not usually measured together or compared, the impact may be mixed with other changes in the building or IT inventory, data center loading, or even the seasonal variations on the heating or cooling loads.  So it’s really best to do the detailed analysis up front.  The best way to gain energy efficiency in the IT space is to use the latest hardware, get rid of CRTs, enable the power savings features, and manage it all centrally.  That’s true for thin clients, desktops, and laptops.

 6.  Well of course that doesn’t include embedded energy, and I know Intel is studying the impact and that recycling more computer hardware is uppermost in your research.  Separately, do you have ideas on added original research to be done on this topic?

 Hmmm, original research?  I can’t think of any specific scientific research needed on this as much as we need better tools to help the end-user to do the full analysis.  If all we do is look at the specific watts of an individual desktop, laptop, and thin client and pick the thin client because it is lowest, we could very well regret that choice.  That’s where more work can be done, tools for analysis.

 Thanks so much, Michael! Great to talk to you… 

  and likewise Deborah, it’s always a treat to talk to you. You always push me; with good questions and though provoking ideas, thanks!

HAVE A GREEN DAY!

 

Symposium from NYC in progress: pictures to follow next week

This has been an exciting few days with tracks that include the innovations and best practices in data center energy efficiency fare from my good colleagues Fred Mapp and Friends of Fred Mapp, and Ken Brill's extensive rolodex of brilliant CIOs that are discussing the urgency of energy efficiency but also some new faces with messages of innovation in related disciplines.

From speaking to colleagues in the hallway at The Uptime Institute annual event, the most popular talk was that offered by Deloitte's CIO Larry Quinlan, who had a very approachable speaking style that betrayed a similar management style - the audience found his message very compelling.  When Larry spoke about putting together a green team with very tangible responsibilities for each team member, it resonated with the data center operations staff in the audience who often felt that the milestones are not specific enough and responsibilities not well delegated. 

Over and over, the message came across that IT and Real Estate/Facilities need the assistance of the C-Level Suite to start and manage data center energy efficiency initiatives - AND, the process is iterative, and continuous, not a one time project.  One speaker recommended that IT approach the CFO with a multiyear program on data center energy efficiency so that the amount of dollars requested is larger and more significant, and requires the CFO's commitment over a longer period of time, thus bypassing an annual "ask" by IT. 

In one case study, one company said that while their data center comprised just 4% of their campus real estate, IT's contribution to the electricity bill topped 45%.  In cases where that huge percentage was not yet determined, discovering advocates just isn't that easy.  

Having consulted on the new content for the symposium, I was glad to see many new faces with different job responsibilities (who hadn't been Symposium attendees in prior years) join the audience.   So while there was a small audience for the panel on what bloggers report is important to sustainable computing, the panel of Matt Stansberry, Rich Miller, Kevin Heslin and David Ohara enjoyed trading their insights on what is urgent or important or both to their readers.  Similarly, the panel on the EMEA's response to IT and corporate social responsibility was faced with a very vocal contingent from Europe expressing their differences from the American model of carrots for industry leaders v regulation as it exists today in Europe. 

Two of the highlights were the presentations by Tom Friedman (author of Hot, Flat, & Crowded) and Christine Ervine, former president of the Green Building Council.  Tom, condensing the research reported in his excellent book, while admitting the damage to worldwide floodzones from just 1 degree centigrade average annual temperature increase, said "I am a cautious optimist... we have just enough time (to resolve global warming) if we start today" and Christine Ervine with more optimism, showed how much the LEEDs certification has accomplished in a short number of years with photographs of beautiful buildings that sent shivers up my spine.  So much to do within the next five years.  IT department managers (we!) cannot sit back and act indecisive because simply holding even will not halt the warming already starting to take place.  "A rollback is required by all of us. we need a green revolution, not a green party" warned Friedman. I'll post photos when I return to my office...Other presentations by Bill Wiehl of Google, Lauralee Martin of Jones Lang Lasalle, Steve Sams and Rich Lechner of IBM, Mark Ascolese of EDSA, Neil Rasmussen of APC Schneider, and Bonnie Nixon of Hewlett Packard offered up varieties of innovation on the topic - the kind Tom Friedman will be been proud of.  Have a green day!

Speaking of Google's container hangar data centers

First of all I have to make a correction based on a comment from Jon Koomey, that he posted but that he'd like to see in the body of this blog. Here it is with apologies to Jon:

Corrections: It was me (Jonathan Koomey) not Bob Metcalf who showed the graph about data center electricity use being comparable to Mexico. I did NOT say that growth in data center electricity use was speeding up (in fact, it's slowing down as the industry focuses on the issue). And I also did not say that sending a letter uses 300,000 times more energy than emailing a PDF--I compared the mass of material in the electrons needed to send the PDF to the mass of a 5 g sheet of paper--that's where the factor of 300,000 comes from. It's an illustration of the power of dematerialization, but it doesn't translate directly to energy.

