not African, India but not Indian, France but not French, England but not English.
That was my first impression of Mauritius, there was the heat and humidity of Africa, the majority of people I saw were of Indian descent, the language is a version of French, but with Creole phrases and the billboards and posters were in English.
And it is all these, Mauritius has a wonderful richness, a hotch potch of cultures, cuisine, and attitude.
It is a jewel in the Indian Ocean, and I'm here.
I am here to provide the Government of Mauritius, funded by the EU, training courses and capacity building assistance in order to enable them to reduce the energy demand of data centres on the already under pressure energy system, this has entailed to date, 2 Green IT courses and tomorrow we begin the Data Centres element with back to back EUCOC and Energy and Cost Management courses, 3 sessions in total, followed by a report to the EU and the NCB, and some visits to various ministries to meet with senior staff to discuss their involvement in the EUCOC in both endorsement and participation.
I've met some wonderful keen people so far and hope to meet many others, the opportunities to help these people in their quest is simply just too good an opportunity to miss out on.
So, I'll be having discussions with various bodies with a view to providing even more help, and I'll be telling you all via these pages exactly what we're thinking of doing and how we're going to do it.
So, keep coming back!
Sunday, 19 May 2013
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Confusing and unhelpful
Whats confusing and unhelpful? well in essence the amount of stuff on the web and being spoken about at conferences, seminars, and on line about how to optimise your data centre.
As independent consultants we get invited to a lot of events where XX Company are trying to get you to use their "optimisation product" or their "optimisation process" this is usually a tailor-made set of processes or products that you can use to enhance your data centre optimisation plans, except.... they all point you in the direction of buying their stuff under the guise of "expertise". Now I don't have a problem with people trying to sell stuff, after all its what they are paid for by their companies to do, what I do have a problem with, is when they wrap up their "expertise" with references to some of the standards and state that this is that, and this product is fully compliant with and so on.
So, a word of warning, the only way to really get expert independent advise is to use independent consultants, these guys (like ourselves) will tell you about the technology areas not specific products or offerings and leave you to make up your minds about what you want to install given your timescales, budgets and appetite.
And, I hear you say, what about the products that you sell? Well, our products are only offered when you take a complete consultancy package from us and we only use them to give you baseline energy measurements and analysis, we can and often do remove them after we have completed our work, but we leave it up to you to decide, if the product does what we say it does and it helps you to reduce your energy consumption or to provide baseline data you have the option to keep it on your network.
What we've done is to look at all the products available and make a judgement on what works for us, and we do this two or three times a year and update accordingly.
Our current product range includes world class products such as:
Greentrac, a PC power management solution that not only measures and reports utilisation, and power use as well as a whole host of other metrics, but importantly gives the end use information about his or hers energy use, and compares that with their peers, on a personal, departmental, or site basis, this allows us to create marketing and competition campaigns to really embed energy efficiency thinking throughout your workforce, after all you don't want to lose the gains you have made by allowing the programme to elapse through not following up.
Command and Control, a Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) product that meets the advanced DCIM criteria as mentioned by the 451 Group in their recent Hosting and Cloud Transformation conference in London in early April.
The Very PC Groups range of low embedded energy, low energy use and low carbon compute, storage and desktop products as well as their innovative liquid cooled server stack products.
We also provide a number of services, such as the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres pre-application service, we will visit your data centre and help you to build your participation application form so that it will get approved.
We also do this for the BCS CEEDA product.
And we are the official reviewer of the EU Code of Conduct applications, so we do know what we're looking for.
And, as we're the BCS CEEDA lead assessor we have an intimate knowledge of the criteria and requirements of the award process.
We also have access to three exceptional analysis products, but we're not allowed to tell you about them publicly, we can speak about them if you engage us to be your Resource Efficient ICT partner though, so drop us a line to info@carbon3it.com and tell use what you want to achieve and we'll create a strategy, advise you on the products you can use to make your baseline calculations, provide them, and help you on your journey to resource optimised ICT future.
As independent consultants we get invited to a lot of events where XX Company are trying to get you to use their "optimisation product" or their "optimisation process" this is usually a tailor-made set of processes or products that you can use to enhance your data centre optimisation plans, except.... they all point you in the direction of buying their stuff under the guise of "expertise". Now I don't have a problem with people trying to sell stuff, after all its what they are paid for by their companies to do, what I do have a problem with, is when they wrap up their "expertise" with references to some of the standards and state that this is that, and this product is fully compliant with and so on.
So, a word of warning, the only way to really get expert independent advise is to use independent consultants, these guys (like ourselves) will tell you about the technology areas not specific products or offerings and leave you to make up your minds about what you want to install given your timescales, budgets and appetite.
And, I hear you say, what about the products that you sell? Well, our products are only offered when you take a complete consultancy package from us and we only use them to give you baseline energy measurements and analysis, we can and often do remove them after we have completed our work, but we leave it up to you to decide, if the product does what we say it does and it helps you to reduce your energy consumption or to provide baseline data you have the option to keep it on your network.
What we've done is to look at all the products available and make a judgement on what works for us, and we do this two or three times a year and update accordingly.
Our current product range includes world class products such as:
Greentrac, a PC power management solution that not only measures and reports utilisation, and power use as well as a whole host of other metrics, but importantly gives the end use information about his or hers energy use, and compares that with their peers, on a personal, departmental, or site basis, this allows us to create marketing and competition campaigns to really embed energy efficiency thinking throughout your workforce, after all you don't want to lose the gains you have made by allowing the programme to elapse through not following up.
Command and Control, a Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) product that meets the advanced DCIM criteria as mentioned by the 451 Group in their recent Hosting and Cloud Transformation conference in London in early April.
The Very PC Groups range of low embedded energy, low energy use and low carbon compute, storage and desktop products as well as their innovative liquid cooled server stack products.
We also provide a number of services, such as the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres pre-application service, we will visit your data centre and help you to build your participation application form so that it will get approved.
We also do this for the BCS CEEDA product.
And we are the official reviewer of the EU Code of Conduct applications, so we do know what we're looking for.
And, as we're the BCS CEEDA lead assessor we have an intimate knowledge of the criteria and requirements of the award process.
We also have access to three exceptional analysis products, but we're not allowed to tell you about them publicly, we can speak about them if you engage us to be your Resource Efficient ICT partner though, so drop us a line to info@carbon3it.com and tell use what you want to achieve and we'll create a strategy, advise you on the products you can use to make your baseline calculations, provide them, and help you on your journey to resource optimised ICT future.
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Latest News
What have we been up to lately then?
Well, we're finalising the trip to Mauritius with the National Computer Board and the EU Delegation, and this is now all sorted.
Our principal consultant joined the Green Grid as an individual member and now has access to some of the world's leading research on data centre energy efficiency.
He's also been revising the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres participant application spread-sheet and this is nearly complete and will include the 2013 Revision of the Code.
Finally, we've been nominated in the company "one to watch" category at the Green IT Awards www.greenitawards.com, please feel free to vote for us, and we thank you in advance.
What else? Oh yes, we were invited to give a presentation to the EPSIAE, which is the "European Programme for Sustainable IT in Academic Education" at the Birmingham City University on April 2nd on the subject of Data Centres, Metrics and the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres and BCS CEEDA.
More Information on EPSIAE http://www.epsiae.com/
We must have done something right, as we've been invited back to the final plenary session on the 12th April at the IET Austin Court in Birmingham, you can still get tickets to the whole event (there are presentations, workshops and tutorials) at the BCS website event page BCS Event Page
So, all in all March was a very busy month, there's other stuff going on as well, but we are unable to tell you about them due to no publicity clauses and non disclosure agreements, however we will be able to let you know whats going on soon.
Just keep coming back to this page for regular updates.
Thanks
Well, we're finalising the trip to Mauritius with the National Computer Board and the EU Delegation, and this is now all sorted.
Our principal consultant joined the Green Grid as an individual member and now has access to some of the world's leading research on data centre energy efficiency.
He's also been revising the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres participant application spread-sheet and this is nearly complete and will include the 2013 Revision of the Code.
Finally, we've been nominated in the company "one to watch" category at the Green IT Awards www.greenitawards.com, please feel free to vote for us, and we thank you in advance.
What else? Oh yes, we were invited to give a presentation to the EPSIAE, which is the "European Programme for Sustainable IT in Academic Education" at the Birmingham City University on April 2nd on the subject of Data Centres, Metrics and the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres and BCS CEEDA.
More Information on EPSIAE http://www.epsiae.com/
We must have done something right, as we've been invited back to the final plenary session on the 12th April at the IET Austin Court in Birmingham, you can still get tickets to the whole event (there are presentations, workshops and tutorials) at the BCS website event page BCS Event Page
So, all in all March was a very busy month, there's other stuff going on as well, but we are unable to tell you about them due to no publicity clauses and non disclosure agreements, however we will be able to let you know whats going on soon.
Just keep coming back to this page for regular updates.
Thanks
Tuesday, 12 March 2013
The Energy Gap and Unrealistic forecasting
Over the last few weeks I heard Prof Ian Bitterlin speak on three separate occasions, all different presentations but with similar elements running through each delivery.
The upshot is, that some forecasting organisations (I'm not going to tell you who they are, ask Ian or check out his presentation slide decks on the BCS Cheltenham and Gloucester branch website, the BCS DCSG website amongst many others) are all citing that internet growth is set to exceed even our wildest expectations, some reckon 2600% growth, others less, some more but they are all in 4 figures.
But, and it is a very big but, these forecasts miss one very important fact, power, and to be precise the lack of it.
In Japan, pre Tsunami, the projected growth of the internet, and by that I mean traffic and the associated data centres was estimated to require 100% of the entire grid generative capacity by 2020, yes, 100%.
Lets put that into perspective, all of the electricity generated in Japan would be needed to run data centres, all of it, so no power available for traffic lights, cooking, heating, lighting, recharging your mobile etc, which I guess would put a stop to people using the internet/data centres, and clearly not sustainable or even with the most liberal government going to happen.
In the UK, we face a similar scenario, here its estimated that 100% of the grid will be needed by 2030, just to power the internet and that's before we switch off 20% of our capacity generated by Nuclear power stations, and another 45% of our coal fired power stations via the Large Combustion Plant directive (an EU Directive which requires Carbon Capture and Storage or CCS, to be installed, OR an operating ceiling of 22,000 hours (which by the way is almost up for all our coal fired assets))
So, it is clear that change is needed, so in my humble opinion we have a number of options:
1. To curtail the internet, now this could be achieved by tariff increases, a "smartphone" or "broadband" tax, but given the Governments desire to provide high speed broadband to all at a minimum of 2MB and in urban areas at 40MB this will be political suicide.
2. Build more generative capacity, but with nuclear power stations taking at least 10 years to build and a seriously poor energy bill progressing through Parliament, the industry will probably go with CCGT assets, that's Combined Cycle Gas Turbines to the layman, fair easy to build (a tried and trusted technology) can be installed on existing power station sites, but leaves us in the hands of overseas "friends" to supply the gas required (a fossil fuel that is also in fairly short supply).
Don't get your hopes up with shale gas either, the reality in the UK is that the beds are not as geologically stable as in the USA and extraction will prove a lot more difficult.
That's not to mention the green lobby that will undoubtedly raise hell if fracking is used.
3. Develop a carbon neutral economy, that to say, reduce energy use but switching off everything if its not being used, generate your own power via solar, Ground or Air Source heat punps, biomass etc there's more information on the CAT website C.A.T. Website
4. Accept the inevitable, buy a shotgun and hole up in the hills with tinned food
Now, 4, aside we can meet this challenge with a little imagination and innovation and I'm very pleased that it seems that the Government is slowly but surely getting there with the Technology Strategy Board announcements today and various other initiatives from the EU etc.
