Views and Opinions on Green IT

Rice University is touting its "inexact" computer chip.  The design improves power and resource efficiency by allowing for occasional errors.  Prototypes show off at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers are at least 15 times more efficient than today's technology -- this is the sort of thing that makes data center buyers sit up and take notice, assuming they don't need high levels of precision. Researchers started looking at slashing power usage by allowing processing components , like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers, to make a few mistakes.  The probability of errors is managed and by limiting which calculations produce errors, designers found they can simultaneously cut energy demands and boost performance. Performance gains come from trimming away some of the rarely used portions of digital circuits.  In initial 2011 simulation runs, "pruned" chips were twice as fast, used half as much energy and were half the size ...

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Smart Grids & Cleanpower is holding its fourth conference, hosted by Cambridge University, on the 14th of June this year. An industrial, commercial, investment, briefing and networking conference, the event will showcase future trends of this diverse industry, and aims to:   describe the Smart Energy Ecosystem and state where we want to get tochallenge the wisdom the smart meter roll-out as it is currently set upphases of smart grid deployment and who will benefitfuture role of DCC - how that will change marketbe the only one that does a full 20:80 analysis of grid and power technologies out therereview wider grid-related technologies, such as micro-grids, off-gridscover LCNF progresscover distribution policy and network integrationcritique or present government strategy on biomass, wind and solarsee utilities describe large power projects UKanalyse renewable generation sector trends, such as Feed-In Tariffs (FiTs) and Renewable Heat Incentive policiesprovide an exposition on the shale gas opportunity/issueenable innovators ...

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A fascinating week for green technology at Apple. Greenpeace increased the scale of its protests against Apple’s “dirty cloud” - asking it to shift to electricity from renewable sources - and then Apple issued an announcement that it is pretty much doing exactly that. By doubling the size of on-site solar power at its data center in Maiden, North Carolina, Apple was able to announce it will make 60 percent of the electricity the site uses from solar and fuel cells - and will buy the rest from renewable sources. I still have some questions about the figures. Greenpeace estimated that Maiden needed 100MW, and (maybe a slightly more reliable witness) Amazon reckoned 78MW. Apple says the center has a full-capacity load of only 20MW. That makes fully-renewable power an option, especially when you are already putting in the biggest solar array in the US, and the biggest fuel cell installation outside ...

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Having been tarred and feathered on numerous occasions in Greenpeace drive-by PR papers, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are actually making forward progress in the battle to cut carbon emission.  But quiet progress doesn't grab big headlines with the mainstream media, so let's give some credit where credit is due. Facebook's Open Compute project has shaken up the hardware industry.  Servers needed a serious refresh.  Facebook has stimulated a rethink of the whole server food chain, including motherboards, power supplies and UPS backup, electrical distribution, and even rack design.   Yes, rack design! Like many IT standards, the origins of the humble rack date back to before there were even computers.  In this case, a 1950's standard for railroad signaling relays.  Changing rack size opens up different configurations of hardware and software within a standard rack "footprint" to squeeze out more space efficiency -- more computing power per square ...

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If no one else applauds Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will go carbon-neutral, then carbon accounting folks certainly will. Microsoft will account for and compensate for all greenhouse gases it is responsible for producing, its COO Kevin Turner announced last week in a blog. What’s more, this is happening from the next financial year - starting in July 2013. This is a very definite promise, and it is a fast-moving one (in accounting terms). It isn’t based on vague corporate social responsibility (CSR) or greenwash marketing (though Microsoft is certainly getting some positive coverage). It’s based on accounting.  Now, carbon accounting had a small surge of interest a couple of years ago. You may have missed it, but I’m paid to watch this stuff, and there was definitely a flicker. A small cluster of start-ups offered software to calculate and account for the carbon emissions a ...

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Where does your data center trash go? Everything from paper printouts to servers is ultimately thrown out or recycled, but the more complicated the product, the more headaches are involved.  However, even something as simple as paper has issues when it comes to the proper disposal before recycling. Back in the days of my youth, I worked for a card-carrying member of the professionally paranoid.  He didn't work for the CIA or other government three-letter agency, but had his own insights on security since he had done his own share of dumpster diving and other hacker-esque activities in his youth. Dumpster diving is the activity of going through a trash bin to see what sort of intellectual or hardware valuables can be found; it really is a story of one man's trash being another man's treasure.   Mr. Professionally Paranoid -- let's call him PP for short -- would ...

