January 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Sun to host free OpenEco Energy Camp on Jan. 10
Just because it's winter doesn't mean it's too early for camp. Sun Microsystems will host the OpenEco Energy Camp on Thursday, Jan. 10, and swimsuits and sleeping bags are purely unnecessary. (Marshmallows are optional.)
Eco-minded business leaders and analysts as well as open-source software developers will be attending the event in San Francisco, which Sun is dubbing (in addition to Energy Camp) an "unconference." "Sun will provide access to environmental leaders and creative tools to help spark ideas, but the real agenda and conversations of the day will be led by the audience," according to the announcement.
Speakers will include: Hunter Lovins, author of "Natural Capitalism"; Adam Werbach, founder and CEO of Act Now Products, former Sierra Club president, and Wal-Mart sustainability consultant; and Sun's VP of eco-responsibility, Dave Douglas.
Also attending: Software developers interested in "coding for the environment" by contributing to OpenEco.Org, Sun's online community aimed at providing tools to help participants assess, track, and compare energy performance and share best practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Green-tech is indeed becoming a hot topic at conferences around the globe (and cyberspace), from New York to Second Life to San Francisco (at InfoWorld's forthcoming Virtualization Executive Forum).
The OpenEco Energy Camp event venue is the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, 1675 Owens Street, in San Francisco. The doors open at 9:00 a.m., and the event will conclude at around 5:30 with dinner. Attendance is free.
If you can't attend in person, there will be a Webcast on Ustream, linked from sun.com and Openeco.org/energycamp. A Wiki will be available at www.openeco.org/wiki/Energy_Camp_2008.
For more information or to register, go to Openeco.org/energycamp.
Related links:
Sun launches community for measuring, comparing GHG emissions
InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum landing page
Eco group brings climate-change conference to Second Life
Big green event in the Big Apple -- and it's free
Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter.
Posted by Ted Samson on January 2, 2008 11:24 AM
September 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun launches community for measuring, comparing GHG emissions
In an effort to help organizations get a handle on their swelling carbon footprints, Sun today is launching OpenEco.org, an online community providing free tools and resources for calculating, tracking, and comparing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
With OpenEco.org, organizations can calculate on a granular level the GHGs related to their facilities and vehicle fleets, based on standard, approved carbon accounting standards. They also can track trends and their progress, and compile reports suitable under programs such as the EPA Climate Leaders, according to Sun.
"This project came about because we were trying to calculate our own carbon footprint … and we found that the tools out there were proprietary or expensive, or else companies were building spreadsheets [to calculate their footprint] on an ad hoc basis," said Dave Douglas, vice president of eco-responsibility at Sun.
The company decided to draw on its open source roots and make publicly available a set of measuring tools it developed in house. Participating companies' footprints will be viewable to other members- anonymously, as an option. That way, organizations will be able to see how their carbon footprints compare to those of other similarly size organizations. "People will start to get comparisons and know how they're doing against one another. They'll know what working and what's not," said Douglas.
Being a community-oriented site, it also features forum tools for organizations to interact.
As the green tech movement has picked up steam, companies are feeling both internal and external pressure to be more mindful of their impact on the environment. "One reason companies are measuring their GHG emissions is that people are asking them too. Increasingly, large investors are asking them to report them, no questions asked," said Douglas. "Some of our largest customers are asking us about our carbon emissions."
Additionally, Douglas said that if the U.S. adopts a carbon cap and trade system, similar to that in Europe, tracking and reducing carbon footprints "is going to become an important part of doing business, period."
Moreover, Douglas noted that measuring an organization's carbon footprint at a granular level -- such as on a building by building basis -- can help that organization prioritize its energy-efficiency strategy. "We use it internally to highlight what to go after. The first step in an energy-efficiency project is to figure out where the energy is going in the first place."
For more information, or to join, go to OpenEco.org.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 24, 2007 12:01 AM
August 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun celebrates green datacenter innovations and tools
As part of its Eco Innovation Initiative, Sun shined a green-hued spotlight on its massive datacenter consolidation efforts yesterday and unveiled a host of tools and services to help datacenter operators inject some energy-efficiency and eco-friendliness into their own facilities.
At a high level, Sun's boasting significant benefits from the massive undertaking, most of which affected its datacenters in Santa Clara, Calif., but also its Blackwater, UK, and Bangalore, India sites.
In Phase One of the project at its Santa Clara site, Sun consolidated 2,177 servers down to 1,240. For example, they replaced 88 Sun Fire V880 systems with 58 Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 systems yielding a 91 percent reduction in datacenter floor space and a 60 percent reduction in power costs.