Now to Google's container hangar announcement yesterday.  This tells you about their announcement. Thanks Rich Miller for taking good notes. I want to tell you about my impressions. 

This was another good example of Novel Innovative Collaboration.  What I mean by that is Google moved the state of the art forward quite a bit yesterday by sharing their server design that includes a 12 v battery attached to each one. James Hamilton, who also spoke, said it was brilliant, because the redundancy is at the lowest possible denominator. Here are some of the notes I copied from his blog:

99.9% UPS Efficiency (Ben Jai presenting)

o   Distributed on-board UPS

o   Single voltage motherboard (12v)

o   Motherboard provides 5v to disk and all step downs needed by on board requirements

o   Installed a lead-acid distributed UPS to ride through power sags

o   Avoids double conversion of many central UPS

o   Only enough power in UPS to allow generators to start or to switch to other A/C supply

What was inspiring to the audience was that the eco-system is so positive when an enduser company shares its experiences.  While waiting in the lunchline, I spoke with someone familiar with Toyota's joint venture with General Motors, the  NUMMI plant in nearby Fremont California, a showplace for car manufacturing best practices. He remarked that in the industrial sector, this kind of sharing is far more prevalent than in the IT world. 

I can acquaint the announcements yesterday to Microsoft's Gen4 data center design announcements late last year.  (See my earlier blogs on the topic).  With Microsoft and Google leading the way by showcasing their innovation, it raises the bar for Yahoo, E-Bay, and Amazon to do the same. 

With near-simultaneous announcements of adjacent technologies, we have the opportunity to innovate as an industry very rapidly. Now Novel Innovative Collaboration is kicking in! With invited participation from the Uptime Institute, (Ken Brill was a panelist yesterday) the attention to CAPEX and OPEX opportunities is squarely in the middle of the conversation.  With the addition of the The Green Grid (John Tucillo gave a great overview of where TGG is today), a methodology for defined and agreed-upon metrics that are Unrecognized, Reported, Registered or Certified through The Green Grid, aids member to distill options in the context of their own data center similarities to the model data centers.

My take on yesterday was that with Andrew Fanara's participation, we saw more of a NGO type event, a non-governmental organizational approach to problem solving, than a contentious industry event. With the private and public sector working so closely to motivate small, medium, and large data centers to improve their energy efficiency without any fancy technologies, we are improving PUEs even beyond Andrew's expectations in his important report to Congress. 

And in case you haven't read this before, although I feel like I have written it several times, Jon Koomey did the early research that got this whole conversation in motion. 

I am encouraged. How about you?  Have a green day!

Where Green & Networks meet

Yesterday I went to this GigaOm event  to find out where Green and Networks meet...Actually, it is still a stretch to make that tagline comprehensible because it is deliberately ambiguous whether networks refers to internet nets, social nets, or both, or neither. It was a confluence of people with diverse interests, agendas, and knowledge, together because of their admiration for the reputation of GigaOm. 

San Francisco's charming Mayor Newsom opened the conference with a rousing talk about San Francisco's greenness. He expressed his optimism based on the green milestones the City has already reached: in one case, he said, "It took only a pen, a paper, and a signature", explaining that a lot of existing regulation, not lack of technology or money, that stood in the way of solving problems. I believe he said that San Francisco has roled back its carbon usage to 6% below its 1990 levels while still adding 100,000 more residents.   "San Francisco is a lab for innovation", he summarized, and welcomed entrepreneurs' and investors' ideas.

He was followed by Gavin Sparks of AMEE, the world's energy meter!He asked an interesting question of the audience: Where do we draw the boundaries of ownership and responsibility for CO2? if you can answer that, you can standardize easily.  A similar observation was made by Saul Griffith when he said that every person in the USA has an average number of USA infrastructure CO2 tucked into his personal CO2 emissions quota, for roads, highways, airport runways, etc., averaged across all of us. Gavin Sparks said that a new laptop weighs roughly 25kg but to manufacture it required 460kg of C02. Amazing, isn't it?  The average American uses 11,200 kg of CO2 per annum, so when you acquire a new laptop, you use up the equivalent of 25% of your annual allotment - or you run over that year...

Bob Metcalf showed a slide that indicated the energy use of data centers worldwide is roughly the same size of all of Mexico's electricity requirements. And it doubled between 2000 and 2005 - and may double faster than every five years going forward...

