July 2, 2008

Eco-Rant: Staycation

How clever! Like a vacation, minus the travel part. It's quickly becoming the most overused word of the summer, with 185,000 hits on Google, and climbing.

A "staycation" is a way to avoid higher travel costs and reduce carbon emissions by staying put during your time off. Because you'll be paying $4+ per gallon of gas, the thinking goes, it's unlikely that you'll be filling up the RV, SUV or minivan and taking a long road trip. Unless you can afford it, of course.

On the surface, there's nothing terribly wrong with the concept. After all, staying local has its benefits. Nearby businesses and venues would love you to spend your vacation dollars with them and you automatically save by otherwise not enduring hours on end behind the wheel.

But marketers are starting to jump on the newly-coined term, and as oftentimes happens, things are taking a bizarre turn.

Take, for instance, an email I got couple of weeks ago. It was from an electronics retailer gushing about all the fun you can have during your staycation if only you bought more gadgets. Instead of watching your money evaporate out your tailpipe, you should instead spend it on TVs, game consoles, MP3 players and the electricity to power them. And let's not forget the massive A/C bill because you're mostly enjoying them indoors.

Yeah, that makes complete sense.

Look, I don't fault anyone for trying to make a buck. I like money too. But logic here is conspicuously absent. In this USA Today report, you can practically see them patting themselves on the back for their keen marketing skills.

Here's a wild, money-saving concept: spend less.

Bike or take a short drive to town. Go on a hike; take a walking tour; watch a film; pack a picnic and play fetch with the dog and ball with the kids... Those things are generally easy on the wallet, don't require an itinerary and won't fill your home with more stuff.

Work-wise, another good thing you can do before you embark on your staycation is turn those gadgets off! The folks at 1E, makers of Nightwatchman power management software, sent me this interesting statistic.

The aggregate power consumed by PCs left on over the 4th of July weekend (three day minimum for most office workers) will cost businesses up to $46 million. In addition to this hefty price tag, these PCs will cost the planet 474 million lbs of CO2 over three days, the same emissions as nearly 23 million gallons of gas!

Their advice, turn those PCs off when you walk out Thursday for your extended July 4th weekend. You can gather more stats in 1E's 2007 PC Energy Report. And if you find yourself with a few minutes to spare, give their Flash-based Turn It All Off game a spin. Do keep your distance from the cupboard of love, however.

And, of course, enjoy your staycation! Rant over.

Posted by phernandez at 12:37 PM | Add Comment

July 1, 2008

Green Storage: OCZ and Pillar

It's green storage day!

Not officially, of course. It just occurred to me that today I wrote two green-themed storage items for the mothership.

The first one this morning, which shocked me to the "core", was on OCZ's line of "affordable" SSDs. A relative term, but they're the cheapest that I've seen so far. Hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit and start nudging their solid state drives into a blissful downward trajectory.

And up the capacity while you're at it, too. Thanks.

Also today, Pillar updated its NAS/SAN platform, the Axiom. Strictly for IT shops, their gear pools disk storage to bring utilization up using a variety of methods, including QoS (of sorts) like in networking. This means that less is "wasted" as there are fewer arrays to buy and keep powered. As novel as it sounds, your IT guys/gals will want to hear nothing of the sort for mission critical apps.

But Pillar has the tech down pat, they say, and offer some pretty convincing guarantees to back up it. I once spoke to a customer of theirs, a no-nonsense IT veteran, and he was singing its praises. Take it for what its worth.

Pillar's CEO, Mike Workman has an entertaining blog (if you're into storage). In this post, entitled "Smoking the Strong Stuff" he pours a cold bucket of reality on the notion that SSD will kick HDD to the curb by 2010. In short, while it makes sense for consumer applications (notebooks, mobiles) it will take more than 1.5 years before SSDs replace disks cost-effectively. Also fun is his missive on "Green Noise."

Good stuff!

Posted by phernandez at 3:52 PM | Add Comment

June 30, 2008

Green Matters: Server Performance First

Rackspace finds that customers are losing interest in pursuing green technologies. But are there other factors, like an economy in a tailspin, at play?

63% won't sacrifice server performance to lower carbon emissions - NetworkWorld

Hosting provider Rackspace surveyed 3,000 customers this year and last year, and found some results suggesting businesses are losing interest in green technology.

