December 2007 Archives
The Rockefeller Christmas Tree and the Brooklyn Bridge aren't the only ones getting the LED treatment. The Times Square New Years Ball, which celebrates 100 years, is also going green.
Energy efficient LEDs will be lighting up the Waterford Crystal face of the orb. Indeed, it's expected to be twice as bright while only consuming "approximately the same amount of electricity as it takes to power ten toasters or a single oven/range."
Head over to this Gothamist post for more fun facts on the event.
On the eve of New Years Day, it's time to take stock of how energy efficiency and sustainability became a prime consideration for IT shops. In no particular order, here are my choices for the top posts this year.
Many are IT related, while some are noteworthy or somehow impact the way we'll be generating power for those servers and PCs in the years to come.
Google Aims for "Cheaper Than Coal"
Gore, UN Climate Panel Get Nobel Nod
67,000 Servers Get a New Lease on Life
And a bonus. The post that started it all...
Happy New Year!
John Spiers over at the LeftHand Networks has a blog post on how the company approaches power savings for SANs. Part of the overall efficiency story is in the company's provisioning software. The other is hardware:
In fact, all of LeftHand’s disk arrays now run on Intel multi-core processors. Our real industry advantage comes from the fact that LeftHand’s SAN/iQ is hardware agonistic, so we can bring advanced storage virtualization and management capabilities to the greenest storage platforms available.LeftHand’s Storage Platforms also use the latest power-saving disk drive technology: reliable, inexpensive SAS drives, which consume less power and will, I believe, eventually replace all shared bus drive technology, including Parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop. Typical power consumption for a Fibre Channel drive is 18.8 Watts, compared with 17.4 Watts for SAS drives based on disk drive specifications from the manufacturer. SAS drives also perform better – no shared SCSI buses, no arbitrated loop I/O contention, no more LIP storms or FC drive chatter – all dedicated, high speed point-to-point serial interconnects.
Check out the blog post for more insight, though obviously from a pro-LeftHand viewpoint.
Hopefully this holiday season has been fruitful in the geeky loot department. Which means that loot of years past is facing the landfill. Or are they?
Here's a selection of some of my favorite posts this year on recycling, reusing or simply stretching the useful life of your gadgets.
Old Laptop + eBay = Smart Recycling
Earth Day 2007: Computer Recycling
And for all those boxes...
But first of all, have fun and enjoy!
Update: And if you did end up with a new computer under the tree, Lifehacker has a great guide on setting it up without the drama.
The little green machine has taken a beating in the press and once lofty goals have been trimmed somewhat. Even governments are playing wait and see, trying to determine if the not-quite-$100-laptop will emerge as Negroponte's feat or folly.
That's why in the face of so much uncertainty, it's nice to see items like this start to bubble up. In Peru, the devices are already starting to expand horizons for the children of remote villages. But even so, challenges persist.
Take, for instance, something that most of us take for granted: tech support. But Negroponte envisions bringing new generations of high-tech tinkerers into the fold.
For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it."What you want is for the kids to do the repairs," said Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson. "I think the kids can repair 95 percent of the laptops."
Read the rest of the AP report at the International Herald Tribune.
Some exciting news in our latest roundup of green links. Stevens Institute of Technology, a very well regarded university in my neck of the woods -- and not a liberal arts school by any stretch -- is kicking off a Green Engineering minor program. The first core course, Sustainable Engineering, starts in the Spring 2008 semester.
Also, Cisco throws its weight behind power management and energy efficient network infrastructures. And where Cisco goes...
Press Release: Green Engineering minor approved in Stevens’ Schaefer School of Engineering & Science - Stevens Institute of Technology
Cisco Urges Going Green - CRN
Greenest Data Centers: What Works - Sci-Tech Today
Oregon Data Centers Go Green - Government Technology
Green Tech Tools - IndustryWeek
What do you do with those computer boxes after they've been unceremoniously gutted? Recycle them, of course!