So, I'm not getting worried yet, but I am watching events very carefully around the world, keeping up to date with various ideas and generally hopeful.
I've made some useful contacts in the past few weeks and hope to build on these in the future.
Until next time, keep safe.
John
The upshot is, that some forecasting organisations (I'm not going to tell you who they are, ask Ian or check out his presentation slide decks on the BCS Cheltenham and Gloucester branch website, the BCS DCSG website amongst many others) are all citing that internet growth is set to exceed even our wildest expectations, some reckon 2600% growth, others less, some more but they are all in 4 figures.
But, and it is a very big but, these forecasts miss one very important fact, power, and to be precise the lack of it.
In Japan, pre Tsunami, the projected growth of the internet, and by that I mean traffic and the associated data centres was estimated to require 100% of the entire grid generative capacity by 2020, yes, 100%.
Lets put that into perspective, all of the electricity generated in Japan would be needed to run data centres, all of it, so no power available for traffic lights, cooking, heating, lighting, recharging your mobile etc, which I guess would put a stop to people using the internet/data centres, and clearly not sustainable or even with the most liberal government going to happen.
In the UK, we face a similar scenario, here its estimated that 100% of the grid will be needed by 2030, just to power the internet and that's before we switch off 20% of our capacity generated by Nuclear power stations, and another 45% of our coal fired power stations via the Large Combustion Plant directive (an EU Directive which requires Carbon Capture and Storage or CCS, to be installed, OR an operating ceiling of 22,000 hours (which by the way is almost up for all our coal fired assets))
So, it is clear that change is needed, so in my humble opinion we have a number of options:
1. To curtail the internet, now this could be achieved by tariff increases, a "smartphone" or "broadband" tax, but given the Governments desire to provide high speed broadband to all at a minimum of 2MB and in urban areas at 40MB this will be political suicide.
2. Build more generative capacity, but with nuclear power stations taking at least 10 years to build and a seriously poor energy bill progressing through Parliament, the industry will probably go with CCGT assets, that's Combined Cycle Gas Turbines to the layman, fair easy to build (a tried and trusted technology) can be installed on existing power station sites, but leaves us in the hands of overseas "friends" to supply the gas required (a fossil fuel that is also in fairly short supply).
Don't get your hopes up with shale gas either, the reality in the UK is that the beds are not as geologically stable as in the USA and extraction will prove a lot more difficult.
That's not to mention the green lobby that will undoubtedly raise hell if fracking is used.
3. Develop a carbon neutral economy, that to say, reduce energy use but switching off everything if its not being used, generate your own power via solar, Ground or Air Source heat punps, biomass etc there's more information on the CAT website C.A.T. Website
4. Accept the inevitable, buy a shotgun and hole up in the hills with tinned food
Now, 4, aside we can meet this challenge with a little imagination and innovation and I'm very pleased that it seems that the Government is slowly but surely getting there with the Technology Strategy Board announcements today and various other initiatives from the EU etc.
So, I'm not getting worried yet, but I am watching events very carefully around the world, keeping up to date with various ideas and generally hopeful.
I've made some useful contacts in the past few weeks and hope to build on these in the future.
Until next time, keep safe.
John
Sunday, 3 March 2013
Data Centre World & EUCOC Workshops
Just recovering from the excellent "Data Centre World" event at the London Excel Arena.
It was great to catch up with old friends and to make some new ones, thanks for the beers people.
Anyway, it was good to see so many people interested the EUCOC and I'm sure that I saw more EU logos than last year anyway, but to all those that asked for and should by now have received some additional information, please get your application in.
Due to the kindness of the venue owner(s), we have been able to reduce the price of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres participation application workshops, more details here http://carbon3it-eucocwksp.eventbrite.co.uk/
And on that note, I have had two companies report to me that they feel that the code of conduct is to become mandatory in the future, so it may be prudent to go on the course to get a heads up.