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A data center can consume up to 100 or 200 times more electricity than a standard office space, which quickly translates into excessive expenses for continuing that level of energy consumption. As energy costs keep growing, more and more companies are looking for options to keep their costs down, and there are some solutions that can offset these costs while creating a greener IT environment. IT equipment – the servers and storage – can account for over half of the energy usage at a data center. In other words, most of the energy that is consumed in these centers is a result of just keeping the basics running. A lot of this is because even though the servers spend most of their time running at 20% utilization, they still draw full power most of the time. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, rack servers remain one of the major power ...

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A couple of years back, the Facebook-led initiative, Open Compute, looked like another one of those well-meaning industry initiatives, that might or might not lead to some small improvement in how things are done. You know, like the Open Group, or the Cloud Industry Forum, or even in efficient data centres, the Green Grid. These groups have an annual meeting, run a web site, and publish some specifications and white papers. Let’s not denigrate that activity, because the Green Grid, for instance, makes beautiful and very useful white papers. But it turns out that Open Compute has ambitions a lot bigger than that. It is after real, radical seismic shifts. Get this: it’s changing the size of computing racks! Don’t laugh. A change in the size of rack-mounted equipment is a big thing, and I did a double-take when I read about it. Rack-mounted kit has always ...

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Greenpeace's preaching against major data center players illustrates the most stark "green" streak roaming around today, an absolutist take-no-prisoners mentality demanding change yesterday -- if not sooner.  The problem with absolutists is that the world is very rarely so simplistic -- a fact they don't like to admit to themselves. So far, Greenpeace hasn't been effectively called out on its double-standards for the computer and data center industries.  Every year, Apple gets bashed for something or another, but Greenpeace staffers have no problem using Macs and iPhones and iPads.   Tools of the enemy and all that, I suppose.   It's recent screeching about coal-powered data centers and calls for transparency in carbon usage ring a bit hollow when Greenpeace USA keeps some of its own servers tucked away at coal and nuclear-fed facilities.  Not to mention the whole thing about calling for "transparency" in carbon usage while its own ...

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Greening IT isn’t just about making data centers more efficient. Every so often I come back to other topics, like PC power management, and e-waste. Here’s a nifty idea I saw this week, which could keep old PCs out of landfill. When PCs become obsolete they get replaced, but what happens to the old ones? They won’t run the latest Windows or Office versions, but they are very happy with a robust Linux, like Ubuntu or Mint, using the bundled applications and going to the cloud for everything else. Old PCs can be useful in developing countries, shipped there by an outfit like ComputerAid (in the UK). Alternatively they can go locally, to people who don’t have the need or budget for a full-fat PC. I’m thinking of poor people or retired people. There are always people ready for a free PC, even an old ...

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GigaOm had a piece earlier this week about biogas powering data centers. It's giving me flashbacks to HP's hype piece about data centers down on the farm.  First, let's get this out of the way:  Methane, the key component of biogas fuel, comes from rotting, stinking things, typically waste products.  You get methane out of waste dumps, landfills, sewer treatment plants, and from the droppings of animals -- barnyard and human. By no means is burning methane carbon-free, but the gas remains in the atmosphere for 9 to 15 years and is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than stock CO2.  Burning methane gas, be it from a waste dump or leaking from a natural gas or oil well, is ironically a lot better for the environment because the primary waste product is CO2.  Putting "free range" biogas or natural gas in a ...

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After finishing the 2012 Boston Marathon, I have some newfound vigor to push back on global warming. While scientists may have a tough time definitively tying the world’s increasing carbon emissions to my 32-deg-C slog from Hopkinton to Copley Square in Boston, there is a way that a company can save money on computing while doing its part to make sure that its advancements in information technology won’t provide any additional carbon-related pain to future sufferers on the Boston Marathon course. And that solution is unique.

In Iceland not only is there a robust power grid that is built to an industrial standard that far exceeds the typical residential and commercial requirements pressed upon local utility companies, but every joule and watt that crosses that grid is based upon power sources that are hydroelectrically or geothermally generated. And beyond that, Iceland has demonstrated that it is strategically committed ...