Instructables shows you how to make a charming decorative reindeer without driving down to Home Depot for some non-biodegradable plastic ones. And they've got geek cred to boot.
[via Gizmodo]
Thin-film solar cell maker Nanosolar has started commercial production and made its first shipment. To help mark the occasion, it's celebrating by selling the second panel on eBay. The first one of these commercial, "printed on" panels stays at Nanosolar for exhibit and the third is going to the Tech Museum in San Jose.
Martin Roscheisen blogs about why this marks an important milestone for his company and the technology behind it:
- the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;
- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;
The first commercial shipment is going to a power plant in Germany. Here's that eBay auction in case you're interested. It's already up to $7,000!
The buzz surrounding virtualization is positively electric.
From Wall Street fawning over VMware to a mostly warm reception from techies, the technology is on a roll. Heck, even Microsoft is diving in.
But before you start drawing up lofty plans, you should be aware that virtualization is not quite the magic bullet. At least not yet.
Most all organizations are still understandably reluctant to place "mission critical" apps on virtual servers. And this article over at Datamation sheds some light on why.
Perhaps the final challenge is total system failure. Because virtualized companies run multiple technologies off one device, failure can wreak havoc on a whole segment of a network. This can cause isolated service disruptions—a reality that Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development at Neverfail (Neverfail, a disaster recovery company in Austin, Texas, said businesses must recognize.“One of the biggest misconceptions regarding virtualization is that true disaster recovery and high availability are built into the products offered by the major virtualization software vendors,” said Barnes. “The fact is that companies need to handle much of this on their own.”
Infrastructure build out and management overhead are also factors to take into account. Though at least on the management side, I’ve noticed in my talks with some vendors that they are starting to blur the lines between VMs and any other physical networked resource.
Read the rest of Matt Villano's virtualization primer for more perspectives.
Presumed to arrive in '08, Microsoft crashes the virtualization party a little early. Quick, hide the eggnog!
Microsoft's Hyper-V Beta Is Here - ServerWatch
The Case for Energy-Proportional Computing - Computer.org - IEEE
Five steps to more energy-efficient storage - IT World Canada
AMD Green Grid Rep Thinks Green Computing Can Outlast The Current Fad - InformationWeek
Who Won and Lost at Bali - Time.com
Poor Frank Pringle, always having to look over his shoulder for assassins.
Why is this man marked for death? Because, like the 100MPG carburetor, Big Oil doesn't want his invention to wreck their industry. Or so he's been told.
You see, he's using microwaves to derive oil and natural gas from waste materials like old tires. The process is a little more involved that nuking trash in a kitchen microwave, however.
Petroleum is composed of strings of hydrocarbon molecules. When microwaves hit the tire, they crack the molecular chains and break it into its component parts: carbon black (an ash-like raw material) and hydrocarbon gases, which can be burned or condensed into liquid fuel. Pringle figured that some gases from his microwaved tire had lingered, and the cold air in the shop had condensed them into diesel. If the process worked on tires, he thought, it should work on anything with hydrocarbons. The trick was in finding the optimum microwave frequency for each material--out of 10 million possibilities.
Already, an auto recycler in Long Island, NY has put in an order for a $5 million, school bus-sized version of his machine called the Hawk.
How is UPS doing its part to curb emissions? By letting software show it the way.
The New York Times reports that UPS, whose fleet of 95,000 brown shipping trucks isn't going anywhere anytime soon, looks to "package flow" software to optimize routes and cut down on wasted fuel, which by extension, reduces carbon output.
Why left turns? Because trucks end up idling while waiting for oncoming traffic to clear.
Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.
Not too shabby. If software devs don't inherit the Earth, they can sure help save it.
Now that tempers have cooled, it didn't seem fair to kick off w00t day on such a negative note. So let's remedy that...
Nevermind those green data centers of the future. Unisys announced that the company has finished an energy efficient expansion to its server farm in Eagan, Minnesota today. The site and its (original) 100,000 square foot data center provide outsourcing services to the firm's customers.
And now, they have an additional 17,000 sq ft of raised floor, which keeps computing gear aloft by 30 inches and allows for improved airflow. A glycol air conditioning system keeps things cool at lower consumption rates. In fact, it's up to 44 percent more efficient than conventional HVAC setups, according to the company.
Inside, Unisys is embracing virtualization, which they expect to help cut carbon emissions by 67 percent versus single-workload servers. And IT staffers get to exert fine-grained control over power and cooling in the form of power management capabilities that can be accessed locally or remotely from another Unisys location.
As part of the project, they also added 12,000 sq ft to the support area, which houses switches, controllers, generators, and UPS equipment.
And who doesn't like that new data center smell? In any case, the story doesn't end there.
During its construction, the company was able to recycle 150,000 pounds of building materials -- 75 tons of the stuff -- including cabling and carpeting. Unisys also embarked on a "3.5-acre oak savanna restoration" that involved removing an invasive species of shrub called buckthorn. Around the site, the grounds have been restored to a natural prairie setting, which eliminates the need for all manner of chemicals and reduces maintenance compared to a manicured lawn.
Victoria Bond, director of North America data center infrastructure for Unisys, hints that her company's green ambitions won't end in Minnesota.
"Unisys has a company-wide commitment to sustainable facilities design, energy efficiency and reduction in carbon footprints. The expansion of the Eagan center is a key step in furthering that commitment. By expanding the Eagan center, Unisys is providing customers access to the latest and greatest enterprise computing technology while enhancing cost and energy efficiency."
Surely, her customers approve. But just in case: w00t!
More fascinating than 'w00t' getting Miriam Webster's blessing (surely a sign of the end times), today's green links:
Before we get to our latest batch of links, allow me to discuss a couple of things.
First, the folks over at The Green Grid shot me an email announcing that the group is hosting its first ever Annual Green Grid General Members' Meeting and Technical Forum in San Francisco on February 5-6.
A get-together is always fun (open bar?), but more exciting to me is that they also announced getting the results back from their first Plugfest in November. During the event, hardware vendors got to test their gear to see how it performed under PCI Express Active State Power Management tests. They haven't made me privy to the results, but they proudly say that it now provides for those vendors a "framework for these components to become more energy efficient moving forward."
Let's hope so!
And now, Dvorak. I think he enjoys pushing people's buttons and watching the pageviews pile up. And honestly, I sometimes find it amusing to see just how much nerd rage he can bring to a boil.
But not this time.
I could go on for a few hundred words about his OLPC rant, but the BBC and Brian Proffitt at the Linux Today Blog did an outstanding job already.
I found Dvorak's opinion -- which he's entitled to, yay free speech -- deeply cynical and dismissive. Sure, the "cute" little green machine may crash and burn in the developing world. Still, my hope is that once the first few OLPCs become a "delivery mechanism" for online content from those communities, they'll become less easy to ignore.
And I find that a cause worth supporting, even if ad-pushing Google foots part of the bill.
Well, look at that. My rant went on far too long. Links ahoy!
Dvorak's Logic Continues to Amaze - Linux Today Blog
Give me rice, but give me a laptop too - BBC News
[New York] City's Taxi Fleet Will Turn Hybrid - Gothamist
Getting Up Close and Personal With Future Green Car Tech - Wired
Finding the Financing for Your Green Building Project - GreenBiz
The Biggest Economic Opportunity of This Century - The Motley Fool
Now this is an interesting way to manage waste heat.
Internet Villages International is building a £600m ($1.2 billion US) green powered data farm in a rural part of southern Scotland. The complex comes complete with a 700-home development and is expected to create 500 jobs.
A lot of technical details are lacking in the BBC report, but one interesting aspect of the project is how they plan to use the waste heat from the data centers.
He also promised that the site would have 20 single-storey data centres covering 3m sq ft of floor space.Under the proposals, waste heat from the site could be transferred to the homes development, which IVI described as a "700-home eco internet village", uitilising green energy.
