by Angela Miller
One of the systems we’re building at NCTD is a security system for our COASTER commuter rail that extends for over 40 miles from Oceanside to San Diego, California.  The geek in me is excited about this project from a pure technology perspective:  the ability to monitor activities in and around the vehicle while it is moving at 60 miles an hour, well that’s a real technology challenge.  Our solution along the rail is a mesh network.

We have a series of ‘nodes’ that we’re installing at about 1 mile intervals that provide a wireless infrastructure along the rail.  With that network, we can then install other wireless devices - for example cameras, or VOIP devices.  But what would this have to do with being green?

Our approach to these nodes has been to install solar panels at each node.  On the one hand this is simple practicality because some sites are very remote and far from existing power sources.  But, for more than half of the nodes we could have chosen to plug into wired power sources.  So as a CIO, I had to make a choice- use solar or use grid power?

The business case is not so straight forward.  While we will save power using the solar, we incur higher installation and maintenance costs to ensure the solar systems provide consistent, reliable power to each node.  We cannot claim that we chose to use solar simply because it was the greener choice - that would be a deceptive message.  However, I can say that as the CIO I had the architectural design choice to go with either solution and chose solar - it seemed to be the more stable choice, and the choice that would still operate if we had a power outage, and yes when all solutions were compared it was the more sustainable, environmentally-friendly approach. 

So I leave it in the reader’s mind - perhaps security at NCTD is green, and perhaps not.  You be the judge.

by Angela Miller
Today we kicked off our desktop virtualization test at NCTD.  I have a few reasons for wanting to look at virtualization - the first is that the workspaces for some of our users are too crowded and we would like to provide them more space within their constraints without requiring a larger footprint on their desk.  This would keep us from needing to expand the offices into additional spaces. 

The second compelling reason is to try to extend the lifetime of some of our desktop investment.  I previously discussed my choice to upgrade user machines with memory and larger hard disks in an attempt to get at least 2 more years out of the machines.  My hope is that desktop virtualization will allow us to contemplate an operating system upgrade without needing to replace every machine at the office.

Our test environment consists of an HPBlade 460, 3 small HP thin clients, 1 HP 6910p laptop, and 2 HP 5100dct desktops.  We acquired a VMWare VDI bundle for a relatively small investment and will run our test with these tools.  Our plan is to test a variety of elements:  stability of the desktop environment, ease of deploying new desktops, the performance of the desktops with a variety of virtual server builds, and performance on the different types of hardware.

We will also be analyzing and researching the power requirements for each of these scenarios.  Our hope is that we might see a reduced power requirement even on the older hardware because the server will be doing the ‘heavy lifting’ on the desktop.

After our test, I’ll post the different results we see, including an analysis of whether pursuing a desktop virtualization strategy is ‘greener’ than continuing with our current approach.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Virtual Strategy Magazine

Infoworld Article

VMWare Green Marketing

by Angela Miller
Today we’re taking a small step at NCTD:  we are initiating a project to replace 150 CRT monitors with LCD monitors.  I performed a business case assessment on these LCDs and determined that based on energy savings I would have a less than 3 year payback period for these monitors.  The private sector might not see such an adventageous ROI, but our government pricing for the monitors, especially given that we purchased 150 at one time, was extremely preferential and helped bolster the financial analysis.

Based on this project, I’ve now added some energy star and energy demand purchasing requirements to my standard specifications.  Taking this small step will not increase my company’s expenses significantly, but should prevent us from acquiring technology that doesn’t fit in with my architectural statement to purchase lower energy components where possible. 

For example, I previously did not include a specific power requirement as part of my specification for some display panels I purchased for our board room, and unfortunately not including this resulted in a lower bid on plasma panels instead of LCD.  Plasma panels will cost us more in operating costs over time than the LCDs just based on the power draw.  So not including power as a specification in the purchasing process can lead to higher total cost of ownership - a mistake I will not repeat.

Small steps can lead to wiser decisions, cost savings, and greener IT.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Report on Energy Usage

by Angela Miller 
I am pleased to announce that I have accepted a position as Chief Information Officer with the North County Transit District (www.gonctd.com).  I am excited about the opportunity to combine my technology and environmental skills in an industry in which I believe in the product.  Public transit will grow more important over time as our communities start to practice more sustainable development, and I am excited to become part of this movement. 

by Angela Miller
I was having a conversation with a colleague this weekend (ok an argument) about carbon offsetting. Everyone seems to be getting into this game, from the Emmy Awards this weekend to big IT vendors like Sun and Salesforce.com. My colleague thinks this trend is simply wasted effort and money and will have little or no impact of either a company’s bottom line or on the environment. He might be right.

The businessGreen blog featured this very question today with a nice analysis both of what IT manufacturing firms are doing and what both environmentalists and anti-carbon offset advocates see as the disadvantage: choosing to procure carbon offsets without making other fundamental changes within your IT organization does not necessarily improve the environment or the company’s bottom line.

My hot button is the tree-planting offset. Because the ecology.IT blog focuses more on building your green IT department rather than validating the science of carbon offsetting strategies, I will not spend significant time of this issue. I will say, however, that as an environmental scientist I am dubious about tree-planting as a primary method for carbon offsetting both because the projects rarely can guarantee the long-term management of the trees and because the scientific analysis is mixed on the net benefits to the carbon load in the atmosphere of tree planting. For this reason, I generally recommend to potential clients that they consider other carbon offset methodologies. However, as one type of environmental stewardship investment in a larger portfolio of activities (e.g. Dell uses tree-planting as an offset to paper usage within the company), I believe tree planting has a net positive benefit.

So, if we instead focus the conversation around net-new clean energy generation projects funded through carbon offsets we can now have a different conversation as IT managers.

Carbon offsetting should be a supplemental activity that IT Managers include as part of a more significant strategy and portfolio. It is the choice after energy-efficiency improvements and potentially alternative energy sourcing. Once your IT department implements changes that provide substantive improvements, carbon offsets can be a good additional step to neutralize impacts that simply cannot be managed away. The bottom line is that IT must use energy – and for most corporations IT energy demands will continue to grow substantially over the next several years just as they have done for the last decade. However, I caution IT Managers against using Carbon Offsets as a primary strategy for greening your department: you will find a growing number of customers and press dubious about your commitment and corporate social responsibility initiatives if carbon offset is the only step the company has taken.

The value of carbon offsetting with net-new energy generation is that over time those investments increase the potential for reliance on cleaner energy in the future. While such an investment may not be appropriate from the IT budget (I generally recommend that it come from a marketing budget), the responsibility for designing the overall portfolio and estimating the carbon load should come from the IT department.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

businessGreen blog

by Angela Miller
The Internet and press are atwitter this week with the announcement of AMD’s new Barcelona quad-core chip. The chip, also known as the Opteron 64, delivers something the competitors did not: a native quad-core design that allows for sophisticated power management. According to the testing I’ve reviewed, the chip delivers up to twice the performance of the duo-core processors but uses the same amount of power.

The design element which differentiates this chip is its native quad-core design which allows each core to be utilized and managed independently. This is a strong design element from the power-management perspective: in the duo-core paired design, the paired cores generally run at the same power level. So if one core is at 75% power so is the other no matter what the processing requirement. In the native quad-core design, the power requirements of each core are managed independently. This simple design change delivers significant power savings.

While some reviewers are saying that AMD is very late to the quad-core game, I believe their design philosophy and the significant power savings prove worth the wait. In addition to the native power savings this chip provides, the sophisticated tools for server virtualization are very strong. Strong enough that Rackspace Managed Hosting decided to deploy the chip after rigorous testing throughout their hosted data center.

We should see over the next several weeks testing centers putting this chip through the paces versus other competitive offerings. I look forward to seeing what the guys at Tom’s Hardware have to say toward validating the performance statements from AMD’s marketing department.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

AMD
TechTarget
CIO
Sustainable IT Blog

by Angela Miller
With the focus ever increasing on energy efficiency in the data center, the topic of virtualization takes center stage for many organizations. Both the performance of the newly-launched VMWare stock on the New York Stock Exchange (from around $29 at IPO to almost $68 today) and Microsoft’s impending push into the virtualization arena demonstrate that virtualization will be a hot topic over the next year.

But the benefits of virtualization are not limited to large data centers, and many organizations miss out on the energy efficiency and cooling benefits of deploying virtualization even in their small IT shop.

According to Gartner, server virtualization is just entering the peak of the hype cycle and it is 2-5 years from ‘mainstream adoption.’ This means that over the next couple of years, IT managers will watch as over 50 vendors vie for marketshare in this re-energized space.

Ironically, virtualization is a mature discipline with over 30 years of history in the IT world. It was a key component of any mainframe deployment as early as the 1970s. But with the proliferation of servers and storage devices and burgeoning IT data centers, virtualization has come around again as a way to more effectively utilize the IT resource.

The impact of virtualization on the environment may not be immediately obvious. But think of it this way: in a company where the trend is for users to specify they must have servers ‘dedicated’ to their function, virtualization is a way to segment pieces of the IT infrastructure to provide those dedicated services without requiring the purchase of separate machines. One powerful server can be segmented into dedicated, non-overlapping functions.

This is a powerful utility, especially when you consider that according to various studies the average usage on a dedicated, stand-alone, functional server is less than 10%.

Virtualization comes in many flavors, from server virtualization through hardware and software, to storage virtualization, to the ability to combine many machines into one virtual device.

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization is either hardware, software, or processor-based. In a hardware scenario, software like VMWare is installed at an operating system layer and allows ‘emulation’. Emulation simply means that a server running Linux for example could also run Microsoft Windows inside of a window within Linux. The basic idea behind this virtualization is that the intermediate software intercepts calls from the emulation window and translates those calls into the underlying operating system to pass to the hardware. The virtualization tool simply serves as a translator between the different environments.

There are many reasons to do this – even at a desktop level. For instance, if you are a small business and you have chosen Apple as your platform, you can install tools to allow you to still run Microsoft Windows within a window on the Apple platform. A small business might do this when they are required to use a particular Windows-based tool to interact with a client and do not wish to procure a new machine. From an environmental perspective, emulation allows companies large and small to run multiple operating systems without requiring acquisition of additional hardware.

The second approach to virtualization is to segment the device into multiple operating systems and allowing these environments to operate independently and simultaneously on one device. In this scenario, the server would run both Linux and Windows at the same time and there would be no conversation between the operating environments – each would make calls to the hardware separately and natively. This approach grew more popular with the release of blade type servers by companies like IBM, HP, Dell and Sun.

Blade servers are quite effective in the data center from an environmental perspective. They are typically stripped of redundant components like power supplies. They are compact and have a small impact on the data center physical footprint. And they are efficient because many servers share so many components. Less waste, less energy, less real estate … all good things from an environmental perspective. (One potential downfall of a densely-populated blade server environment is cooling cost. We’ll cover this in a separate post.)

At the component level, some processors by Intel and AMD now come with native functionality to support virtualization. With newer multi-core, multi-threaded processors, the processor can deliver on the virtualization promise by increasing performance by 3-5 times within one processor (according to IDC). Given the heat generation of the processor, the ability to minimize the number of required processors is highly desirable from an environmental perspective.

Server virtualization clearly delivers significant energy savings to companies that can consolidate their environment effectively.

Storage Virtualization

Like server virtualization, storage virtualization comes in many flavors and tends to be far more complex. The primary theories on storage virtualization are appliance-based, switch-based, and storage-controller based. All three approaches basically rely on mapping tables to route application requests between a ‘virtual’ location and a ‘physical’ location on the disk. Without detailing the specifics in each scenario, the bottom line on storage virtualization is that it allows large data centers the ability to deploy very large, disk-dense devices that again are far more efficient than a distributed set of independent devices.

So to build on the blade server discussion: deploying many stand-alone servers each with their own disk storage that is minimally utilized is far less efficient than installing blade servers without any native storage and then linking them to a large storage array or network as a separate, optimized device.

From an environmental perspective, one can argue which architectural approach to storage virtualization is more efficient, but the use of storage virtualization in any context is far more energy, cooling, and footprint efficient for the enterprise data center.

Conclusion

Server and storage virtualization should be key components to any green IT strategy. Both deliver significant energy and cooling cost savings to the enterprise and SMB through consolidation of resources.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Vmware
Gartner
IBM
Dell
AMD
Intel
Sun
IDC
ESG
Wikipedia

PodTech posted an interesting discussion with HP’s Senior Vice President of Technology Services. While most of the big IT vendors are making a play in this arena now, this interview was a quick and accessible discussion of one vendor’s approach to power management.

by Angela MillerI read with interest Western Digital’s announcement of their new GreenPower Drives. Their marketing statement is that this line of drives can save a significant amount of energy over all their competitors’ drives. