Well, this http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/reports/How-dirty-is-your-data/ report certainly stirred it up, judging by the fantastic amount of retweeting and posting on the net.
I was lucky enough to get the report pre publication, not by much, a couple of hours maybe but enough time to circulate it around to colleagues in the Green Grid, Uptime Institute and the BCS.
Personally, I have been alarmed at the Greenwash that originates from some IT Vendors and cloud services providers and am pleased that these claims are now being looked at in some detail and alternative views are coming to light.
For the record I have raised this issue on this blog many times, moving to the cloud does NOT reduce IT energy consumption it merely moves it, and quite possibly adds to the overall energy consumption of IT in general.
Whilst in Amsterdam I was sad to hear one of the panelists state that "energy consumption in Data Centres will surpass the Aviation Industry carbon emissions some time this year, but we as an industry to not have to worrry about when that will be as Greenpeace will tell us."
I found this statement to be particulary crass, it invites criticism of the youngest industry in the World (Data Centres have only been around for about 20 years) that is misleading.
Whilst all Data Centres are energy intensive, there are many ways to reduce energy consumption and to become more efficient, the industry does care and is taking steps to address the problem with initatives such as the Green Grid, and the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres (Energy Efficiency) and assessment schemes such as the BCS CEEDA accreditation (Links below).
As a BCS Green IT & Data Centres specialist group member I have contacted Greenpeace to begin a dialogue with them regarding this issue and will report back on this blog.
http://www.thegreengrid.org/
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/html/standby_initiative_data_centers.htm
http://www.ceeda-award.org/
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Amsterdam
Sorry for the delaying in getting this, last weeks blog out, I was in Amsterdam and then had a few client meetings.
Anyway, lets move to my trip to Amsterdam, it was lovely when I landed and made my way to the city, the canals and warmth were exactly what you need after clouds and drizzle. I enjoyed lunch in Rembrantplein and made my way to the hotel.
Later, I enjoyed a nice steak at El Rancho, the best steak house in Amsterdam.
I was up early to attend the 451 Group Datacentre transformation seminar at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, this was a really interesting seminar and covered the growth of cloud, the need for energy efficiency, and the implications of world wide legislation/regulation relating to the data center arena.
Afterwards, I was taken out to dinner by 3 complete strangers, where the topics of conversation where "Withnail & I", the cult british film of the 80's starring Richard E Curtis and one of the McGann brothers, the cultural and illict delights of Amsterdam and some of the transformation topics, including the availability of finance to build new data centres. This is only to be expected, city types see the growth of the cloud, assume that big bucks can be made and provide the funds for data centre construction, however the growth of the cloud is merely a way for DC operators to fill space in their existing DC's and this after funding rounds in the Tech Boom which left many data centres with lots of space and not much else. Are we to see the same thing happen again?. Will new data centres under planning and construction now see less growth than they expected, especially when articles like this one occasionally slip under the mafia's radar?
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/04/19/246473/Moving-to-the-cloud-39could-increase-energy-costs39.htm
I agree with this statement, and believe that the wholesale movement of on premise computing to data centres does increase energy use, and in the UK at least this growth bangs headlong into the forecasted reduction of generative capacity caused by the decommisssioning of nuclear power stations, and large capital injections of cash to coal fired power stations to meet the LCPD, which in turn leads to reduced production hours.
We live in interesting times, and sometimes I despair of what I call the hand differential, where the right hand does not know what the left is or is not doing, but still I will keep blogging and tweeting on the issue in the hope that things will change.
On Thursday I attended a course at my local business hub, I actually gained a qualification, the CIEH Level 2 Award in Environmental Principles and Best practice, well I'm awaiting the result but the course content and exam were not too difficult, and I suspect are aimed at getting a lot of people through. That said, although a lot of the course was (to me at least) common sense, its good to get some best practice information.