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Earth Day must be a major celebration. It has been marked by a Google Doodle, an animated gif of flowers growing into the search giant’s logo.

The festival is little known in Britain, and I only became aware of it when I started covering the Geen IT beat. Since then, I’ve seen annual announcements of green awards and initiatives, and always some anger from Greenpeace.

This year is no different. The Uptime Institute announced a set of Green Enterprise IT awards honouring, some very different Green IT approaches including Facebook for its Open Compute project (sharing custom-built server designs) and Bell Canada for achieving a PUE of 1.266 using off-the shelf servers.

Greenpeace, meanwhile, got the coverage with another attack on cloud providers (and Apple in particular) urging them to use clean electricity.

The first Earth Day was held in 1970 (led by the marvellously-named Senator Gaylord ...

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GreenPreach, er Greenpeace USA, has started its latest "Do as I say, not as I do" data center jihad by attacking Apple, Amazon and Microsoft for using  "asthma-inducing, climate destroying coal pollution" to keep The Internet humming.   Meanwhile, the preachy non-profit can't (or won't bother) meet the standards it has set out for the big boys. What standards are those?   If you go to Greenpeace's web site, it will forward you to a Convio auto-gen email site providing text that includes four bullet points: Make it company policy to seek renewable energy when siting data centers; Urge data center electricity suppliers to move away from dirty energy generation, investing instead in renewable energy generation, capacity, and efficiency; Advocate full transparency of organization energy use and carbon footprint for all products, as well as its cloud presence; Encourage company product suppliers and manufacturers to adopt similar policies, and ...

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Running a data center is - I imagine - all about doing math. Calculating the cost per MIP of the hardware, the cost of the energy, the likely failure rates, the replacement schedule... I’ve never done that job, but from all I hear, there are a lot of sums, all directed at ensuring the center performs well, delivers to budget, and meets all sorts of changing regulations. Quite how many sums a data center manager has to do came home to me in an article I read recently, about back-up power pollution at data centers in Quincy, Washington. The sums don’t just cover what happens inside the center. It seems they spill out into the outside world. Quincy has several data centers, run by firms including Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, Sabey and Vantage Data Centers all lured there by the availability of cheap power at a couple of cents per kilowatt ...

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Everyone is all about cleaner air for the servers, but what about people? If you're going to run a green data center, shouldn't you show some green love for the employees? I know it's counterintuitive to mix growing, leafy things and dirt with the pristine cleanliness  (OK, maybe not in your data center) of a server room, but there can be a lot of outgassing with synthetic materials ranging from carpets and wallpaper to the plastics in your older servers.   Depending on how tightly the data center building and/or space is constructed -- and more recent construction is, in order to more efficiently cool things -- you could end up with some health complaints issues if someone simply uses the wrong type of paint. Enter the plants.  Back in 1989, NASA released "Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement." NASA originally started researching the issue with a ...

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So how is teleworking shaping up as the next green bandwagon? Last week’s report from the UN said broadband could cut the planet’s energy use - and a large part of that saving is supposed to come from more efficient transport, and the use of technology to replace travel. This possibility is real, especially in the developed world, where we use a lot of energy getting about. The average Brit burns about 40kWh/day of energy on driving (about 20 percent of their total energy). Averaged over the year, he or she burns a similar amount on flying. The figure, and the idea of converting energy to units of 1kWh, comes from David McKay’s book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. One kiloWatt hour (kWh) is a good unit because if you buy that much electricity, it costs about 10p (around 15c) and is the equivalent of keeping ...

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Everyone’s all rah-rah this week about Google using “thermal storage” for the first time in its new Taiwan data center, as first reported by Focus Taiwan. C’mon! People should be asking why Google hasn’t done this sooner.  It’s not like making ice at night to balance cooling hasn’t been done before.  We’re talking way, way old school here! How old is this technique? Go back before the industrial age, horse-and-buggy days and earlier, when small towns would chop up blocks of ice out of a pond in the winter, stick them in a cool place, and layer them with straw.  As summer approached, the blocks would be man-handled out and delivered to where needed to keep food cold.   Moving forward to the IT Age, some building and facilities went high(er) tech with the concept.  Ice is created and stored at night, when the ...