The company also consolidated 738 storage devices down to 225; and 550 racks down to 65 (reaping 88 percent compression of square footage). Power-wise, the company is shrinking consumption from 2.2MW to 500KW, which will result in an estimated $1.1 million cost savings per year.
In Phase Two, which entailed a new datacenter design, build-out and deployment, the company went from 254,000 square feet of facility space to 127,000, and it expects to reap another 30 percent in energy savings.
Sweetening the effort: Sun's enjoying nearly $1 million in rebates and awards from Silicon Valley Power, including a one-time $250,000 cooling innovation award, the first award of its kind given by the utility.
Sun estimates that the company's datacenter efforts will reduce its CO2 production by 4,100 tons per year, trimming 1 percent from the company's total carbon footprint. (The latter stat is pretty interesting; most companies don't get quite so detailed as to the size of their footprint.)
One of the most intriguing aspects of Sun's new datacenter design is its pods: modular, scalable clusters of racks or benches that have the same requirements. The design will enable Sun to easily and quickly swap in and out racks, as well as deploy modular power, cooling, cabling, and monitoring equipment. Planning for future growth, Sun designed server racks to support a capacity of up to 30kw per rack.
There's a lot more detail about the modular design and other technologies and practices Sun employed on the company's Web site. I recommend that you watch Sun's Energy Efficient Datacenter Tour on the company Web site. It's pretty interesting and informative, and not too market-y, either.
In addition to showing off its shiny new datacenter facilities, Sun unveiled several products and services to help companies wring more energy efficiency out of their own datacenters.
Among them, Sun unveiled three Eco Ready Kits: The Sun Eco Assessment Kit, The Sun Eco Optimization Kit and the The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit.
The Sun Eco Assessment Kit "provides a methodical approach to analyzing datacenter energy efficiency, using a combination of assessment services for systems, storage, and datacenter infrastructure."
The Sun Eco Optimization Kit is designed "to help customers optimize, consolidate, refresh, and recycle their hardware infrastructure ... ."
The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit "offers virtualization solutions that enable better asset utilization and datacenter energy efficiency," according to Sun.
Additionally, Sun announced its Eco Services Suite, which encompasses four offerings:
- The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Basic, which is intended to help customers maximize power and cooling efficiency in the IT infrastructure running Web-based services;
- The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Advanced, "a comprehensive datacenter service providing a technical evaluation of datacenter energy use, cooling capacity, rack placement, air distribution and other environmental factors";
- The Sun Eco Cooling Efficiency Service for Datacenter, aimed at helping companies "recover misused air conditioning capacity and direct it to the areas where it is needed";
- and the Sun Eco Optimization Service for Datacenter, through which Sun provides direct assistance with implementation of corrective actions outlined in the Eco Assessment Service.
Posted by Ted Samson on August 22, 2007 12:38 PM
May 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Less power hungry than their PC peers, thin clients are garnering greater attention for their green advantages
Verizon CIO John Hinshaw confirmed a juicy green nugget of data in a recent interview: He said the wireless giant has reduced energy consumption by 30% since replacing PCs with Sun Ray thin clients in the company's call centers.
That will translate to a savings of $1 million per year for Verizon, once the company rolls out thin clients (or some "desktop-less" variants) in its remaining data centers.
"Power consumption is more of a hot topic in the U.S. than it has ever been," says Klaus Besier, president and CEO of thin-client vendor Neoware. "What we see with many more customers today is when they look at thin clients, they're taking more into account power consumption and [related] savings."
With their relatively lower energy requirements compared to PCs -- not to mention other eco-advantages like longer lifespan and smaller form factor with fewer parts -- thin clients are worthy of some serious consideration from companies.
Or perhaps I should say "reconsideration." Thin clients, after all, certainly aren't new, and advantages such as easier administration (fewer admin visits to users' desks) and improved security (data's stored remotely) are pretty well recognized. But thin clients continue to mature, as do the essential technologies that make them all the more viable. That includes virtualization (as InfoWorld Chief Technologist Tom Yager has noted), Wi-Fi, embedded OSes, and software as a service.
Thin, trim, and healthy
Combine all those technologies with the very real concerns over power shortages, high energy bills, and global climate change, and it's no surprise that IDC foresees steady 20%-plus year-over-year growth in the thin-client space, with shipments expected to reach 7.3 million in 2011.
