I promised a short blog about buses and here it is.
The buses on Mauritius are interesting to say the least, it is a totally free market, there are many companies operating depending on their specific area but they all have services into Port Louis, there are however some aspects that create total and utter chaos, firstly, none of the bus-stops have route designators, thus a newbie could wait at a bus stop and have no clue as to where the services go to or at what time. There are no timetables, none whatsoever, in fact you could find that a service may run one night and not the next but you'd never know.
The buses themselves have a route destination so you'd have to take pot luck.
All the buses are fairly old, and very dirty and noisy and fares seem to depend on how much the driver thinks he can scam you for (I'm sure that this is due to the fact that a) I can't speak french and b) I'm obviously a tourist and c) clearly minted.
So, if you're even in Mauritius, you must get a bus, you'll see the real Mauritius not the tourist brochure, but make sure you know where you are going, have a working knowledge of french, and don't pay too much, standard fares about no more than R100, Oh, and always get a ticket!
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Saturday, 1 June 2013
The mauritian roads are.....
well maintained and the driving standards are high........NOT!
The trip from the airport to my accommodation started well enough, wide dual carriageway type roads and roundabouts and with very little traffic, then as we entered the more populous highlands, potholes, obstructions and other drivers all combined to make the journey a little more torturous, but it was nothing compared to what was about to hit us as we entered Port Louis, the capital.
As we descended form the highlands down into Port Louis, the traffic became heavier and it seemed that road etiquette consisted of finding a route around (either side) or through (via a bib, honk, or hand gesture) our car by cars traveling faster or motorbikes weaving along the road with no real concept of safe driving.
Worse was to come!
After the motorway had given way to an A road, it split into two main roads at the Place de Armes, one toward the city centre and one to the North, we choose the city centre.
In the capital traffic mingles with people, trikes, bikes, mopeds, carts, lorries, street stalls, parked vehicles all honking to get their route through the melee sorted out, shouts, hand gestures indicators or no indicators they all seem to get through somehow, more luck than judgement in some cases.
The pollution is bad, really bad, the engines don't seem to have any emission tests and the exhaust ranges from dirty white smoke to black clouds of noxious fumes (most it must be said from the multitude of buses, I'll speak about the buses in a future blog post)
Eventually we crawled through the city centre and out into the suburbs. We turned off the main road into the Vallee De Prets and through the mainly Indian area, up into the hills.
Here, dogs with a disregard for the own lives lay in the middle of the road only moving after being alerted to the sound of a moving car or via a discrete honk.
We arrived at our destination and met with a rum punch, a welcome relief from the roads and the heat I spent a delightful afternoon with my host for the mission Joan.
The trip from the airport to my accommodation started well enough, wide dual carriageway type roads and roundabouts and with very little traffic, then as we entered the more populous highlands, potholes, obstructions and other drivers all combined to make the journey a little more torturous, but it was nothing compared to what was about to hit us as we entered Port Louis, the capital.
As we descended form the highlands down into Port Louis, the traffic became heavier and it seemed that road etiquette consisted of finding a route around (either side) or through (via a bib, honk, or hand gesture) our car by cars traveling faster or motorbikes weaving along the road with no real concept of safe driving.
Worse was to come!
After the motorway had given way to an A road, it split into two main roads at the Place de Armes, one toward the city centre and one to the North, we choose the city centre.
In the capital traffic mingles with people, trikes, bikes, mopeds, carts, lorries, street stalls, parked vehicles all honking to get their route through the melee sorted out, shouts, hand gestures indicators or no indicators they all seem to get through somehow, more luck than judgement in some cases.
The pollution is bad, really bad, the engines don't seem to have any emission tests and the exhaust ranges from dirty white smoke to black clouds of noxious fumes (most it must be said from the multitude of buses, I'll speak about the buses in a future blog post)
Eventually we crawled through the city centre and out into the suburbs. We turned off the main road into the Vallee De Prets and through the mainly Indian area, up into the hills.
