Thursday, April 30, 2009

Green IT Jobs


If the world leaders of the G20 nations are to be believed, green technology and the green economy will help bring an end to the world recession. Whether or not this is true, it is clear that many new IT jobs will be created in an attempt to stimulate a greener economy.


Let’s start with the word “green”, which has been overplayed in the IT industry so many times for different agendas. It conjures up a stereotypical image of a hippie in sandals, protesting against the spread of capitalism and impending doom. I prefer the phrase “efficient computing” to the word “green” as any IT professional can be interested in environmental and cost-saving issues.

Many of the skills required to succeed in delivering efficiency are now mainstream technical skills; it could be argued they just need re-packaging for IT professionals to become efficiency experts.

Typically, people who are employed as efficiency experts, architects and analysts will understand technologies such as virtualised servers, virtual desktops, thin clients, power management and datacentre efficiency. Server virtualisation may include Citrix Xen server, VMware ESX and Microsoft Virtual Server or some other open-source variation.

The desktop virtualisation suppliers have traditionally been Citrix with Presentation Server (now renamed Xen App) and Microsoft Terminal Services. Now a new breed of desktop virtualisation includes Citrix Xen Desktop, VMware View and Ericom Powerterm.
Thin clients are often a good, power-efficient alternative to PCs and the market is dominated by Wyse, HP and VXL.

Nevertheless, there is one area of knowledge that serves as the foundation for efficiency which is not fundamentally an IT skill – an understanding of electricity consumption.

Do you know your amps from your watts? Understanding Kilowatt hours, Kilovolt-Amps and three- or single-phase electric power is useful, as is understanding a little about electric generation and power transmission ­ from the burning of fossil fuels through to the distribution of electricity via the national grid and substations.

IT professionals must arm themselves with an understanding of how to make the most efficient use of electricity when it enters the building. DC power distribution, efficient power supplies and three-phase power are some ways to reduce the losses experienced when stepping down from the substation to the DC power used by most PCs.

Cloud computing is one of today’s IT buzzwords and is worth following in the efficiency arena. In theory, a shared resource such as Google Apps can have higher use and therefore greater power efficiency. If the cloud datacentre is close to a green power source, such as a hydroelectric plant or a wind farm, you can minimise transmission line power losses and be even greener.
Building an efficient datacentre requires a different skill set to understand the basics of cooling and heat. You should know your hot aisles from your cold aisles and be able to speak in British thermal units. You should understand thermal surveys and some of your buzzwords should include free cooling and heat exchangers.

Naturally, technology can play an integral part in building an understanding of the issues. A Google search of the phrase “green IT” provides more than 4.5 million results; there are many green computing blogs, LinkedIn special interest groups, RSS feeds and YouTube video channels, not to mention the Twitterverse, which regularly commentates on the sustainable computing sector to keep you up to date with the latest trends.

Half the battle of implementing efficient computing is pitching the business case to the board. This is where the word “efficient” comes into its own. With the recent high costs of utility bills, it is often very simple to show tangible returns on investment. If you can present a quick return on investment based on just financial criteria with the environment element as a value-added benefit, everyone is a winner.

The great thing about the word efficiency compared to the word green is that it means different things to different groups of people.

To environmentalists it means low-carbon computing, to the IT professional it means low maintenance and most importantly, to the finance director, it means cost-efficient computing.

Sean Whetstone is head of IT services at Reed Specialist Recruitment, which won the Computing Awards for Excellence Green Project of the Year 2008.


Published in Computing 30th April 2009


Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Data Centres Europe 2009 Presentation


Today I gave a presentation as part of a panel on the Efficient Green Data Centre at the 5th Data Centres Europe 2009 Conference and Awards in the City of London. It was attended by over 300 executives.

Summary of what I said is below together with my slides.

When I started in IT over twenty years I worked with ICL mainframes where five gigabytes storage was the size of a juggernaut and modest processing power took up a size of an aircraft hanger and you needed a power station just to run it.

It’s perhaps ironic that I have spent most of the twenty two years in the IT industry working out how to get power into data centres and now have spent the last four years on ways to remove power.

Interestingly enough I attended a virtual webinar by Intel last week where they claimed that computer systems are more 2.8 million more efficient when compared to 1978 while the car industry had only managed 40% in the same time period.

Today is Earth day which started 39 years ago in 1970 and is now followed by over 1 billion people around the world to create more awareness.

I think the phrase 'Green data centre' is tainted by over hyping of Green IT or 'Green Wash' by some vendors and has cogitations of hippies in sandals proclaiming doom for the world.

In the current economic climate I prefer the word Efficient Data centre rather than Green
so I will talk about efficient data centres today.

The great thing about the word efficient is it means different things to different groups. To the CEO and CFO it means cost savings, to the environmentalists and Green IT supporters it means reduced carbon emissions and to the IT professional’s reliable and low maintenance computing.

Sometime we forget why we run data centres. The key aim of any data centre should be to cost-effectively support the technology needs of the business. The data centre should be the right level of facility and matched to the needs of the business

Data centre experts recommend building as much standardization and modularity into the hardware inventory as possible.

In our case our modular building blocks are Cisco networks, HP blade servers and Netapp Storage.

If you are going run an efficient data centre you need to use metrics such as Green Grid (PUE) Power Usage Effectiveness to measure the efficient use of cooling and plant equipment. The holy grail is a PUE of 1.0 where no energy is used for cooling or plant. The average would be 2.0 where the same amount of energy is used for facility as computing systems.

In our efficient data centre the use of 64 bit computing, server virtualization, blade servers, consolidation of storage, 90% plus power supplies and free cooling have helped us achieve a PUE of 1.3.

