Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Cool video but... - Everything that is being done at the kernel level will eventually (if not already) pass on to the hardware. Virtualization has gone to the chipsets and the chipsets will also do the following: - DPM - Fabric Motion (lot faster) - Fabric Security - Fabric Privacy So you see, all the intelligence is going into the fabric and eventually the OS and the hypervisor will not only be thinned to bare minimum but may virtually vanish as they, or should I say their critical function (OS: host applications, Hypervisor: host OS and Apps stack) gets absorbed into the hardware. But for now, this video may give you the idea of where we're eventully heading for.

CO2 emissions has been the sole cause of eliminating life in the past and it will take our life once again. On a mass scale unless we act. NOW! Following shocking revelations from the past tell us tales that we are in the eye of the storm already. Hundreds of millions of years ago, a sharp rise in CO2 led to mass extinctions. Today humans are witnessing and are responsible for that sharp rise. This is calculated with GEOCARB. Temperature variations since the past 400,000 years. These are changes in CO2 level since industrial revolution.

Data Center Knowledge first reported Microsoft’s interest in container-based data centers last May, and late in 2007 Microsoft confirmed that it would use container-based data center solutions in the new $500 million, 500,000 square foot facility in Northlake, Illinois. Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty said the containers could support power densities beyond 1,000 watts per square foot. The layout of the first floor of the Chicago center will feature rows and rows of containers parked at a 45 degree angle. Manos said the facility will accommodate between 150 and 220 shipping containers, which will be shipped and dropped off by trucks. That approach led Microsoft to consult with parking lot operators to address the design logistics of enabling large trucks to navigate within the facility. Shipping containers have been used for years by the U.S. military. In 2006 Sun Microsystems (JAVA) introduce Project Blackbox (now the Sun MD S20), the first effort at a “data center in a box” incorporating ...

O’Brien told Siliconrepublic.com that the Windows Server 2008 is 10pc more efficient than the 2003 version of Windows Server. “We’ve seen customers virtualise 16 machines down to one machine – there is opportunity there to ensure massive consolidation and make savings in terms of cooling and more efficient servers.” He said while 5pc of servers in the Irish market are currently virtualised, some 60pc of Microsoft’s customers currently have a virtualisation evaluation project under way. “This is a hot area right now and offers a lot to business’ bottom line and capability.” Early adopters of the new Windows Server 2008 software include Ryanair, UTV, Hosting 365, Netforce, Merill lynch, University College Cork and Nissan Ireland. Nissan Ireland is implementing the software to help reduce energy costs. “Virtualisation with Hyper-V will allow us to reduce power consumption, build an R&D environment and will form a core part of our business recovery plan,” commented Rory Donnelly, CIO, ...

FREMONT, CA , February 12, 2008-- 3PAR ® (NYSE Arca: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage , announced today its 2008 Carbon Neutral Storage Initiative and published results from its 2007 program, which 3PAR estimates to have reduced carbon emissions equivalent to removing 2,300 cars from the road for the entire year. 3PAR’s Carbon Neutral Storage Initiative is part of the company’s ongoing commitment to green technology and is aimed at continuing the reduction of energy consumption and the environmental impact of storage in the datacenter. 3PAR’s Carbon Neutral Storage Initiative, the first of its kind when introduced last year, has achieved tremendous results in its first year. Through this program, 3PAR has purchased carbon credits to offset 4,367 metric tons of CO2 emissions, allowing 3PAR customers to deploy storage capacity that is effectively 100% carbon neutral. In addition, last year 3PAR awarded three of its customers--IAC, Edelman, and CACI--with the ...

Press Release here: Fuel-efficient engine The People’s Car has a rear-wheel drive, all-aluminium, two-cylinder, 623 cc, 33 PS, multi point fuel injection petrol engine. This is the first time that a two-cylinder gasoline engine is being used in a car with single balancer shaft. The lean design strategy has helped minimise weight, which helps maximise performance per unit of energy consumed and delivers high fuel efficiency. Performance is controlled by a specially designed electronic engine management system. Meets all safety requirements The People’s Car’s safety performance exceeds current regulatory requirements. With an all sheet-metal body, it has a strong passenger compartment, with safety features such as crumple zones, intrusion-resistant doors, seat belts, strong seats and anchorages, and the rear tailgate glass bonded to the body. Tubeless tyres further enhance safety. Environment-friendly The People’s Car’s tailpipe emission performance exceeds regulatory requirements. In te...