Here, dogs with a disregard for the own lives lay in the middle of the road only moving after being alerted to the sound of a moving car or via a discrete honk.
We arrived at our destination and met with a rum punch, a welcome relief from the roads and the heat I spent a delightful afternoon with my host for the mission Joan.
Thursday, 23 May 2013
Mauritius - Arrival
I landed just before 1pm in the afternoon, the heat and humidity hits as soon as you leave the air conditioned luxury of the airplane, and I thought "well Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore".
So, I made my way down to the immigration hall to join the previous flight from France trying to get themselves into Mauritius.
When it was my turn, the officer wanted to know where I was staying as I was going to be on the island for 41 days, but all I knew was it was a place called Mon Choix, and this was not good enough for me to be allowed entry, but luckily I knew that I had someone meeting me, so off we go, through the customs post (me with a bag and duty free) to meet with my taxi driver who called the owner of the B&B to confirm the address and the duration of my stay (I didn't want to say that I was a guest of the EU and working on behalf of the Mauritian Government as I knew I would be teaching delegates from the Immigration Dept later!).
Anyway, address obtained I was ushered back through the customs post, where a Customs officer had some harsh words for the Immigration officer for letting me through to the outside without having my bag checked (more on that later).
My passport was duly stamped with a 60 day entry visa and I was dispatched to pick up my main bag from the baggage carousel and to walk through (for the 3rd time) the Customs post, this time though the same guy who had obviously chastised the Immigration officer nabbed me and I had to undergo "additional security precautions" my main bag being subjected to an x-ray (this would have been the 2nd time on the journey).
This meant that the 300 USB sticks I had in my bag which contained the training materials were bound to be spotted, and spotted they were. So I had to open my bag and retrieve the items and I really thought that I was going to have to have each one scanned and spend even more time in the airport.
But, as soon as the officer saw them he let me through with a smile, "Welcome to Mauritius"
I made my way through to the outside world and saw my friendly taxi driver, we made our way to the car after a crafty smoke and away we went from the south of the island to the capital Port Louis (pronounced with emphasis on the "s" as in Lewis)
An adventure that will be told in the next installment of the Mauritian Blog.
So, I made my way down to the immigration hall to join the previous flight from France trying to get themselves into Mauritius.
When it was my turn, the officer wanted to know where I was staying as I was going to be on the island for 41 days, but all I knew was it was a place called Mon Choix, and this was not good enough for me to be allowed entry, but luckily I knew that I had someone meeting me, so off we go, through the customs post (me with a bag and duty free) to meet with my taxi driver who called the owner of the B&B to confirm the address and the duration of my stay (I didn't want to say that I was a guest of the EU and working on behalf of the Mauritian Government as I knew I would be teaching delegates from the Immigration Dept later!).
Anyway, address obtained I was ushered back through the customs post, where a Customs officer had some harsh words for the Immigration officer for letting me through to the outside without having my bag checked (more on that later).
My passport was duly stamped with a 60 day entry visa and I was dispatched to pick up my main bag from the baggage carousel and to walk through (for the 3rd time) the Customs post, this time though the same guy who had obviously chastised the Immigration officer nabbed me and I had to undergo "additional security precautions" my main bag being subjected to an x-ray (this would have been the 2nd time on the journey).
This meant that the 300 USB sticks I had in my bag which contained the training materials were bound to be spotted, and spotted they were. So I had to open my bag and retrieve the items and I really thought that I was going to have to have each one scanned and spend even more time in the airport.
But, as soon as the officer saw them he let me through with a smile, "Welcome to Mauritius"
I made my way through to the outside world and saw my friendly taxi driver, we made our way to the car after a crafty smoke and away we went from the south of the island to the capital Port Louis (pronounced with emphasis on the "s" as in Lewis)
An adventure that will be told in the next installment of the Mauritian Blog.
Sunday, 19 May 2013
Africa but....
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!
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, 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
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