A meeting on Friday was cancelled, and strangely enough my meeting was with someone who was also at the seminar in Amsterdam, but we didn't meet there and neither did we meet on Friday, I'm going to catch up with him after easter.
The weekend was full of gardening, a BBQ and a boot sale.
This week we're on an Admin week, where we sort out all our receipts and sales and general tax etc.
As its Easter this weekend, we'll be scaling down our activities this week and concentrating on planning.
Have a good Easter, Royal Wedding and Bank Holiday, but we'll be tweeting and blogging as usual.
Anyway, lets move to my trip to Amsterdam, it was lovely when I landed and made my way to the city, the canals and warmth were exactly what you need after clouds and drizzle. I enjoyed lunch in Rembrantplein and made my way to the hotel.
Later, I enjoyed a nice steak at El Rancho, the best steak house in Amsterdam.
I was up early to attend the 451 Group Datacentre transformation seminar at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, this was a really interesting seminar and covered the growth of cloud, the need for energy efficiency, and the implications of world wide legislation/regulation relating to the data center arena.
Afterwards, I was taken out to dinner by 3 complete strangers, where the topics of conversation where "Withnail & I", the cult british film of the 80's starring Richard E Curtis and one of the McGann brothers, the cultural and illict delights of Amsterdam and some of the transformation topics, including the availability of finance to build new data centres. This is only to be expected, city types see the growth of the cloud, assume that big bucks can be made and provide the funds for data centre construction, however the growth of the cloud is merely a way for DC operators to fill space in their existing DC's and this after funding rounds in the Tech Boom which left many data centres with lots of space and not much else. Are we to see the same thing happen again?. Will new data centres under planning and construction now see less growth than they expected, especially when articles like this one occasionally slip under the mafia's radar?
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/04/19/246473/Moving-to-the-cloud-39could-increase-energy-costs39.htm
I agree with this statement, and believe that the wholesale movement of on premise computing to data centres does increase energy use, and in the UK at least this growth bangs headlong into the forecasted reduction of generative capacity caused by the decommisssioning of nuclear power stations, and large capital injections of cash to coal fired power stations to meet the LCPD, which in turn leads to reduced production hours.
We live in interesting times, and sometimes I despair of what I call the hand differential, where the right hand does not know what the left is or is not doing, but still I will keep blogging and tweeting on the issue in the hope that things will change.
On Thursday I attended a course at my local business hub, I actually gained a qualification, the CIEH Level 2 Award in Environmental Principles and Best practice, well I'm awaiting the result but the course content and exam were not too difficult, and I suspect are aimed at getting a lot of people through. That said, although a lot of the course was (to me at least) common sense, its good to get some best practice information.
A meeting on Friday was cancelled, and strangely enough my meeting was with someone who was also at the seminar in Amsterdam, but we didn't meet there and neither did we meet on Friday, I'm going to catch up with him after easter.
The weekend was full of gardening, a BBQ and a boot sale.
This week we're on an Admin week, where we sort out all our receipts and sales and general tax etc.
As its Easter this weekend, we'll be scaling down our activities this week and concentrating on planning.
Have a good Easter, Royal Wedding and Bank Holiday, but we'll be tweeting and blogging as usual.
Friday, 8 April 2011
Not a April Fool
I've jsut realised that last weeks Guinea Pigs post was posted on April 1st.
Now, this wasn't an April Fool it was actually a geniune request, so I've reposted the article below.
Please get in touch if you want to be on the bleeding edge of IT energy monitoring.
Carbon3IT Ltd want to test our hybrid energy monitoring system in a live environment.
We need a company with a small to medium data centre around 25-50 servers, UPS and HVAC installed etc.
We'll install our Greentrac IT Monitoring system on the servers and use non intrusive clamp smart meters on your racks and UPS/HVAC systems, we'll link it all together and report your energy consumption.
We'll need to gather around 3 -6 months worth of data, and we'd like to write a report and post it on our website, this will be a real interactive report detailing every aspect of the installation (notes from the field if you like!)