I will be writing these series at ITToolBox, a CEB (NYSE:EXBD) subsidiary. Quoting myself: So we have briefly, discussed this problem ans surely there is more than meets the eye. I am sure a lot of firms (established and new) are adopting all kinds of research methodologies" to get into this market. A lot of them are using, and I would definitely recommend, given the current horizontalized global market which is not an easy place to be around if you have a weak stomach, to adopt a more "Adventurous or Exploratory Research Designs". I have spoken to one firm called Embotics and they are really very much into this, doing it closely with their partners, so a lot of things are happening behind closed doors. lot of insights are being shared (and leaked too! - to China, India, S. Africa etc, don't forget you are in a global market , with connectivity, ideas can flow in "all directions"). Today I will be talking to another start-up firm which is attempting to sol...

And they are: 1. Increasing Use of Archiving 2. Awareness of Storage Deficiencies 3. Data Mobility will be a Key Requirement 4. Control Unit Virtualisation of Storage 5. Services Oriented Storage 6. Convergence of Content, File, and Block based Storage Services 7. Thin Provisioning 8. Deduplication Quoting: With increasing concern about global warming, 2008 will see more governments impose guidelines and legislation around carbon emissions and major corporations will set targets for reduction of carbon emissions. A major source of carbon emissions comes from the generation of electricity and the increasing demand for compute power, network bandwidth and storage capacity will increase the need for data centre power and cooling. The US government just completed a study which estimated that the IT sector consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption) for a total electricity cost of about USD 4.5 billion. This number is expected t...

Using open standards, the company wants to get server and storage vendors to collect and share information about their equipment and send it to Cisco routers and switches. The data could include power consumption, operating temperature and more. It's becoming a critical job, and because the network touches all IT resources across the enterprise, data collection should happen there, according to Paul Marcoux, vice president of green engineering. Marcoux joined Cisco from American Power Conversion only about six weeks ago, after Cisco created the position to overlook energy issues across all parts of the company. Networking gear itself makes up a much smaller portion of IT power consumption than do servers or storage, but Cisco plans to go beyond just making its own products more efficient. Read the rest.

This is very shocking! We need some strong govt regulatory steps here. Firms must begin to comply! Get the PDF here. And don't print that PDF, just read it on your laptop/pc. El Reg reporting: Restorick reckoned this growth is unsustainable, with more than two thirds of companies having already used up 75 per cent of their data centre floorspace and 61 per cent expected to hit storage capacity within two years. While green awareness among those questioned was high, the study found that 86 per cent did not know the carbon footprint of their own department. The report also highlighted 56 per cent of IT departments did not see their firm's electricity bills, despite their huge reliance on energy. Global Action Plan called for the government to adopt a more robust approach towards the IT industry. It recommended the possible introduction of tax incentives for small and medium-sized businesses that reduced their carbon footprint and also said that vendors needed to be more transpare...

The sketch: Well this looks very ambitious. I am very curious where it might go from here. The Arabs are spending in everything these days and are gradually moving away from their main source of income: OIL! Europe would provide initial funds for developing the solar technology that will be needed to run plants as well as money for constructing prototype stations. After that, banks and financial institutions, as well as national governments, would take over the construction programme, which could cost more than £200bn over the next 30 years. 'We don't make enough use of deserts,' said physicist Gerhard Knies, co-founder of the scheme. 'The sun beats down on them mercilessly during the day and heats the ground to tremendous temperatures. Then at night that heat is radiated back into the atmosphere. In other words, it is completely wasted. We need to stop that waste and exploit the vast amounts of energy that the sun beams down to us.' Scientists estimate that sunligh...