As some of you maybe aware I have been invited to lead some Green IT and Data Centre training courses in Mauritius commencing in May, so I shall be busy over the next few weeks creating and amending content for the programme and flying off just after my birthday for approximately 8 weeks, although I may stay for a little longer. Well, it would be rude to fly all that way and not take the family for a holiday!
So, I expect that as of May, we'll be finding out more about the wonderful South Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius, how they are addressing climate change and energy efficiency especially in the data centre sector and I look forward to telling you all about it.
I shall be attending a few events in London next week, these are the BCS DCSG event at BCS London Office on Wednesday 6th March, Dr Ian Bitterlin will be telling us why the internet and thus data centres are unsustainable in the present form and after a short networking break there will be a "meet the committee" where you can ask us about whatever data centre topic you wish.
The event starts at 6pm and booking is required, please email DCSGEvents@gmail.com for more information, check the BCS Events page or the Linked In group Linked In
Until next time..
It was great to catch up with old friends and to make some new ones, thanks for the beers people.
Anyway, it was good to see so many people interested the EUCOC and I'm sure that I saw more EU logos than last year anyway, but to all those that asked for and should by now have received some additional information, please get your application in.
Due to the kindness of the venue owner(s), we have been able to reduce the price of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres participation application workshops, more details here http://carbon3it-eucocwksp.eventbrite.co.uk/
And on that note, I have had two companies report to me that they feel that the code of conduct is to become mandatory in the future, so it may be prudent to go on the course to get a heads up.
As some of you maybe aware I have been invited to lead some Green IT and Data Centre training courses in Mauritius commencing in May, so I shall be busy over the next few weeks creating and amending content for the programme and flying off just after my birthday for approximately 8 weeks, although I may stay for a little longer. Well, it would be rude to fly all that way and not take the family for a holiday!
So, I expect that as of May, we'll be finding out more about the wonderful South Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius, how they are addressing climate change and energy efficiency especially in the data centre sector and I look forward to telling you all about it.
I shall be attending a few events in London next week, these are the BCS DCSG event at BCS London Office on Wednesday 6th March, Dr Ian Bitterlin will be telling us why the internet and thus data centres are unsustainable in the present form and after a short networking break there will be a "meet the committee" where you can ask us about whatever data centre topic you wish.
The event starts at 6pm and booking is required, please email DCSGEvents@gmail.com for more information, check the BCS Events page or the Linked In group Linked In
Until next time..
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
EUCOC Workshops
Following on from our previous blog posts, the workshop event brite page is now up and running, you can find it on this EUCOC Participant Workshops.
We've decided on 3 dates as follows:
London, to be held at Intellect on the 28th March and 11th April
Manchester to be held at the Manchester Conference Centre on the 4th April
Places are limited to 10 delegates per workshop.
You'll need to bring your laptop and be armed with some info about YOUR data centre as we will be going through the entire application form and filling it in with the information that is required by the reviewer.
We've decided on 3 dates as follows:
London, to be held at Intellect on the 28th March and 11th April
Manchester to be held at the Manchester Conference Centre on the 4th April
Places are limited to 10 delegates per workshop.
You'll need to bring your laptop and be armed with some info about YOUR data centre as we will be going through the entire application form and filling it in with the information that is required by the reviewer.
Monday, 4 February 2013
The Costs of EUCOC
I'm often asked about the costs of participating in the EUCOC, so I decided to get things down on paper (well in this blog anyway).
With the EUCOC, it costs nothing to submit an application to the EC JRC team to get your Data Centre listed as a participant to the code, however the application form can be a tad tricky if you've never seen one before and if you don't have the required information to hand, this adds time mostly internal.
From my estimates it will take an internal resource about a week (not cumulative) to gather together all the info required to submit the form, it can take up to 6 weeks to ask questions of the facilities guys, the IT guys and the IT director.
Filling out the form once you've gathered all the info will probably take about a day.
So, using a conservative £250 per day of internal resource cost, you looking at least £1500 (6 x £250) just to gather and submit the information and that is an absolute minimum.
