Wednesday 23 February 2011

Growing Green Expo

Well, we're all set up and have been attracting a lot of enquiries for our Energy Guardian and Greentrac energy monitoring products.
We've also had a lot of interest in our Broadleaf energy efficient PC unit.
We've got this on an energy comparison test with an old pc, the results are as follows:

Fujitsu Siemans PC Base Unit - 143W

Broadleaf PC + Monitor - 55W

Nearly a two thirds saving, can you afford not to use this product?

Anyway, we got a lot of leads and will be trawling through these over the next few days to follow up.

Tuesday 22 February 2011

Carbon3IT will be blogging at Growing Green in Birmingham.

Not only are we presenting the very best in power monitoring solutions, and low carbon/low energy computing equipment but we'll be blogging and twittering all day from the event.

It looks like its going to be a very good day indeed, various speakers will be covering transport, energy, microgeneration, green buildings topics and the west midlands own Prof Carl Chinn wil be there to tell us why its important to Grow Green.

Monday 21 February 2011

Growing Green in Birmingham Planning

As we've previously posted, we're off to Edgabaston Cricket Ground on Wednesday 23rd February 2011 between 9.30am to 4pm to attend the "Growing Green in Birmingham" www.finditinbirmingham.com, you'll need to register to gain access to the events page.

We're on stand 29. We'll be demonstrating our portfolio of Green IT Products:

The Very PC Ltd "Broadleaf" PC.
Very PC Ltd provide one of the most environmentally friendly technology products in the world today, everything is offset, the carbon the machine uses over its lifecycle is offset by CDM's, The packaging is designed to be recycled and manufactured using sustainably sourced materials,
The PC is a triumph of energy efficiency, measured on the 21st February using the equipment listed below, this PC had a idle energy consumption of 19.81 watts (the average PC will use 120w), check for yourselves on Wednesday.

The Enistic Energy Monitoring System, a system of zigbee connected smart meter sockets and clamps connected to smart zone controllers to accrurately record energy consumption on a local, floor, building, or enterprise basis, giving you the ability to focus your energy saving efforts on the systems that use the most energy and this provide the best return on CAPITAL via a short ROI.
Pricing on these products is very competitive by our very good commercial realtionship with Enistic Ltd.

We'll have the Greentrac User Agent running on a laptop and can demonstrate the following components:

· Greentrac Compliance - Straightforward yet sophisticated reporting that shows actual energy use
and provides real-time feedback on energy use across an entire network, plus equivalent carbon
emissions, wasted energy (even subdivided by time-of-day when variable rates and energy
surcharges can add up) and much more. Greentrac reporting has shown customers how to develop
power management plans that have decreased cost by over 30%!
· Greentrac Incite - Our engaging user-awareness programs that not only educate users on their
power consumption, but also encourage and reward them for doing something as simple as
shutting off their PC’s when not in use.
· Greentrac Kickstart – A handy application that works with smart phones and even building security
systems to allow users to manage their PC power needs and energy usage from anywhere while also
minimizing employee downtime by powering up workstations at the right time—when users are at
or near their computers. Greentrac Kickstart overcomes the main reason users don’t power down:
the wait while computers restart.
· Greentrac PC Power Management Suite (PPMS) – The complete set of Greentrac tools licensed in
one convenient bundle. Greentrac PPMS helps companies lower their energy consumption and
reduce carbon emissions by managing and monitoring the power used by computers, printers and
technology assets and by motivating people to do what’s right: turn their computers off when not in
use. Greentrac PPMS is built on the idea that people have the potential to save far more energy
than automated software, and our energy saving software provides the motivation and the platform
for your staff to do so.

Source: Greentrac in One Page

We'll also tell you about our range of Green IT Consultancy services:

GO GREEN IT

1. Survey, this is where we'll come in for £500+ VAT and conduct a initial survey of your IT readiness for "GO GREEN IT" programme for your organisation.
2. Audit, we'll install your selected energy monitoring systems and configure the software for your use, this takes approximately 8 days for the Greentrac option, 3 days to plan, design, and deploy the system agents, and 5 one days analysis over the period of one year. With the Enistic energy monitoring components we will work with your electrician to design, plan and install the system and project manage the installation to fit in with your operating procedures. This service is priced at £2000, plus the cost of the energy auditing equpment.
3. Analysis, we allow 5 days over the year following the installation to review collected data and write a short report on some outline energy saving activities relating to your IT estate.


