Sunday 30 October 2011

Slight Delay

I know we promised to have our review of the Greening Government ICT document up by COP on Friday, but unavoidable circumstances meant that we have been unable to meet our self imposed deadline.
We apologise for this, we hope to have the review completed and online shortly.

Thursday 27 October 2011

Greening Government ICT

Busy little blogger today methinks, anyway we've been advised that the long awaited "Greening Government ICT document has been released today, its available on this link Greening Government: ICT Strategy.


We review it later today and blog our thoughts on it very soon but in the meantime we've pulled one very salient set of points that we are very pleased about:

Commitment
6
Government to adopt the EU Code of Conduct for energy efficient Data centres
April 2012
Action
6.1
Government to be registered as endorsers of EU code of conduct for energy efficient data centres and server rooms
April 2013
All Government departments
6.2
Government to require any data centre or cooled server room used in delivering a new ICT service to be registered as Participants under the EU Code of Conduct for energy efficient data centres
April 2014 onwards


This is excellent news and one we've been hoping for, for a while now, we do hope that this means that the new £60million cloud tender released this week on the procurement portal means that the winner will be a EU Code of Conduct participant and also a potential CEEDA award holder as a statement of intent by the government.

Anyway, off to read in detail the strategy with a pencil and notenook in hand, expect a reponse by COP tomorrow.

Thoughts on Data Centre energy metrics

So, we've had PUE/DCiE we've had DPPE, CUE AND WUE, we've got the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, we got ASHRAE, we've got ETSI, we've got TIA-942 It seems that everyone and his dog are in the process of or have actually set down on paper a standard of what a Data Centre should aspire to.
And it is laudable that the industry does this, but the nature and complexity of Data Centres around the world means that one standard could not and should not be applied to all facilities.
In reality the only real standard should be that of energy efficiency, and we're given some thought on this and this it should be based on the PUE metric created by the Green Grid.
We think that we need to include the source of the input energy and the use of the output energy, we given this metric a name Total Power Effectiveness or TPE.
So, the first element "Input Energy" or (IP)is the amount of energy derived from the grid or on site renewable energy expressed as a %, so if your grid mix is 50% nuclear and 30% wind and 20% hydro, then the IP would be 50%.
We'll then use the conventional DCiE metric for the facility say 50%. we'll call this Facility Use or (FU)
Finally, we think that energy re-use (ER) should be considered in the metric and this will also be a % so if you collect 100% of your waste heat and pump it in to a district heating system or into a greenhouse, your score would be 100%.
So a facility that used 100% renewable energy (verified of course) had a PUE of 1.07 or DCiE OF 94% and reused 100% of its waste heat would have a TPE of 100%+94%+100% = 294%, correspondingly, if another facility had 0% renewables, a PUE of  2 or DCiE 50% and reused 25% of its waste energy then its TPE would be 75%.
Obviously the higher the percentage the better your facility is but it can never be in excess of 300%

Simples. comments as always please

Green IT Event - Cheltenham 26th Oct 2011 - Report & Feedback from Green IT Talks

This was an very early start, the whole family arose before 6am to get the car loaded and off to set up for the event.
We actually arrived quite early, but I've always said its better to be early rather than late.

Altogether there were about 60 delegates and 10 exhibitor stands will about 15 exhibitors, maybe more, but we digress.
I only attended the first four sessions of the event, this was the introduction, a chap who was talking very generally about Green IT and then a lovely Irish lady who works on a project for JISC, to do with the measurement of the financial benefits of moving to a Greener IT estate, rounded off by the IT manager of Gloucester College who gave us a run through on what they were doing, quite impressive if a little cautious in their approach.

We had a very long conversation with somebody from the rather large government organisation that is based in Cheltenham about Green IT, they did mention a few things which I was quite surprised at, but given their needs it makes sense for them to go down this route rather than adopt more conventional methods.
We also had a talk with representatives from the Environment Agency who were very interested in our PC power management solution and the low carbon, low energy compute solutions from Very PC, not for themselves unfortunately, but to advise their clients that such products are available.

We recognise that we are very knowledgeable about Green IT and what purports to be Green IT but isn't, but we are always surprised at the lack of knowledge in the general public and for that matter in some IT professionals so we like going to these events to catch up with Colleagues and to cascade our knowledge and thoughts around to others.
And on that note we've been very pleased we some of the feedback we've received as a result of our Green IT talks to BCS and UKITA branches over the last few weeks, we contacted a few of the people that gave the comments and requested their permission to quote them so heres a brief selection of them:

"Hi John,

It was great to see you at the UKITA CSW meeting last week.

I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your presentation. It was genuinely one of the most interesting talks I have been to in recent years. Hearing some of the facts and statistics you put forward was extremely thought provoking and has really prompted me to now consisder more carefully the energy and enviromental aspects of the work I do with my clients.
I know some of my voluntary sector clients take the environmental side of things quite seriously, so I shall certainly pass your details on to them as and when appropriate.
You mentioned that the slides were available?

Thanks again.

Kind regards

Martin Bird, B.Sc.(Eng.) Hons.
C.Eng MIET

Engineering and IT Consultant

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
Quality approved member of the United Kingdom IT Association

Tel         0845 200 8540
Mobile  07770 660918
Email    contact@martinbird.co.uk
"


"Listened to you talk on Green IT at the Hampshire Branch AGM, very good and very interesting. I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."

Paul Shonk BSc (Hons) MIfL MBCS Teacher of IT at Alton College

John for his helpful ideas for speakers for the February meeting and his excellent talk on Green IT."
Flick Wheeler UKITA Interim Chair CSW Branch

"many thanks for an excellent presentation - the feedback was great"
Margaret Ross, Chair of BCS Hampshire branch"



"Hi John,
Thanks for coming to give the talk and forwarding the slides. Some of the students are investigating Green IT as their dissertation, it’s good that you have given them some insight."

David Liewe BCS Cheltenham & Gloucester Branch Chair & IT lecturer at University of Gloucester"


Thank you all for inviting me to talk on this subject to your members, I find it very enjoyable and look forward to updating the talk in 2-3 years time, hopefully the doom and gloom would have lifted a little or I'll be able to report exciting new developments in either energy or IT that will go some way to allievate the problem.