We'll install and configure the system for free and provide a free DC Health Check report that you can use if you are planning to apply for participation to the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres energy efficiency (its basically an assessement of your readiness).
After the test period, you can purchase the equipment or we'll take it out at no charge.
Offer only available in the UK.
Contact us on 01926 843389 or 07897 780337 or email john.booth@carbon3it.com or info@carbon3it.com
Now, this wasn't an April Fool it was actually a geniune request, so I've reposted the article below.
Please get in touch if you want to be on the bleeding edge of IT energy monitoring.
Carbon3IT Ltd want to test our hybrid energy monitoring system in a live environment.
We need a company with a small to medium data centre around 25-50 servers, UPS and HVAC installed etc.
We'll install our Greentrac IT Monitoring system on the servers and use non intrusive clamp smart meters on your racks and UPS/HVAC systems, we'll link it all together and report your energy consumption.
We'll need to gather around 3 -6 months worth of data, and we'd like to write a report and post it on our website, this will be a real interactive report detailing every aspect of the installation (notes from the field if you like!)
We'll install and configure the system for free and provide a free DC Health Check report that you can use if you are planning to apply for participation to the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres energy efficiency (its basically an assessement of your readiness).
After the test period, you can purchase the equipment or we'll take it out at no charge.
Offer only available in the UK.
Contact us on 01926 843389 or 07897 780337 or email john.booth@carbon3it.com or info@carbon3it.com
This week....
we've been down to London for the BCS Member Groups convention, this is a bi yearly event where committee memebers find out what other specialist and member groups have been up to, what they intend to be up to etc.
It was good to see that the BCS will be promoting sustainable IT throughout the year, we already do quite a lot, with our Green IT qualifications (Foundation & EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres) and the CEEDA award, but as a committee member on both the Green IT and DC specialist groups I can assure you all that exciting things are in the pipeline, not least the BCS Innovative use of recycling equipment competition. I'll provide the links for all the above projects towards the end of the article!.
On Thursday I was at the National Grid HQ for a "carbon budgeting" presentation organised by the Mayday Network, this was basically how the National Grid allocate carbon and energy consumption mitigation activities across all of their business units, very interesting stuff, for instance the NG use an internal "carbon price" applied to all their capital and operational activities to check that purchases offer "value for.." both financially and socially. What was very interesting is that they have no extra pot of money for energy and carbon mitigation projects, all funding has to come from savings made within the BU's, effectively a "spend to save" concept but can be spread across a number of years.
Another interesting fact is that the senior management team are "bonused" on their business unit performance, its not much at just 5%, but it seems to underline the notion that with any energy saving or sustainable project, senior management must be supportive, if not driving the agenda. We try and deal with very senior personnel when we deal with clients, as it really is the only way to get all the warring factions together to deal with the issue.
Today we've been to see a potential client in Stratford and hope to get two projects off the ground with them, watch this space.
We've been asked whether we're a Energy Monitoring Equipment Supplier Company or an IT consultancy, well we're both but let me enlarge on the detail.
Carbon3IT Ltd is a sustainable IT consultancy, primarily assisting clients to reduce their IT energy bills, but its more wide reaching than that.
We recognise the three main areas in Green IT to be:
Manfacturing of Equipment
Use
Disposal
Now, we do not manufacture computing equipment so we're kind of restricted in what we can acheive except to promote energy saving computing equipment and badger the likes of IBM/HP/DELL etc to design computers that are sustainable in terms of resources use and energy consumed both in manufacture and in use, we try to do this all the time and we promote the use of low energy low carbon computing equipment from Very PC Ltd, a UK company based in Sheffield.
We feel that no one can tell us exactly how much energy their organisation and their IT department is consuming unless they are measuring and monitoring their consumption. As energy monitoring is a relatively new field of expertise we provide the tools for companies to measure and monitor. Our products here are the Greentrac PC power monitoring and management tool and the Enisitic Energy Guardian and other smart metering solutions.
These tools tell us accurately how much energy your IT estate is using, and more importantly provides us with the raw information that we can process to identify where energy savings can be made.
Greentrac in particular tracks energy consumption by user and pc, and can identify those periods throughout the working day where the equipment is on, but idle, we target the idle time by either putting equipment into standby mode or by getting the user to turn the machine off, we also have ad hoc power profiles that will turn PC's off if they are in the right group, the right policy and have the right profile, this is ideal for multiuser PC's, call centre environments or public computers in Librarys or Universitys etc.
This software suite also manages printers, can integrate with IP enabled smart meters (like energy guardian) and provides lifecyle analysis (which PC in your estate is the most energy efficient!) it also links in with access cards and smart phones ( Text's will be sent to telephones that move outside of a proximity range when IT equipment is left on)
As for old equipment that may be donated to charity or sent to landfill we have two options, the first is to use a computer recycling company that is fully compliant with the necessary legislation or the use of software that converts the PC into a thin client, thus reducing wear and tear on components and shifting the processing to a cloud server or virtual server, thus extending its life for a few more years beyond its warranty period.
But we also feel that there is a great deal of waste within the way that IT is delivered, but that is a story for a new blog.
The links to the BCS stuff as promised:
BCS Green IT
BCS CEEDA Award
BCS Green IT "Innovative Use of Recycling Equipment" Competition
It was good to see that the BCS will be promoting sustainable IT throughout the year, we already do quite a lot, with our Green IT qualifications (Foundation & EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres) and the CEEDA award, but as a committee member on both the Green IT and DC specialist groups I can assure you all that exciting things are in the pipeline, not least the BCS Innovative use of recycling equipment competition. I'll provide the links for all the above projects towards the end of the article!.
On Thursday I was at the National Grid HQ for a "carbon budgeting" presentation organised by the Mayday Network, this was basically how the National Grid allocate carbon and energy consumption mitigation activities across all of their business units, very interesting stuff, for instance the NG use an internal "carbon price" applied to all their capital and operational activities to check that purchases offer "value for.." both financially and socially. What was very interesting is that they have no extra pot of money for energy and carbon mitigation projects, all funding has to come from savings made within the BU's, effectively a "spend to save" concept but can be spread across a number of years.
Another interesting fact is that the senior management team are "bonused" on their business unit performance, its not much at just 5%, but it seems to underline the notion that with any energy saving or sustainable project, senior management must be supportive, if not driving the agenda. We try and deal with very senior personnel when we deal with clients, as it really is the only way to get all the warring factions together to deal with the issue.
Today we've been to see a potential client in Stratford and hope to get two projects off the ground with them, watch this space.
We've been asked whether we're a Energy Monitoring Equipment Supplier Company or an IT consultancy, well we're both but let me enlarge on the detail.
Carbon3IT Ltd is a sustainable IT consultancy, primarily assisting clients to reduce their IT energy bills, but its more wide reaching than that.
We recognise the three main areas in Green IT to be:
Manfacturing of Equipment
Use
Disposal
Now, we do not manufacture computing equipment so we're kind of restricted in what we can acheive except to promote energy saving computing equipment and badger the likes of IBM/HP/DELL etc to design computers that are sustainable in terms of resources use and energy consumed both in manufacture and in use, we try to do this all the time and we promote the use of low energy low carbon computing equipment from Very PC Ltd, a UK company based in Sheffield.
We feel that no one can tell us exactly how much energy their organisation and their IT department is consuming unless they are measuring and monitoring their consumption. As energy monitoring is a relatively new field of expertise we provide the tools for companies to measure and monitor. Our products here are the Greentrac PC power monitoring and management tool and the Enisitic Energy Guardian and other smart metering solutions.
These tools tell us accurately how much energy your IT estate is using, and more importantly provides us with the raw information that we can process to identify where energy savings can be made.