Sixty-three percent of customers this year said they are not willing to sacrifice any server performance to lower carbon emissions. (Compare server products.) Last year, only 41% of Rackspace customers were unwilling to sacrifice performance to reduce global warming emissions.

Green Storage and The Idle Time Secret - Nexan - The Green Storage Blog

Recently, Steve Lohr of the New York Times wrote an interesting article titled, “Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight” . A paragraph of particular interest states, “The problem is that most computers in data centers run at 15 percent or less of capacity on average, loafing the rest of the time, though consuming electricity all the while. (In the old days, when they housed a few large computers, data centers were far more efficient. Mainframe computers run at 80 percent of capacity or more).”

Grant turning city onto solar power - NOLA.com

As Louisianians face unprecedented state and federal tax credits offering up to $12,500 off the cost of solar panel systems, solar technology has yet to become a significant trend. A barely-there solar business infrastructure (there are currently five certified solar installers in the entire state, said Forest Bradley-Wright with the Alliance), a lack of public information about the technology and the financial hump of buying a solar system, even with the tax credits, are the main obstacles the grant will tackle through programs such as the solar installation course, McGowan said.

G-8 to Pledge $10 Billion to Combat Climate Change, Nikkei Says - Bloomberg

Leaders from the Group of Eight nations will pledge to spend more than $10 billion a year on research and development to tackle climate change, Nikkei English News said.

The Environmental Technology of Wall*E - EcoGeek

In Wall*E's world we seem to have developed some great environmental technologies. Wind turbines abound...though they are covered up to their necks in the refuse of our civilization. This, for me, was the movie's most powerful statement. Is it possible that, no matter how much power we produce renewably, we will never satisfy the demand of the Earth's people. Will we simply consume our way back into the hole of unsustainability no matter what solutions are presented by technology?

Sony Ericsson Named Greenest Electronics Manufacturer - Matter Network

Sony Ericsson wins the title of most improved, environmentally speaking. In the eighth issue of Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide, Sony Ericsson took the lead as the producer of green electronics.

Posted by phernandez at 11:54 PM | Add Comment

4-day Workweek Watch: Utah State Workers

It looks like 4-day workweeks are catching on. In Utah, Governor Jon M Huntsman, Jr. is kicking off the Working 4 Utah initiative in August. State government agencies will operate on extended hours Monday through Thursday, 7 am to 6 pm, and close Fridays. Essential services, courts and the like remain unaffected.

The plan is already winning raves from the Salt Lake Tribune. However, they rightfully point out that 10-hour workdays may upset 5-day routines.

West Valley City and Provo, have adopted four-day schedules and they report that most employees like it, although a 10-hour workday takes some getting used to. A Brigham Young University study suggests that both morale and productivity improve.

Still, the schedule will be a challenge for employees with children. Day care from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. is going to be hard to find, and no parent would relish getting kids ready for elementary school by 6:30 a.m., then figuring out how the children will be supervised until school starts at 8:30 a.m. And how are parents supposed to help with after-school activities when they don't get off work until 6 p.m.?

Nonetheless, the energy savings and lowered emissions, for both the State and its workers, are hard to ignore. Plus one more solid, uninterrupted day of family/personal time? I suspect many will gladly make the trade-off.

Posted by phernandez at 11:41 AM | Add Comment

June 27, 2008

Green Matters: Is the 3G iPhone Un-green?

Greenpeace is at it again. It's unlikely, however, that it will prevent Apple devotees from lining up on launch day.

3G iPhone ruins Apple's green credentials - PC Advisor

Apple has missed a “big chance” to advance green credentials by “not improving the environmental performance of the new version of the iPhone”, says eco campaign force Greenpeace.

CherryPal: The Green Little PC That Could - EcoGeek

Even the name is adorable. CherryPal. This tiny 10.5 oz PC is coming soon, and will use no more than 2 watts of power without sacrificing speed. The triple-core processor uses only 20% of the components of traditional computers and will start up in only 20 seconds, promising to be faster than Vista and mac’s OS-X…though it doesn’t take much to be faster than Vista.

Do sustainable PCs exist? - TG Daily

Dell currently has two green computing options on the market - the Dell Latitude D630 Energy Smart Laptop and the Optiplex 755 Energy Smart Desktop.

What makes the Optiplex 755 special is the fact that Dell claims the Core 2 Duo-based PC offers energy efficient power management settings. The systems is said to consume 54% less power than computers that don’t allow you to configure your power management settings. Dell promises that the 80% efficient power supply are between 10-12% more efficient than power supplies of the past. Dell declines to share any actual energy use numbers on their website.

Kill the Business Trip - Forbes

Here's my favorite set of "clean-tech" companies--the folks who make online meetings and conferences possible, and let travelers skip all the hassle and environmental problems of travel. Even better: It's an area ripe with inefficiencies and so primed for innovation.

So far two companies have done particularly well in the stock market by offering Web-based conferencing technology: Polycom and Webex.

Disk Drives Costing More Green - Data Center Central, IT Business Edge

Enterprises looking to cut down on power and cooling costs might want to shift their eyes from the server rack to the storage array.

The latest figures from IDC indicate worldwide expenditures to cool magnetic storage is set to nearly double by the end of this year. In 2007, enterprises shelled out about $1 billion on storage-related cooling, a figure that seems likely to top $1.8 billion this year.

Posted by phernandez at 1:35 PM | Add Comment

June 26, 2008

Microsoft's Hyper-V is Official

It took a long time but there you have it.

Microsoft is finally officially releasing Hyper-V today after its beta was put through its paces by 1.5 million downloaders. The company's hypervisor will be baked into some versions of Windows Server but you can download the RTM (release-to-manufacturing) at around noon Pacific.

Server 2008 Hyper-V can handle VMs with "up to four virtual cores, 32-bit as well as 64-bit operating systems, and up to 64 GB of RAM." And to prove that their stab at virtualization is more than a neat toy for geeks, Microsoft is undergoing some server consolidation of its own and running some beefy workloads on it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft itself has been using Hyper-V in production environments, including heavy-traffic Web properties such as MSDN, TechNet and Microsoft.com. MSDN has more than 3 million average page views per day, TechNet averages more than 1 million per day, and Microsoft.com averages more than 38 million per day. By the end of June, Microsoft.com is targeted to be 50 percent virtualized with Hyper-V.

If you're of the sort that's starting to feel the way the winds are blowing, here's Microsoft's TechNet page devoted to Hyper-V.

John Howard, Senior Program Manager, Hyper-V team, Windows Core Operating System Division, has a good post on his blog explaining some specification, changes since RC1 and recommended updates.

For example, here are Hyper-V's uppermost limits (parent partition):

• Up to 1 TB of physical memory (Enterprise and Datacenter Editions)
• Up to 32GB of physical memory (Standard Edition)
• Up to 16 logical processors
• Up to 128 virtual machines running at any one time
• Up to 512 virtual machines configured

Be sure to get caught up on some of those knowledge base articles before venturing forth. And don't miss this earlier post on virtual network use cases. Things just got a little more interesting, haven't they?

Should VMware be trembling in their boots?

Maybe just a little. But for now, they are comfortably perched at the very top of the virtualization market. More importantly, the brand has become synonymous with virtualization. And though Hyper-V supports virtualized instances of other operating systems, non-Windows shops will likely be hesitant to make the leap.

In any case, welcome Hyper-V!

Posted by phernandez at 3:12 PM | Add Comment

June 25, 2008

In NYC: Waterfalls

This summer, New York City will reward visitors and residents with a little bit of engineered natural beauty this summer. Hailed as the biggest art installation in New York City since Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates (also awesome), The New York City Waterfalls by Olafur Eliasson will bring man-made waterfalls to four locations. The most dramatic one is nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge.

The New York Times has a spectacular gallery of an predawn test. The waterfalls will operate starting tomorrow, June 26 until October 13, 7am to 10pm. If you're in town, be sure to stop by and gawk.

[via Gizmodo]

Posted by phernandez at 3:04 PM | Add Comment

Term of the Day: Reverse Globalization

Those nosebleed oil prices are putting a strain on businesses (and individuals too). As a result, a curious, though not unexpected trend is emerging says this ABC News report. Manufacturing jobs are starting to trickle back into the U.S. prompting some to toss around the notion of reverse globalization.

As the cost of shipping continues to soar along with fuel prices, homegrown manufacturing jobs are making a comeback after decades of decline. The cost of oil and shipping leads some companies to bring jobs back home.

While it once cost $3,000 to ship a container from a city like Shanghai to New York, it now costs $8,000, prompting some businesses to look closer to home for manufacturing needs.

Read the rest of the report and view the accompanying video here. And a note to the ABC News web folks... Shame on you for that one-sentence Page 2!

[via Slashdot]

Posted by phernandez at 1:51 PM | Add Comment

How Dense! Rackable Increases Per U Processing, Storage

It seems that to promote adequate power and cooling the last thing you want to do is to pack those servers in tight. But that's exactly what Rackable Systems is advocating.

Andy Patrizio of InternetNews reports on new gear from the company that allows data center operators to bunch more computing and storage capacity together without driving up power consumption.

The new designs deliver up to twice the density of existing Rackable Systems servers in the same physical footprint, while also reducing power consumption. Emphasis was placed on increasing local storage and compute density, rather than depending on attached storage or moving data around to process it.

Despite the increased density, Rackable specifically stressed power efficiencies as a major plus. "Our number one power claim is ecological," Geoff Noer, senior director of product marketing for Rackable told InternetNews.com. "It's leveraging everything we've learned and leveraging power efficiencies and a number of components across servers."

One of the standout new pieces of hardware is the Scale Out Blade ST2000 (pictured right).

In addition, there is the Scale Out Blade ST2000, a 9U rack and the highest-density rack the company has ever offered. It supports three power modules and 12 dual socket modules, for 21 cores per U and 11TB of storage per U.

21 cores, 11TB per U... not too shabby.

Posted by phernandez at 1:30 PM | Add Comment

June 24, 2008

Cisco Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions 25% by 2012

In just four short years, Cisco plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. John Chambers announced during Cisco Live! that the cuts will be made possible by across the board improvements, from internal operations and its own products to, of course, their own IT operations and how employees travel (or don't).

In a company press release, they outlined just how much of a reduction is in store.

In calendar year 2007, Cisco's gross GHG footprint was 832,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalents (CO2e). This footprint includes emissions from Cisco's globally owned and leased facilities, vehicles and its airline travel. Based upon the EPA Climate Leaders protocol, this figure becomes net 724,000 metric tons of CO2e. With today's announcement, Cisco aims to reduce its GHG emissions by 2012 to a net footprint of 543,000 metric tons of CO2e.

One way they plan to accomplish this is power management, which thanks to the likes of IBM and others, has sparked whole new ways of monitoring and tweaking data centers to make sure that no watt is wasted. Another is a favorite of mine: teleconferencing.

In its labs and data centers, which account for a significant percentage of Cisco's energy use, the company will deploy a variety of techniques. These include taking detailed measurements of energy flows, utilizing more efficient lab equipment, using the "virtual network" to store data, adding smart power-distribution units that automatically shut down machines not in use, and upgrading building mechanical and electrical systems. Cisco will also increase its use of collaboration technologies such as Cisco TelePresence and the Cisco WebEx suite of tools to reduce the need for business travel, which accounts for 27 percent of Cisco's GHG footprint.

For customers, Cisco launched the public beta of Efficiency Assurance Program (EAP) portal (link is on the right hand side), which is flush with Flash-based videos and tutorials to get companies started on their own CO2 reduction programs.

In related news, Cisco announced new software and services centered around virtualization. The new stuff, flying under the Cisco Data Center 3.0 banner, is as follows:

• Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software release 4.1, offering virtualized application hosting services, greater application acceleration and video delivery for the branch office;
• Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) software release 3.1 for the ACE 4710 application switch, offering up to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput and up to 2 Gbps of compression capability, and multimedia readiness on a virtualized platform;
• Cisco VFrame Data Center software release 1.2, offering end-to-end infrastructure provisioning with Cisco ACE and VMware ESX;
• New Cisco Data Center 3.0 professional programs and services to better support customers with data center deployments.

Busy day. Thanks Dan!

Posted by phernandez at 11:26 PM | Add Comment