BT is engaged in an ongoing drive to reduce its carbon footprint, using innovative technology to improve environmental sustainability. BT has already reduced emissions by 60 per cent between 1996 and 2006, and now aims to extend that reduction to 80 per cent by 2016 ­ the equivalent annual carbon emissions produced by 143,000 cars. BT began the project with an assessment of 90 legacy data centres. Combined, these data centres had 11,000 server racks powered by an average of 3,000 watts per rack and 25,000 physical servers. VNUnet.com

Hitachi's new Dynamic Provisioning software is meant to enable customers to allocate virtual disk storage based on their anticipated future requirements without dedicating physical disk storage up front. If the need for additional physical disk arises, capacity can be purchased at a later time-at a lower cost-and implementation occurs transparently, without any disruption to mission-critical applications. Link

There is also the use of what Saxe called "collaborative technologies", such as personal carbon calculators for employees on the internal website. Saxe said a lot of work is going into the bank's supplier and vendor ecosystem to implement green issues into contracts - ensuring vendors comply with emerging environmental standards. Saxe referred to Firebird, a programme to examine how Morgan Stanley's 12 data centres around the world can be made more efficient and cost effective - with air cooling seen as one of the future options. He said the bank is asking whether computer resources are being used as efficiently as possible, with virtualisation seen as a better way of allocating resources. Head of group sustainable development at HSBC, Jon Williams, explained what his company is doing to improve its environmental standing. "We need to be smarter," he said. According to Williams, HSBC became the world's first carbon-neutral bank in October...

I have opened a question on C limate Change in LinkedIn and got this reply from a Programmer @ Fedex who also gave a link to this site. Quoting the NewScientist.com: Our planet's climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors. Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences. Yes, there are still big uncertainties in some predictions, but these swing both ways. For example, the response of clouds could slow the warming or speed it up....

General Introduction Virtualization has come a long way, it has come from the cradle of the developers to the masses. It has happened right under our noses, and then we are talking about the noses of all the big business firms that ignored the trend. It has happened and exploded while many of the vendors were sleeping, and now it is taking over the x86 servers, 95% of the market yet to be capitalized, and soon it will proliferate into the desktops, mobile devices and who knows, some day into your daily appliances such as washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, TV sets, Green Vehicles, Oven/Microwaves, all apparatuses that consume energy. And it will come to all of us, even to you, as a consumer, who will be held accountable for your energy consumption at work, but also at home. I see it as an "optimization phase", with the advent of windows we saw a visible shift from “Centralized Computing Environment”, the mainframes computing where everyone got its own “space” on the ...

BusinessWeek is carrying this "eye-opener" article: Inspired by this marvelous promise, Schendler took a job in 1999 at Aspen Skiing Co., becoming one of the first of a new breed: the in-house "corporate sustainability" advocate. Eight years later, it takes him six hours crisscrossing the Aspen region by car and foot to show a visitor some of the ways he has helped the posh, 800-employee resort blunt its contribution to global warming. Schendler, 37, a tanned and muscular mountain climber, clambers atop a storage shed to point out sleek solar panels on an employee-housing rooftop. He hikes down a stony slope for a view of the resort's miniature power plant, fueled by the rushing waters of a mountain creek. The company features its environmental credentials in its marketing and has decorated its headquarters with green trophies and plaques. Last year Time honored Schendler as a "Climate Crusader" in an article accompanied by a half-page photo of the jut...

I've opened an "open question"in LinkedIn and would like to hear from YOU about it. My personal take is "Yes" and "No". Yes, because virtualization as a technology, if deployed "effectively" on both the Server and Desktop environment can indeed make that difference. Power consumption per desktops can be reduced drastically (up to 90% per desktop PC) and on server level they can be brought down by 40-60%, as per independent research firm by ButlerGroup.com. No, because on the long run there will be more data centers sprouting as we speak across the globe; however, it may be argued that these virtual data centers (VDC) will eventually help client/user communities shut down their own servers and use thin PCs,... Please come and participate, it is for the good of us all!

Sure, but we all knew it, didn't we? I mean, if our feeble brains could write smarter codes that barely touched the processing powers of the Pcs, we'd have a PDA-Data Center today ;-) But Alistair Croll has something really neat to say, a quotation (I will say that explicitly, as with this template you don't see the big quotation signs, I'll work on it this weekend): Modern applications, however, are changing in several important ways: * One, virtualization lets applications scale across multiple machines. Many companies are consolidating their server infrastructures, and decommissioning hundreds of machines in the process. A 2006 Yankee Group study of 700 firms estimated that 76 percent had already deployed server virtualization in the data center or planned to do so. * Two, power is the limiting factor for many data centers. A typical Google (GOOG) data center — which puts 10,000 computers into 30,000 square feet — is likely located in a Wet State near a powe...