"We're expecting positive growth for thin clients based on all the factors you've laid out [i.e. advances of virtualization and 10G, and growing concern about power consumption], as well as ongoing concerns about security and PC management costs," says Bob O'Donnell, program vice president for clients and displays at IDC.
Neoware asserts that companies can save as much as 90% on desktop-computing energy costs by swapping out PCs for thin clients -- depending on what models of hardware you're extracting or implementing, of course. But as an example, a desktop PC consumes as much as 280 watts of power in the amount of time that the high-end Neoware e140 burns up 48. So a company with 1,000 desktops would be spending about $62,000 yearly on power (based on the national KWH rate of $0.0849.), compared to around $10,500 for the clients, according to NeoWare. Savings: Around 50 grand a year per one thousand systems.
For the visually-oriented, here's a chart provided by thin-client vendor Wyse, comparing energy consumption of some of its thin-clients to various PC configurations:
Of course, when you install thin clients, you need servers in the server room to act as their brains. But those power savings are still significant, as noted in a recent report titled "Environmental comparison of PC and thin client equipment" by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. "Consumption is at least twice as low, sometimes three or four times lower than the consumption of corresponding PC systems. This applies even with the proportionate offsetting of the energy required by the server and the cooling power required for this," the report says.
Lower energy consumption is one of the clear eco- and monetary benefits. Another green-oriented cost advantage: the life-expectancy of a thin client, compared to a PC. "Thin clients don't need to be upgraded frequently. With thin clients, an OS release does not cause an upgrade to the client, only to the server -- resulting in far less e-waste, since the client can continue to be used longer," says Subodh Bapat, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun's System Level Energy Strategy, which offers a range of Sun Ray thin clients. "Upgrade cycles of eight to 10 years are common in the thin-client world, as opposed to three to fours years for PCs, with corresponding benefits to the environment in terms of less e-waste."
Speaking of e-waste, Neoware's Besier adds that "Without moving parts, such as a fan or disk drive ... thin clients help companies meet their sustainability targets by eliminating much of the overhead associated with computing."
According to the Fraunhofer study, thin clients also hold a form-factor advntage over PCs, making them less expensive to ship: "They are only 35-40% of the weight of a PC and only take up 19-30% of the volume."
Not just about the green
Green issues aren't the only drivers for thin-client adoption. Jeff McNaught, chief marketing office at Wyse, opines that the new and improved Terminal Services features forthcoming in Windows Server 2008 (i.e. the platform formerly known as Longorn) will be a boon a Windows shops running thin clients.
In a simiar vein, Travid Brown, product manager for thin client solutions at HP, credits Windows XP Embedded for more acceptance of thin clients. "Microsoft has come a long way in developing XP Embedded It's the same binary as XP Pro ... and the thin-client experience now looks very much like the desktop experience. It's a lot better than it was a couple of years ago."
Another boon for thin clients: the shift toward 64-bit computing, by companies like Microsoft and Citrix, will spur adoption by sweetening the TCO pot. "Instead 125 users, you can have 250, 300 users on that server, just by changing the software. That has changed the cost equation," says McNaught
Moreover, McNaught says that company's in 2006 had been waiting to gauge VMware's success on the desktop virtualization front, given it success in the realm of server consolidation, and the results look promising. "You take the existing PC, suck all the data off a hard drive and onto the back-end, pop that PC off the desktop, drop a thin client, and the user continues working."
(Test Center Analyst Randall C. Kennedy was fairly impressed by the beta version of VMware Workstation 6.0 -- especially compared to the competition.)
There's also the advancements thin clients have undergone since the late 1990s when they were overhyped, notes Wyse's McNaught. "In those days, thin clients didn't do multimedia. Screen-draw capability was good, but not amazing," he says. "Companies like Wyse have been working on technology that will dramatically improve the user experience with multimedia, with voice over IP, with USB peripherals. Users can work in a multiscreen environment."
But green fever and technological evolution alone won't necessarily reduce some company's resistance to thin clients. Thin client vendors acknowledge that there wares won't dethrone the PC anytime soon.
For one thing, the machines are well-suited for plenty of basic applications, such as call centers or other roles where users are continually using the same few apps (e.g. productivity and e-mail). But high-end apps are better left on the desktop. "You would not have a CAD/CAM application running through a thin client," says Besier. "It doesn't even make sense to try to solve that problem. The market is not large enough."
Another reason thin clients haven't seem greater adoption, many vendors say, is that companies are set in their ways insofar as purchasing that which is familiar -- in this case, PCs, despite the fact that most desktops generally run at around 3% utilization. "Today's barriers are more of a cultural nature rather than a technical nature," says Sun's Bapat.