Data Centres

Pre - Ceeda/EU CoC Report Service

We are working with the BCS DCSG to provide audits of Data Centres for CEEDA compliance, however we can provide a readiness report for compliance with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres (Energy Efficiency)

We hope to see you on Wednesday in Birmingham at the event, but if there if you can't attend, and still want some information, please visit our website www.carbon3it.com or email us at info@carbon3it.com

Thursday 17 February 2011

Growing Green in Birmingham Exhibition

Carbon3IT Ltd will be exhibiting at the Growing Green in Birmingham exhibition at Edgbaston Cricket Ground on the 23rd February 2011.
We're very excited to be able to present our energy monitoring products and part of our range of low carbon/low energy computers.

We've been busy this week selecting and ordering our display and promotional materials and everything has arrived and is currently being shuffled and moved about to create the best visual impact, we hope you like it, we'll be taking photographs which we'll post after the event.

We hope to be able to provide real time energy monitoring using a selection of the products we can suppply.
Our intention is to have an old computer (7 years) being compared with the latest low carbon/low energy Broadleaf PC from Very PC Ltd using the Enistic monitoring range and our Greentrac PC monitoring tool.

We'll also be gauging opinion on a possible new product range from IGEL.
IGEL sell thin clients and a special piece of software that can convert a conventional PC  into a thin client, this product very much supplements our range of service offerings and products by extending the life of old PC's, thus fulfilling our "reuse, reduce, recycle" mission statement.

Entry to the event is free, but you'll need to register on the following website:

Growing Green Registration

We'll be running a draw for a prize, just put your business card in the vase.

Thursday 10 February 2011

Hypocrite?

Yeah Yeah, I've just noticed that a cloud supplier is advertising on my blog!!!!!
This is not something I have any control over as this content and advertising is provided by blogger and not me, the only thing I have control over is the subject, which as you expected is actually IT.
However, whilst I do have reservations about cloud suppliers calling themselves the "green"option I do actually quite like the idea of distibuted cloud computing, I just want to make it even greener than it actually is, so we are actually doing something about it.
This week we have entered into discussion's with a University regarding research into a green data centre concept, we hope to publish the scoping document on our website very soon, once it has been submitted to the university so watch this space, as always this blog will be the first place where information regarding Carbon3IT Ltd is posted.

BCS Innovative Recycling Competitions

IT Technical Innovative/Art & Design Recycling Competitions from BCS Green IT Specialist Group, Details

The BCS Green IT Specialist Group is running two competitions for the innovative use of recycled computer equipment for Universities, Colleges and other Further Education Facilities, futher details are available on the above including how to enter the competition and details of the prizes that are on offer.

We are proud to be sponsoring some of the prizes and look forward to judging what is bound to be a very exciting competition.

We think that the standard of entries is going to be high and urge all higher education bodies to enter.

Saturday 5 February 2011

Cloudy Weather

Theres been more clouds in the news this week, its seems that some companies are wary of entering the cloud.
This is a good thing, after all any data put into the cloud is akin to leaving your company laptop on a train in my opinion.
Now, lets get something straight, there are some instances where a distributed network infrastructure is a good thing, it can give you greater resilence and comfort from knowing that in the event of an emergency your data will not be destroyed and that you can get your company back up and running fairly quickly, however the use of the cloud is not a substitue for a good, well tested disaster recovery plan, something that not all organisations have, and not something that all companies test.
Previous posts have detailed certain aspects of the cloud that I am not happy with, primarily the notion that moving into the cloud is somehow "greener" than your current setup.
A lot of the big consultancies state that cloud computing services ARE greener than your current set up but this is not true, every paper I've seen come with caveats that are so wide as to be meaniless, not all companies have the amount of equipment required, not all companies use IT services in the same way, so care should be taken when reading these articles and papers.
The cloud is not green for the following reasons:

1.You will still need computing power locally in order to access cloud services, these will be your local authentication services and of course access to file and print servers with data that you dare not place into a public and relatively unsecure domain. This local compute power will of course remain within the local Data Centre that has not had many of its servers removed to the cloud and as a result the PUE of said data centre will go up (more ancillary power, less compute power)
2. Cloud data centres although energy efficient, are additions to computing estate, therefore requiring additional energy provision, not green.
Carbon3IT is designing a distributed truly green cloud solution and will publish our concept document when available.


Next Week, we will be attending a low carbon technologies event in Birmingham and we have a meeting to discuss some project at a University in the West Midlands.

We rather enjoyed last nights Rugby and are looking forward to the rest of the weekends games including the Superbowl on Sunday Night.

Have a good weekend.