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Combatting climate change is a bit like adopting a healthier lifestyle - on a planetary scale. You might want to cut carbs in your diet and exercise more; the world will have to cut its carbon emissions and get more efficient.  Like a human body, the planet is an organism, and it can become unhealthy or unbalanced. In our bodies, we tend to consume too much and burn too little energy. The world, meanwhile, tends to consume and burn too much. There are likely to be 53 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent (Gte) emitted in 2020, which is 9 billion tonnes more than the 44 Gte we should be at to stop the world’s temperature going up more than 2C. How do we cut those emissions? Well, a big part of the answer could be broadband, according to a report brought out today by two UN agencies. The report, The ...

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One of the more interesting tidbits I heard at the Verne Global data center tour was Colt's idea that you could take its modular data center platform and relocate it to somewhere else if customer demand within a region/area had shrunk or consolidated. It's an intriguing idea, but I'm not really sure if it's going to happen any time soon. Expanding a modular data center is pretty straightforward.  Take empty space, order the modules, turn everything up four months later.  The limits to growth are an available, empty, usable physical space, affordable power, and bandwidth; don't have one of those three and there's no further expansion. If you believe in the power of cloud computing and virtualization, relocating work within the data center via consolidation and moving work between geographies due to processing load or other factors is a snap, assuming there's ...

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There has been a lot of talk - and disagreement - this week, about the role of solar energy in powering data centers. Maybe it’s sensationalist to call this a “solar storm”, but I like the phrase, and we have seen it a lot in recent months. Luckily this week’s solar storm was not a coronal mass discharge of Carrington proportions, taking out GPS and mobile phones. You would probably have heard about that already. Thankfully, this week’s “solar storm” was more of the tea-cup variety. Someone at a data center firm that doesn’t use solar power, said some things that everybody knows, pointing out that there are good reasons not to rely on it heavily to run data centers. Specifically, it was Amazon vice president and data center guru James Hamilton, who said: “I love solar power, but in reflecting carefully on a couple of high profile ...

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If you need further evidence that a straight-line carbon-reduction pitch -- damn the bucks, full green ahead -- just doesn't work, fuel-cell manufacturer Bloom Energy has opened up a Mission Critical Practice to drive the sale of its products to the professionally paranoid.  So much for the green story. Bloom's announcement was made last week and it seems to have been interpreted as a tighter focus by the company on data center sales -- a point that is true, but Bloom has been pitching for data center business pretty much from day one as a more reliably source of electricity than being plugged into the grid. Joining the company in the announcement of Mission Critical-ness is Peter Gross, co-founder and CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities and formerly VP and managing partner for global consulting at HP.  Going half way down the press release, you come to the following: "Because Bloom ...

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I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but a survey at  London’s Data Centre World shows that data center managers are still not making the obvious connections. In its annual survey, nlyte asked a hundred data centre managers, and found that their topconcern was capacity and operational costs - which include a huge slice of power and cooling. The demand for capacity was particularly interesting. Last year 15 percent said it was a top concern, this year it was 32 percent. That backs up the general feeling that, thanks to cloud services, we are at the start of a boom for data centers. Indeed, cloud computing and virtualisation figured high as concerns for data center managers - and so did power management, cited by 21 percent of the survey. But what are they doing about their power and management? It turns out that more than half (53 percent) keep the status ...

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I'm spending two days this week down at Satellite 2012. As my head starts to throb from vendor hype and marketing lies, I wonder: Are satellites green? I know this sounds like a side track from green IT nirvana, but some data centers do business in some way, shape or form with satellite companies, be it for backup connectivity (rarely) or storing the latest gigabyte broadcast surges of 3-D soccer matches.  From one perspective, satellites are grossly inefficient data pipes.  Only the very latest/newest satellites can download data at what translates to hundreds of gigabits to a terabit per second, but there's a lot of magic math involved.   If you want a single bi-directional big data pipe, you need a big dish -- say five meters or larger in diameter -- and a whole transponder (dedicated broadcast piece of a satellite) and some other kit to get around 200-300 ...

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