"He" is Peter Hewkin, Internet Villages International's founder. Also, the green energy, he says, will come from nearby wind farms and an E-On biomass plant.
Construction is expected to start in 2008 and end in 2010. This should prove interesting to watch...
It's common knowledge among geeky circles that you can prolong the life of your aging hardware if you install a Linux distro. What usually results is a snappy PC or small server instead of a machine that used to creak and groan on Windows.
Now this post on CNN Asia makes that bit of conventional wisdom official:
True or False: Switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%.The answer is: TRUE
The bold proclamation is based on a study from a few years ago that found that Windows users have to toss out their old hardware twice as often.
A UK government study in late 2004 reported that there were substantial green benefits to running a Linux open source operating system (OS) on computers instead of the ubiquitous Windows OS, owned by Microsoft. The main problem with Windows users was that they had to change their computer twice as many times as Linux users, on average, thereby effectively creating twice as much computer-generated e-waste.
And judging by the gluttonous reputation Windows Vista has earned, it doesn't look like things will change any time soon. And by the way, Linux has been getting hip to new power saving tricks if you want to give it a try.
DatacenterDynamics has awarded its Green Data Centre prize to banking giant Citigroup for an IT facility in Frankfurt, Germany. Pretty neat, except it's not fully operational yet...
Upon completion in June 2008, this data center will save up to 25 percent on electrical energy consumption, compared to conventional data centers. In addition, 16,000 megawatt hours will be saved each year, the equivalent needed to power 3,000 average family homes. The amount of carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere will be up to 11,000 tons less annually than conventional centers of its size. Savvy water management, including natural drainage of almost 90 percent of the rainwater, will save up to 46.5 million liters in water usage every year.
Now, I'm all for progress, but how about awarding it to a data center that's driving up efficiency now? Still, yay to Citi's soon-to-open €170 million ($250 million US) data center... I guess.
The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree isn't the only New York City landmark to get the LED treatment.
AP has the story on how the Brooklyn Bridge is getting its "necklace lights", the lights that trace its massive cables, replaced by LEDs that consume a lot less power.
Changing 160 lights on the landmark bridge, which turns 125 years old next year, is expected to cost $500,000. Other city bridges, which first got their lights in the early 1970s, could also get the modern makeover, officials said.The switch from 100-watt mercury vapor lamps to 24-watt bulbs known as light-emitting diodes will not make the lights noticeably dimmer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
And since LEDs last longer, maintenance costs also drop.
Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, typically last three times longer than the mercury lights, said Jonathan Wish, chief strategic officer at LED Dynamics, which is not affiliated with the city's project. Most mercury vapor lights endure for 24,000 hours, or about 1,000 days, before burning out, he said."Because of the longevity, they're not going to have to change these lights for years, and that will save maintenance costs on top of electricity," he said.
More Looks like the mayor's PLANYC 2030 is hitting its stride.
[via GoodCleanTech]
By now, I've come to terms with my love/hate affair with Amazon's Kindle. I want one, but not until a non-ugly, less pricey version 2.0 drops.
Datamation's Mike Elgan, on the other hand, is smitten. He's a convert thanks to its eco-friendly nature and potential for cost savings.
But what makes the $400 device so kick-@$$ is how it transforms the act of reading the newspaper.
I've been using a Kindle now for a few days, and reading my subscription to The New York Times (Amazon currently offers the Times, plus 10 other newspapers). Reading a Kindle-based newspaper is superior -- far superior, actually -- to reading a paper newspaper.So even if you don't care about saving the newspaper industry -- even if you hate the environment -- buy a Kindle anyway for purely selfish reasons.
A little heretical there, Mike, but I'll let this one pass. In short, he goes on to say that the e-ink display is a godsend; not wrestling with a newspaper in a tiny coach seat on an airplane is magic; and the insta-search/research functionality astounds...
