Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

My talk today at a dutch congress, was about security and compliance. Funny thing to see is the bewilderment of the public. This first initial nudge by the EU is a mere reminder that a very resounding governmental interventionism is definitely in the offing. Compliance will come in many ways: There will be strong focus on an organization's CSER policy, one may be asked to demonstrate it periodically GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) will play major role in every strategy and organizations will be tested and funded (under-funded) accordingly A snippet on the expected compliance w.r.t Data Management and Security The EU is asking data centre owners and operators to "voluntarily" sign up to a Code of Conduct (CoC) which will include oversight of their energy efficiency in what could be green regulation through the back door. The European Commission has issued its Code of Conduct for Data Centres Energy Efficiency and invited data centre owners and operators to sign u...

Microsoft Corp.'s most technologically advanced data center opens today in Westover Hills. It's a massive $550 million, 470,000-square-foot building that will contain thousands of computer servers, which will begin serving up e-mail, Web pages, pictures, software applications and videos to customers online. “San Antonio is a key hub for Microsoft in its North American distribution system,'' said Mike Manos, Microsoft's senior director of data center services. Microsoft has built two nearly identical buildings under one roof on its 44-acre site. The servers in the first building go live today. The second half of the building is almost done, Manos said. It's expected to be complete within the next few months, he said. Microsoft's facility with 75 employees also has helped to ignite a data center building boom in Westover Hills. Six other companies — Frost, PowerLoft, Stream Realty, Lowe's Corp., Valero Corp. and Christus Health — have projects under wa...

This is bound to spark of a huge discussion. Does that also makes hypervisors inefficient for CloudApps? The hypervisors we tested from VMware (ESX 3.X), XenSource (Xen) and Microsoft's Virtual Server (not Hyper-V, which wasn't yet released) all prohibit the ability for the CPU/chip sets to reduce speed or go into "green mode" as long as there's a virtual machine guest running atop the hypervisor -- regardless of operating system flavor. Hypervisors allocate system resources as specified by administrative constraints imposed on virtual machine guest operating systems and applications. The action of actively monitoring and allocating specified resources generates a lot of work for the CPU. Hypervisor system clock ticks and resource controls, combined with host VM guest operating system ticks, simply prevent CPUs from resting and therefore saving power. Source

With the Hong Kong SAR Government seeking a reduction in energy intensity of at least 25 percent by 2030 1 , local business leaders are under increased pressure from stakeholders to employ green initiatives. At the same time, CEOs are planning to increase their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments by 25 percent over the next three years 2 as customers pay careful attention to their suppliers’ CSR profiles, including “green” initiatives. With the rising expectation that suppliers are socially responsible, and the increasing realization of the importance of energy efficiency, IBM’s comprehensive set of solutions are perfectly timed to meet market demand. “Project Big Green reflects our commitment to the environment and to delivering energy efficient solutions to help our clients tackle the escalating energy and rental costs challenge in their data centers,” said Dominic Tong, General Manager, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “With a blend of hardware, software, technology and...

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 ...

Techworld's Manek muses about it: Let's not kid ourselves about ideological spending on so-called 'greenness' - how likely is that? - the trend is of course driven by ratcheting energy prices. One of the consequences is the need to reach out and drag as many applications and assets as possible back into the datacentre, where energy use and other attributes can be managed - and where devices are nowhere near as vulnerable to malware and user-induced glitches; we'll leave IT staff-induced issues out of the equation for the moment. Additionally, virtualisation technology has now moved on from being simply a way of consolidating servers - although for most real-world users as opposed to commentators, this remains a goal yet actually to be achieved. There's a growing awareness of virtualisation's ability improve an organisation's disaster recovery schemes. Instead of needing an expensive, energy-guzzling second infrastructure humming away, 24 hours a da...

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.

Applies only for US IT folks, click below to calculate: More tools: Uptimes True TCO Calculator Platespin's Cost Calculator

AmeriVault, a leading provider of online data backup, offsite storage, and recovery services, today is offering small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) data backup options for “green data storage” practices that support broader “green” programs and initiatives. Organizations of all sizes are generating significant amounts of data, resulting in an ever-increasing data footprint. With the recent focus surrounding “green” awareness, many companies are now seeking solutions to reduce the environmental impact of their operations and storage practices. Online data backup and storage can provide a “green” alternative for many who are currently using tape-based backup solutions. Those using tape-based systems increase their carbon footprint as a result of the manufacturing, packaging, power consumption and waste issues that tapes incur as they wear out and require disposal. Online data backup and storage also eradicates the need for trucking services that contribute large amounts of CO2 emissi...