Greentrac in particular tracks energy consumption by user and pc, and can identify those periods throughout the working day where the equipment is on, but idle, we target the idle time by either putting equipment into standby mode or by getting the user to turn the machine off, we also have ad hoc power profiles that will turn PC's off if they are in the right group, the right policy and have the right profile, this is ideal for multiuser PC's, call centre environments or public computers in Librarys or Universitys etc.
This software suite also manages printers, can integrate with IP enabled smart meters (like energy guardian) and provides lifecyle analysis (which PC in your estate is the most energy efficient!) it also links in with access cards and smart phones ( Text's will be sent to telephones that move outside of a proximity range when IT equipment is left on)
As for old equipment that may be donated to charity or sent to landfill we have two options, the first is to use a computer recycling company that is fully compliant with the necessary legislation or the use of software that converts the PC into a thin client, thus reducing wear and tear on components and shifting the processing to a cloud server or virtual server, thus extending its life for a few more years beyond its warranty period.
But we also feel that there is a great deal of waste within the way that IT is delivered, but that is a story for a new blog.
The links to the BCS stuff as promised:
BCS Green IT
BCS CEEDA Award
BCS Green IT "Innovative Use of Recycling Equipment" Competition
Friday, 1 April 2011
Guinea Pigs Wanted
Carbon3IT Ltd want to test our hybrid energy monitoring system in a live environment.
We need a company with a small to medium data centre around 25-50 servers, UPS and HVAC installed etc.
We'll install our Greentrac IT Monitoring system on the servers and use non intrusive clamp smart meters on your racks and UPS/HVAC systems, we'll link it all together and report your energy consumption.
We'll need to gather around 3 -6 months worth of data, and we'd like to write a report and post it on our website, this will be a real interactive report detailing every aspect of the installation (notes from the field if you like!)
We'll install and configure the system for free and provide a free DC Health Check report that you can use if you are planning to apply for participation to the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres energy efficiency (its basically an assessement of your readiness).
After the test period, you can purchase the equipment or we'll take it out at no charge.
Offer only available in the UK.
Contact us on 01926 843389 or 07897 780337 or email john.booth@carbon3it.com or info@carbon3it.com
We need a company with a small to medium data centre around 25-50 servers, UPS and HVAC installed etc.
We'll install our Greentrac IT Monitoring system on the servers and use non intrusive clamp smart meters on your racks and UPS/HVAC systems, we'll link it all together and report your energy consumption.
We'll need to gather around 3 -6 months worth of data, and we'd like to write a report and post it on our website, this will be a real interactive report detailing every aspect of the installation (notes from the field if you like!)
We'll install and configure the system for free and provide a free DC Health Check report that you can use if you are planning to apply for participation to the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres energy efficiency (its basically an assessement of your readiness).
After the test period, you can purchase the equipment or we'll take it out at no charge.
Offer only available in the UK.
Contact us on 01926 843389 or 07897 780337 or email john.booth@carbon3it.com or info@carbon3it.com
Wot? No response and no comment post!
I came across this on the web The cloud is green, isn't the cloud wonderful? not the articles real title but it may well have been.
I had a good look at the post and the referenced report and I was moved to add a comment.
My comment has not been published and I suspect its because it wasn't "on message".
I said that it was all very well publishing statements that indicated that the cloud was green and wasn't it a good thing yayay, bada bing bada boom yawn, but wouldn't it be wise to read the back page where all the assumptions were listed, in fact it was nearly two pages of A4 some 600 odd words of exclusions, some of which I have posted about on this blog before.
Things such as if you move into the cloud you'll save 90% on operating costs!
90% wow that is some cloud if it can do that, but hold on whats this small print, oh you have to move everything in your server room to the cloud, ah and sack all of your IT staff, ah and etc etc etc.
Right, so I've moved all my kit out of my server room and made it back into the stationary cupboard it was 40 years ago, I've got no kit so I dont need any staff, fine now what?
Ah, the MD just rang and wondered why he cant get his email, or his facebook page, ah and he hasn't been able to do anywork since the move into the cloud, can I help?
Well, not really as I cant access the cloud myself
Ah, so when I shut down my server room I shut down all my access equipment too, the stuff that authenticates my users and allows them to access cloud services via the internet gateway server, that wasn't a good move ut still we've saved a fortune by going into the cloud.....
Er no we havent, we killed the business.
So, an exclusion that is meaniless, really, no company can access the cloud unless it retains its computer room, unless of course it is completely mobile and even then there would be something technical around somewhere in the building. Really, the big consultancies should know better, should not allow themselves to be manipulated by the big vendors excluding some many real life events that render the purpose of the document moot.
Its a prime example of Greenwash, beware.
I had a good look at the post and the referenced report and I was moved to add a comment.
My comment has not been published and I suspect its because it wasn't "on message".
I said that it was all very well publishing statements that indicated that the cloud was green and wasn't it a good thing yayay, bada bing bada boom yawn, but wouldn't it be wise to read the back page where all the assumptions were listed, in fact it was nearly two pages of A4 some 600 odd words of exclusions, some of which I have posted about on this blog before.
Things such as if you move into the cloud you'll save 90% on operating costs!
90% wow that is some cloud if it can do that, but hold on whats this small print, oh you have to move everything in your server room to the cloud, ah and sack all of your IT staff, ah and etc etc etc.
Right, so I've moved all my kit out of my server room and made it back into the stationary cupboard it was 40 years ago, I've got no kit so I dont need any staff, fine now what?
Ah, the MD just rang and wondered why he cant get his email, or his facebook page, ah and he hasn't been able to do anywork since the move into the cloud, can I help?
Well, not really as I cant access the cloud myself
Ah, so when I shut down my server room I shut down all my access equipment too, the stuff that authenticates my users and allows them to access cloud services via the internet gateway server, that wasn't a good move ut still we've saved a fortune by going into the cloud.....
Er no we havent, we killed the business.
So, an exclusion that is meaniless, really, no company can access the cloud unless it retains its computer room, unless of course it is completely mobile and even then there would be something technical around somewhere in the building. Really, the big consultancies should know better, should not allow themselves to be manipulated by the big vendors excluding some many real life events that render the purpose of the document moot.
Its a prime example of Greenwash, beware.
This week....
started very well, we've got approval to install Greentrac into a large West Midlands university on a trial basis, the trial will initially be for 5 months to allow us to collect and analyse the data prior to holding a full UK product launch event at the same venue some time in October.
The installation should be up and running by the end of April, Easter and the Royal Wedding permitting and as usual this site will be the first to be updated.
On Wednesday I was in London at a BSI Carbon Footprinting masterclass for SME's, made a few contacts and hopefully another University will be trialling Greentrac soon.
Next Week, I'll be in London again on the Monday and Tuesday, I'm attending the BCS Members convention as the Data Centres Specialist Group representative and hopefully meeting up with my London University contact.
I've also been in discussions with the Coverntry & Warwickshire LEP over the low carbon economy group, this is very exciting and I'll update this site when final proposals have been put together.
Have a good weekend.
BTW We're available on Twitter and Skype under username Carbon3IT
The installation should be up and running by the end of April, Easter and the Royal Wedding permitting and as usual this site will be the first to be updated.
On Wednesday I was in London at a BSI Carbon Footprinting masterclass for SME's, made a few contacts and hopefully another University will be trialling Greentrac soon.
Next Week, I'll be in London again on the Monday and Tuesday, I'm attending the BCS Members convention as the Data Centres Specialist Group representative and hopefully meeting up with my London University contact.
I've also been in discussions with the Coverntry & Warwickshire LEP over the low carbon economy group, this is very exciting and I'll update this site when final proposals have been put together.
Have a good weekend.
BTW We're available on Twitter and Skype under username Carbon3IT
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