Kindle has a built-in dictionary: The New Oxford American Dictionary. Just click on a line, and Kindle will show you definitions of each major word in that line. If you don't like that dictionary, you can buy another one in the Kindle store and replace it as the default. If you want to go further, look it up on the Wikipedia -- or Google or any other Web site. A Kindle-based service called Kindle NowNow will set actual humans in motion to answer your questions -- and it's free. Try doing that in a taxi with your print newspaper.
If Mike's glowing review compels you to "1-Click" your way to holiday happiness, well, it sucks to be you because they're sold out. Actually, they'll take orders, but it won't arrive until after the 24th.
Buying new and improved storage gear to improve on datacenter energy efficiency runs somewhat counter to green IT goals, says Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International. Byte and Switch reports that during the Storage Decisions conference he advocated getting to the root cause of wasteful storage instead of wielding your IT department's purchasing power. This, he says, will help organizations think in terms of "green data" before greening up their storage.
One way of accomplishing this is to routinely practice "data hygiene" and purge orphaned data. Here are some tips he offered:
"The delete key [on your PC keyboard] is the greenest key in your environment. Use it."Established methods to identify, migrate, and store data with a "low re-reference probability," i.e., data that's gone to sleep that needs to be retained only for compliance or archival reasons.
Only after gaining a substantial measure of storage efficiency, he says, should IT shops then explore their storage hardware options.
Photo Credit: Vitor Sá - Virgu / Flickr - Creative Commons
Dezeen has a post with plenty of pics on Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen, a church that found new life as a book store in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The results are very striking. So striking, in fact, that it won the Lensvelt de Architect Interior Prize 2007 for the firm Merkx + Girod.
With Kindles flying off Amazon's virtual shelves, one has to wonder if it's the wisest of moves to fill these formerly pious places with dead trees. Even so, it's better than breaking ground on a new strip mall (B&N and Borders take note).
In any case, head over to Dezeen to get a sense of how the design comes together.
Me? I still prefer the chapel-turned-supercomputer, but that goes without saying.
[via Treehugger, BLDGBLOG]
Some details have emerged on Herkules, a new supercomputer at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Though it placed 244th with 8137 GFlops in the most recent Top 500 list (November 2007), the 1,092-processor beast does much better on ecological rankings (48th), according to the institute.
Hercules is the result of green data center design coupled with some prudent hardware choices, all in an effort to keep consumption down and number crunching up.
For Dr. Franz-Josef Pfreundt, who is head of IT at the ITWM and was in charge of the building activities, the overall "green" concept had to include a low-energy computer center. Working together with computer manufacturers, Pfreundt combined particularly energy-efficient components to create the supercomputer, which has a total of 272 individual computers. These components include thrifty power supply units, power-saving dual-core processors, and device drives with a noticeably lower consumption. In addition, the number of memory modules per computer was reduced to four, which reduces the power requirement even further.
Personally, I find the good doctor's attitude toward the latest and greatest tech most refreshing.
"For example, we deliberately chose not to use the very fastest CPUs - microprocessors - for our computer, but those that yield the best performance per watt," says Pfreundt.
And check out how they handle cooling:
Cooling the server rooms is another way of saving energy. Up to a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius [68 degrees Fahrenheit], the rooms are cooled directly with outside air. If it gets too warm, the CHP provides the necessary cooling via an absorption refrigerator. Conversely, on cooler days, the waste heat from the computers is used directly to heat the building.
My tower at home doubles as a little space heater in the winter months, so I totally buy that approach.
Solar, biofuels are still making waves. Plus, Midwestern firms want a piece of the action.
Fun In the Sun: Good Energy Ups Stake in SolarFun - Earth2Tech
Midwest firms looking to ride the wave of VC investments in clean tech - Medill Reports
OPX receives $3.6M for synthesized fuel replacement - VentureBeat
Gushan files for $250M biodiesel IPO - Cleantech.com
U.S. Clean Tech Venture Capital Still Rising - Red Herring
Anne Fisher of the "Ask Annie" column at Fortune tackles a topic near and dear to our hearts over here at eITplanet: greening up your office. Sure, we're primarily fond of technology that helps boost efficiency in the datacenter (and gadget bag), but those innovations rarely impact rank-and-file employee in glaringly obvious ways.
However, tips like these require the involvement of every employee. And in turn, there's every chance that employees will then carry those lessons home and into their communities.
In "7 ways to make your office greener," Fisher picks selects some great advice from the upcoming book, True Green @ Work: 100 Ways You Can Make the Environment Your Business by Kim Mckay and Jenny Bonnin, and published by the National Geographic Society. She covers some basics, like printing on both sides of paper and using your PC's sleep mode (or turning it off completely), but there's one factoid that blew my mind...
Need one more reason to push for flextime and telecommuting? If your boss still balks at letting you work from home or keep flexible hours, you might mention this: U.S. drivers waste nearly 6 billion gallons of fuel each year sitting in rush-hour traffic jams, which accounts for nearly 60 million tons of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere. Telecommuting and flextime can help reduce those emissions.
6 billion gallons a year wasted just idling?! Not cool.
If you want more tips in the same vein, we've recently posted a guide here (data center edition here). And don't forget to scan-to-email instead of sending paper faxes.
Thanks Michael P.!
Is this the start of something new on our nation's roadways?
LiveScience has a neat article on a PG&E billboard just off Highway 101 in San Francisco that features 20 solar panels and produces 3.4 kilowatts on sunny days -- enough for a family of four. At night it draws power from the grid. Even so, it produces more power than it consumes and feeds the excess into the grid. PE&G attributes some of the savings to the LEDs used to illuminate the ad.
PG&E spokesperson Jennifer Zelwer told LiveScience that the billboard is the only one of its kind but expressed some hope that they'll someday become a fixture on our highways.
Let's hope so.
[via Treehugger]
Infinitely more interesting than smart chimps, today's green links:
Global warming and celebrity melt-downs in top Yahoo searches in 2007 - AFP/Google
...and don't forget Harry Potter.
Business backing is vital to realise green IT savings - ComputerWeekly.com
Climate Savers Launches 'Green' Computer Catalog - The Unix Guardian, IT Jungle
UK datacentres lack green credentials, says report - Computerworld UK
Marriage: Eco-friendlier than divorce? - USA Today
Maybe, if they play their cards right.
When it comes to clean energy, most envision drawing solar power across the vast deserts of the Southwest. Or perhaps wind farms across the plains and off the craggy, blustery shores of the Northeast. And now Buffalo, New York, with its rich ties to America’s industrialized past, may also soon become synonymous with wind power generation.
This opinion piece in the Buffalo News by Bill Nowak, executive director of Buffalo's Green Gold Development Corp., thinks that the region is uniquely positioned to become a vibrant wind-driven economy and grow jobs. Of course, he paints quite the rosy picture given his ties. Nonetheless, the combination of his ideas, along with an infrastructure that seems predisposed to making this transition, does merit some attention.
Take, for instance, his "E" bullet-point from his WET SOIL acronym:
EXAMPLE: Steel Winds is the largest urban wind farm in North America. The eight turbines on the old Bethlehem Steel site provide monumental advertising both for our wind resource and for the potential that exists for renewal on our urban waterfront brownfields. Any manufacturer looking to make a clear, progressive statement to markets far and wide recognizes the benefit of being associated with this project.As a pre-eminent example of brownfield reuse, this project has been written up in publications from Reader’s Digest to the New York Times. For the time being, thanks to progressive political leadership from the City of Lackawanna, Steel Winds gives Western New York a huge leg up in the race to establish our regional identity as a hotbed of green activity.
Brownfields are abundant in the U.S., especially in the regions that ring our cities. Can you think of a better use for many of these sites?
Also, I’ve driven past Steel Winds and while they pale in numbers to some of the wind farms I’ve seen out west, it's indeed inspiring to see in an urban setting. Plus, now I know what they're called.