Brief Introduction This I did a couple of weeks back and spoke to several Intel folks. Intel is virtualizing its 130 Data Centers worldwide and bring them down to 8 hubs! That is a massive undertaking and Intel has a few years to do that. Virtualization is forcing companies to start looking seriously at the core business. In the post-mainframe era we needed PCs to do work. The demands grew and both small and massive firms like Intel, IBM etc, grew bigger. More staffs and more PCs. Data Centers grew from a mere handful to full house! All this obviously led to areas that had nothing at all to do with your core business. So Intel decided, like any smart firm should, to put every useful Dollar/Euro/Yen back into the Silicon to keep up the pace in this continuously evolving and innovating market. The people I spoke to were enthusiastic and had a common mission: Focus on your core strategy that is Silicon and not on Steel! It was good to see that even firms, of such depth and scale as Intel ...

Hu has something to tell about it: In September of this year Hitachi ltd, our parent company announced a program in Japan that is known as CoolCenter50 which is targeted at reducing power consumption in their Yokohama and Okayama data center by 50% in 5 years. This effort encompasses all of the groups in Hitachi including, air conditioning, power generation, IT equipment and management software. In support of this goal, Naoya Takahashi, the Executive General Manager and Vice President of the Information and Telecommunications Group announced last week the Harmonious Green Plan which aims to reduce 330,000 tons of CO2 in the next 5 years through the development of power saving IT products. Dr. Takahashi is the same Takahashi who is credited with the development of the USP storage virtualization platform and its predecessor, the Lightning 9990. So when Takahashi-san states that this is the goal, there is a track record that gives it a great deal of credibility. The amount of reduction ...

Got this comment by Eredux folks. Check out the CO2 footprint per state.

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...

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 ...

3PAR®, the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today native support for lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). Support for LDAP enables centralized user authentication and authorization using a standard protocol for managing access to IT resources. With 3PAR’s support for LDAP, customers are able to now integrate 3PAR Utility Storage--a simple, cost-efficient, and massively scalable storage platform—with standard, open enterprise directory services. The result is simplified security administration with centralized access control and identity management. “3PAR Utility Storage already provides us with a reliable, shared, and easy-to-use consolidated storage platform,” said Burzin Engineer, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at Shopzilla. "Now, with 3PAR support for LDAP, managing security commonly--across all our resources, including storage--is also simple and efficient.” Press Release

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...

El Reg is carrying the article: We're pretty sure we've heard this one before. And before any of you ask, yes, they did bring up the idea of utility computing. It'll be down to the the telcos to sort out, though. We'll not mention it again, promise. The numbers are compelling, however. Swap 1,000 PCs for a bunch of servers and the same number of thin clients, and you'll divide your electricity consumption by ten. Sod the environment, that's real money. "Companies have an obligation to get the best value for their shareholders, so showing the value proposition is the best way of persuading people to go green," notes Wyse's Euro marketing chief, David Angwin. Angwin reckons you certainly start seeing savings when swapping 20-30 PCs for thin clients, adding: "I'd like to run the numbers for fewer, I have a gut feel you could make it pay even with five." Link

Starting Oct. 11, Big Blue is launching a new program—dubbed a "mainframe gauge"—for customers of its System z9 mainframes that will allow them to monitor and collect statistics on the amount of energy their mainframes' systems use in a typical day. The Armonk, N.Y., company also will begin collecting and publishing data from approximately 1,000 customers' mainframes in order to better gauge the average numbers of watts a system uses per hour and to offer a better picture of the average watts and kilowatts a computer uses in a given day or week. All of these efforts fall under IBM's "Project Big Green," which the company first announced May 11 as a $1 billion project that looks to double the computing capacity of its own data centers without increasing power consumption by 2010. One of the first steps IBM took toward this goal happened in August when the company announced plans to compact 3,900 of its own servers onto 33 virtualized System z mainframes r...

I was sitting and watching the TV and saw this ad from "Act on CO2". This thing moved me off my feet, it always does actually (that also show how soon we all can forget and how badly we need these reminders). Just think about it, forget about Virtualization (for a while), with me: Who are we? Why are we here on this planet? What are we giving back to our "Mother Earth"? What can we do to help us stay on this rock a bit longer? Why don't we all shutdown our PCs when we go home? Why don't we shut down our lights we we go out? Do we turn our heating on full blast or keep in on "eco-drive"? Who are we? Why are we here on this planet? DO WE DESERVE TO BE HERE??? The way we have been acting the last 200 years..umm, I'd fire the whole staff if I was the "Earth CEO"! While these questions will raise a lot of questions in your heads, I just want to take this opportunity to display how badly we have have altered our biosphere. Nuff said. Watch ...