Research has shown that it already costs more to power and cool a server over its lifetime than the capital cost of the server so why isn’t efficiency of equipment at the top of the procurement requirements. It always amazes me that IT purchasers will fights over a a few hundred pounds for the capital cost of a server but may no attention to energy ratings and the total cost of ownership to power and cool that server in it's lifetime.

I also believe you can’t manage what you can't measure and you can't measure what you can't see.

CIO’s, IT Director’s and IT departments should be responsible for the electricity bills for the data centre and perhaps the whole company if IT consumes a significant part of the power bill.

Gartner has recently announced that Green IT is still forefront of organization’s plans, despite recessionary cutbacks.

Almost half (46 per cent) of European respondents said they expect to spend at least 15 per cent of their IT budgets on green projects in 2009

In some ways the current world recession is the catalyst that efficient green computing has been waiting for.

Hopefully we can all work towards running efficient data centres which reduce costs at the same time as reducing their impact on the environment.



Thursday, April 16, 2009

Green IT in Australia


I have recently returned from a business trip in Australia. Before anyone asks my carbon footprint for the flights and hotels were offset through the Carbon Neutral company.

My trip was meeting suppliers to build new Green IT infrastructure to support our Asia Pacific operations expansion and build a new data centre.

Before I left for Sydney I was told that the Asia Pacific region lagged behind Europe and the United states in Green Technology so my expectations were not high of what I might find. While it is true that end users in Australian companies have not adopted low carbon computing at the same rates as the UK it became clear that many suppliers and organisations were very knowledgeable on the subject and had products and services readily available.

While in Sydney I met with Optus, an Australian telecommunications provider who impressed me with their Green building campus just outside Sydney for which they won a Green Globe in 2008

When in Melbourne I had a early morning breakfast meeting with Dr Turlough Guerin who is Group Manager Environment for Telstra, the primary Telecommunications provider in Australia. Turlough gave me a good insight to the improvements Australian companies are making in Green technology and their environment impact. Turlough's Green Files blog can be found linked below.
http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/blogs/green-files

Turlough also told me about Bianca Wirth, another Technololist working with Microsoft Australia who is passionate about Green Technology. While I didn't get the opportunity to meet up with Bianca we have exchanged a few emails during and since my visit. Bianca blogs under the name of Little Miss Enviro Geek at http://blogs.technet.com/lmeg/ and her other website is Green IT Strategy http://www.greenitstrategy.com/ which has some good Green IT resources and links.

While in Australia I was micro blogging on Twitter under the name of @GeekyGreen at http://www.twitter.com/geekygreen with a local theme of Australia Green IT (when in rome and all that..... ) There are plenty of websites, blogs and events in Australia on Green computing.

I toured over eight data centres in Sydney and Melbourne and Green is very much on the radar with all of them. The one that stood out for me was Interactive data centre at Port Melbourne. Their managing director and novelist Christopher Ride who I met really understands what it means to be green and they have become the first to offer 100% Green energy in their data centre (a world first they claim).

On a brief trip to the capital Canberra I was encouraged to hear the Australian federal government and DEWR are embracing Green IT. They are also in the process of pushing through Carbon Emission Trading bill.
I look forward to doing business with many of the forward thinking green IT suppliers in Australia in the coming months.

I also became aware of a forward thinking Australian organisation called "ComputersOff.org" they launched a hilarious video on Youtube called "Naked Tuesdays" which is below and is a fun way of getting the message across.





On Saturday evening on March 28th I sat in Sydney Harbour to experience Earth Hour which was a great experiece.

I learnt that Earth Hour was founded by WWF Australia in Sydney in 2007 as a Citywide event which is now a global campaign backed by the UN and claims to have reached 1 billion people in 2009.


Below is my experience of Earth Hour from the Opera Bar just behind Sydney Opera House



Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Xen desktop The missing part of the jigsaw for desktop virtualisation


If you have been reading my blog and case studies you will know that we have virtualized 95% of our desktops over the past three years. This now represents nearly 5,800 Wyse Thin Client terminals and over 100 Wyse Thin Client laptops across the whole enterprise which is 270 locations through the UK, Europe and Asia Pacific.

This strategy together with server virtualization and our Green data centre has been fundamental in reducing our carbon footprint by 2,500 tons per annum and picking up a hat trick of awards along the way during 2008.

However, we are not satisfied with 95%!

I want 100% desktop virtualization by the end of 2009 with PC's and laptops retired across the company so they become a distant memory.

This is not just a green thing but a security, flexibility and cost saving strategy.

The reason that 5% of my enterprise is still using PC's and laptops is common in many organizations.They tend to be the difficult and technically demanding end users to convert to Citrix Xenapp. Marketing departments where multimedia is used is one common group and of course the IT departments who want control over their own desktop space and registry settings are another obvious group.

Enter Xen Desktop as the missing piece of the jigsaw. I have been piloting this technology myself for the past six months and I must say I am very impressed. This allows me to deliver a full functioning unrestricted virtual Windows XP desktop through a Wyse thin client, my ASUS EEEPC, my Apple iphone or through any device with Microsoft Internet Explorer and a Citrix plug-in.

The multimedia capability is very good too; on a recent business trip I was able to stream UK BBC TV programmes via my Slingmedia Slingbox to my virtual desktop without losing speech sync and with a smooth video stream. You could never do that with Microsoft RDP.

I will be giving a presentation on this very topic about Xen Desktop at this year’s Citrix Iforum 2009 in Edinburgh Scotland on Tuesday afternoon 16th June 2009

Citrix Iforum is on from 15th to 17th June. Maybe see you there.

http://www.citrixevents.com/English/about/index.asp?eventID=8756

More on Xen desktop from Citrix



http://www.citrix.com/english/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=163057

Video Demo of Xen Desktop