Jon Koomey gave an excellent overview of IT's role in reducing carbon footprints for all of us around the world. He talked quite a bit about de-materialization, a concept I enjoy discussing without using that word because I don't like new words made from adding prefixes such as pre or de. (pre-owned, instead of used, when talking about cars, for example).   Specifically, Koomey gave the example of mailing a PDF cross the USA by the postal system takes 300,000x more energy than sending it by email via electrons.  An excellent example of how we can save energy using the web.

Participants also heard an excellent panel onf the PowerGrid2.0.  The moderator, Jesse Berst, started out by saying that the Smart Grid has three elements: metering and listening for commands, two way communications, and advanced control systems.  The value to re-creating the power grid across the USA is in the applications you build on top of the new grid. Unfortunately, it is akin to fixing a moving train.  If you were to compare the power grid with the mobile telephone grid, you woul dsee that the cellular network is more secure, more reliable and 1/10 the cost.  However, reliability needs an asterisk next to it, because we all experience frequent outages on our cellphones, and we are intolerant of similar service from our utility companies.  I think it was also at that panel that someone remarked, "It is easier to teach entrepreneurs about utilities than to teach utility executives entrepreneurship."

About 15% of the audience left the room after lunch when the presentations turned to IT - many of the cleantech students, entrepreneurs, and practitioners think it is too technical for them, or else, to esoteric.  They don't yet understand something that both Koomey and Ken Brill, another panelist have been saying for years: IT is the 2% that affects the other 98% of your business.  It cannot be ignored. It has to be strategic, and it has to be energy efficient.

Rob Bernard of Microsoft was another highlighter, and gave an excellent presentation similar to one that I covered in an earlier blog last month.

The end of day was punctuated by a gong show, a pseudo competition among 11 companies for the best product, based on a 4 minute presentation by a founder.  The winner was FarmsReach: the web hub for local grub. congratulations to my colleague Lana Holmes for expressing her vision in such a way that it resonated with the audience.

It was great to come to a conference in the Presidio park, on a sunny, clear day with gorgeous views of the Golden Gate bridge, and bask in the intellectual framework of Silicon Valley discussing how to save the earth when it looks like an impossible task.  Back to work now doing itsy bitsy tasks that might be considered problem resolution.  Have a green day!

Perspectives I am learning along the way

Over the last several weeks, I have conducted podcast interviews on behalf of the Uptime Institute in preparation for their Symposium 2009 event April 13 - 16, 2009 In New York City.  You can go here to listen to the podcasts that have been uploaded.

For example, Philip Morris of Sun Microsystems spent time talking to me about how he became interested in energy efficiency in Sun's data centers several years ago. He gave much credit to the implementation of his ideas, and in fact, their contributions to the strategies as well, to Mark Monroe and Dean Nelson, his peers that have helped Sun to become an industry leader on the topic.  You can read more here.

Christine Ervine, a former Green Building Council President who oversaw the leap in LEEDs certifications gave an insightful overview of that process. I specifically recall that Christine said that in retrospect, with 20/20 vision, one of the most successful aspects of the LEEDs building certifications was that it was made available in tranches - you can participate at silver, gold, and platinum levels. Instead of having an on off switch, essentially, you have a dial to help you decide what level you want to participate at.  Through that interview, I also became aware for the first time, how important the General Services Administration of the US federal government was in promoting LEEDs.  You can read more about GSA here.

My interview with Amy Wohl is also an interesting perspective on the current economy and how it will drive certain IT  initiatives forward at a faster speed.  Amy is an economist as well as a well known IT strategist, and she believes that the lower startup cost of SAAS and PAAS will enable those segments of the IT industry to expand while other segments contract over the following 24 months.  Sometime over the next few weeks, look for additional podcasts to be loaded to the same page: it has been a privilege to speak with Steve Sams of IBM, Mark Ascolese of EDSA, Neil Rasmussen of APC/Schneider, Chris Crosby of Digital Realty, and Lauralee Martin of Jones Lang Lasalle and yes! they will all be speakers at Symposium 2009.  The podcasts may be enriching for those of you who are on travel restrictions and won't be in NYC to hear their presentations live.

I will be at the Symposium for all four days, participating on two panels. One of these panels is with Eric Olson of  Business Social Responsibility, a non profit based in San Francisco. 

We will be talking about the sustainability programs that drive BSR clients to include data center energy efficiency in their corporate GHG emissions goals, and how they are reporting their goals through annual reports, websites, etc., in an effort to convey their sincerity and successes. 

On the topic of Novel Innovative Collaboration I will be moderating a panel with Ray Pfeifer, KC Mares, and Bruce Myatt, all participants in the 2008 Data Center Energy Summit held in Silicon Valley last June. We'll be talking about the attributes of the collaboration that made the pilot studies so successful.

Hope to see you in NYC... Have a green day.