But Bapat predicts that "with the lower energy use, lower administration costs, better security, and less frequent capital expenditure outlays for upgrades, we will see more and more organizations making the move to thin-client computing."
Posted by Ted Samson on May 24, 2007 03:00 AM
May 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun's eco VP talks greening the data center and JavaOne
Just in time for next week's JavaOne show, Sun Vice President of Eco-Responsibility Dave Douglas arrived in San Francisco yesterday afternoon. His first stop: the InfoWorld office to chat with me about his first year-plus in his green role; data-center issues confronting IT admins -- and solutions; and dealing with carbon emissions. You can watch the video right here.
Dave's been the VP of eco-responsibility at Sun for just over a year now, and judging by our conversation, he has a pretty full plate. No surprise there: Reining in energy waste entails far more than reminding employees to shut off the lights before going home at night.
Rather, Dave appears to be involved in multiple areas of Sun's business, from product development to internal IT operations. (It sounds rather like the chief sustainability officer position I wrote about a while back.) That's a lot to keep a watchful green eye on, but as he tells it, plenty of folks at Sun believe in the benefits of being environmentally conscientious, so it doesn't sound like he has to struggle with a corporate culture that's resistant to making necessary changes toward sustainability.
As an example of Sun's commitment to sustainability and waste reduction, Dave talked to me about how the company has made the annual JavaOne show a little greener this year.
For example, Sun saved 4.63 tons of paper by going with virtual direct mail campaigns, online surveys and feedback forms for the show. It also stepped up the use of recycling, and plus Dave noted that site for the show, the Moscone Center, has a 60,000 square foot photovoltaic array on the roof (designed to generate energy savings of 4.8 million kWh annually).
The company has made "green" purchasing decisions to keep food-trash compostable. Also, as swag, the company is handing out organic t-shirts, and notepads made from recycled paper and printed with soy ink. Read more about it here.
OK, so that alone isn't going to, say, reduce global warming, but it's a nice example of relatively little things companies can don't cost much (or perhaps even save money) and that are good for the environment. And Dave said that next year, the conference will be even greener. I'm curious to see how. Maybe it will take place in Second Life?
Like any other high-level techie in the IT industry, Dave is keenly attuned to the data center crisis companies are facing, and he shared some of the strategies he's been looking at, including consolidation and virtualization.
One certainly inventive solution that Sun has devised to help companies deal with the lack of data center real estate is Project Blackbox, a project Dave was involved in developing, and he's clearly excited about it. For those who aren't the know, Project Blackbox is a portable data center that can be located just about anywhere, designed to support 10,000 simultaneous desktops without requiring an administrator. (It was also one of InfoWorld's 12 "crackpot technologies that could transform the enterprise.")
Carbon emissions are gathering more attention in the IT realm, and they're certainly on Dave's radar: He's written about the topic at some length on his blog. Tracking emissions is pretty important, as we're seeing increasingly strict regulations emerging.
We're also seeing some companies, such as Dell and Yahoo, embracing the notion of carbon offsets and neutrality. On that subject, Dave diplomatically said that Sun is looking at internal ways to reduce its carbon footprint as best it can -- in ways that are directly beneficial to business -- before exploring something like offsets. In addition to watching the video clip, you can check out Dave's comments on the topic here in his blog.
There was one question I'd meant to ask Dave, but we were running a little short on time (and frankly, I forgot): Earlier this year, Sun joined a bunch of other companies in calling on the federal government to help" achieve sizable, sensible long-term reductions of greenhouse gas emissions" from 60 to 90% reductions below 1990 levels by 2050. Why the wide range of 60 to 90%? Why 1990 levels as the baseline? And why wait until 2050? In other words, is this a sufficiently ambitious goal? I'll have to ask him next time I see him, I suppose.
One last thing: If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend (perhaps in town for JavaOne), you might want to check out Eco LIVE 2007 on Saturday, May 5. Dave will be one of the speakers, talking the challenges of reducing energy and resource consumption within IT. Robert Kennedy Jr. will be delivering the keynote. The event takes place at the Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 8th Street in S.F., and after the keynote, entrance is free.
Posted by Ted Samson on May 4, 2007 03:46 PM
TOP STORIES
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Virtualization: A Step by Step Approach to Success
- Dialing up Agility with Business Transformation
- 5 Things You Need to Know About Storage Virtualization
- Is your smaller organization ready for High Availability?
- Is system maintenance doing more harm than good?
- Virtual Test Lab Automation: Manage development infrastructure
