This Week...

started with a trip to the Green IT Expo at the QE2 Conference Centre in Westminster.
As always the seminars and quality of speakers was outstanding and anybody with an interest in Green IT or Sustainable Computing should mark this as the premier event in the Green IT Calendar.
Very PC launched a number of new products at the event as well as a new website and I was lucky enough to be invited to their after show party at the Cinnamon Club Bar (Thank You Peter!)
The view from most people that I spoke to was that Green IT was going to be high on the corporate agenda this year mainly due to a need to cut costs.

Some commentators are still promoting cloud services as the best way that organisations can become greener and cut costs, however nothing at the event has persuaded me that a move to the "dirty brown cloud" (dirty and brown because most data centres are powered by coal) will result in greener IT or for that matter a reduction in costs.
As I have blogged before, any organisation intending to move to the cloud needs to think very very carefully over what this means, both in the short term and over a longer timeframe.
I have doubts over the long term costs, service levels, the ease of amending or breaking a contract, the lack of open standards and fundamentally the so called green credentials of data centres providing cloud services.
Add to that the very real possibility that new data centres in the Uk are likely to be hit with the overall reduction in power generation caused by the large combustion directive and the nuclear decommissioning.

Here at Carbon3IT Ltd we believe that the current cloud model is fatally flawed and needs to be reviewed in line with external events not with a cosy view that everything will be fine.
Over to you cloud providers...

On Wednesday we attended the DataCentre Dynamics conference at the Lancaster Hotel, and specifically the EU Code of Conduct Data Centres Energy Efficiency update for stakeholders event, hosted by Paolo Bertoldi and others (Apologies for not catching all your names!)
There are some proposed amendments to the code out to the stakeholders for discussion and debate, including the new DPPE metric and others. Paolo has advised that the slides from the various presentations will be available on the EU Code of Conduct Website shortly.

All in all, a good week for those involved in the Green IT sector, lets hope that between us we can push the message home that Green IT is here to stay and that those organisations still dithering can make their minds up and get involved.

We have also progressed a few opportunities this week and hope to have some resolution soon... watch this space.