So, how to minimise the costs of making a EUCOC application and ensure that it will not get rejected due to a lack of information (one the biggest rejection points is people telling the EC JRC that certain elements of the best practice have been implemented but not actually telling us how)?
Well, the obvious best way is to get somebody within your organisation trained up specifically in energy efficiency skills from various Data Centre training outfits, such as DCD and C-Net, this will cost approximately another £1000 on top of the internal resource costs.
But, here at Carbon3IT Ltd we think that a better way to help would be to run a workshop that looks at the specific things you'll need to complete an application, and to provide application assistance through a follow up visit on site (if taken) so we've partnered with Concurrent Thinking Ltd to develop a EUCOC workshop which will be held in London on the 28th March and 11th April and in Manchester on the 4th April.
The costs of the workshop is £495+ VAT and we'll be releasing the booking form (via eventbrite) shortly
We're restricted these events to 10 delegates and there is special pricing available for the early birds (20% off), if you'd like the discount code and for further information please contact us on info@carbon3it.com.
The workshop will take you through each element of the EUCOC Application form, and you'll be safe in the knowledge that your form will totally compliant to the requirements of the EUCOC and you'll hear tips and tricks to minimise energy consumption in your data centre, whats not to like?
The course is aimed at anyone who has a data centre and wants to reduce energy consumption, it will also be suitable for any organisation that is intending to provide services to G-Cloud or services to the public sector, this is due to HMG endorsing the EUCOC (See separate Blog Post), this means that Govt will be seeking participation for all data centres that will be providing new services from April 2014.
As LOCOG put it in the summer before the London 2012 Olympics, get ahead of the game(s), get your data centre(s) approved as EUCOC participants before you need to.
With the EUCOC, it costs nothing to submit an application to the EC JRC team to get your Data Centre listed as a participant to the code, however the application form can be a tad tricky if you've never seen one before and if you don't have the required information to hand, this adds time mostly internal.
From my estimates it will take an internal resource about a week (not cumulative) to gather together all the info required to submit the form, it can take up to 6 weeks to ask questions of the facilities guys, the IT guys and the IT director.
Filling out the form once you've gathered all the info will probably take about a day.
So, using a conservative £250 per day of internal resource cost, you looking at least £1500 (6 x £250) just to gather and submit the information and that is an absolute minimum.
So, how to minimise the costs of making a EUCOC application and ensure that it will not get rejected due to a lack of information (one the biggest rejection points is people telling the EC JRC that certain elements of the best practice have been implemented but not actually telling us how)?
Well, the obvious best way is to get somebody within your organisation trained up specifically in energy efficiency skills from various Data Centre training outfits, such as DCD and C-Net, this will cost approximately another £1000 on top of the internal resource costs.
But, here at Carbon3IT Ltd we think that a better way to help would be to run a workshop that looks at the specific things you'll need to complete an application, and to provide application assistance through a follow up visit on site (if taken) so we've partnered with Concurrent Thinking Ltd to develop a EUCOC workshop which will be held in London on the 28th March and 11th April and in Manchester on the 4th April.
The costs of the workshop is £495+ VAT and we'll be releasing the booking form (via eventbrite) shortly
We're restricted these events to 10 delegates and there is special pricing available for the early birds (20% off), if you'd like the discount code and for further information please contact us on info@carbon3it.com.
The workshop will take you through each element of the EUCOC Application form, and you'll be safe in the knowledge that your form will totally compliant to the requirements of the EUCOC and you'll hear tips and tricks to minimise energy consumption in your data centre, whats not to like?
The course is aimed at anyone who has a data centre and wants to reduce energy consumption, it will also be suitable for any organisation that is intending to provide services to G-Cloud or services to the public sector, this is due to HMG endorsing the EUCOC (See separate Blog Post), this means that Govt will be seeking participation for all data centres that will be providing new services from April 2014.
As LOCOG put it in the summer before the London 2012 Olympics, get ahead of the game(s), get your data centre(s) approved as EUCOC participants before you need to.
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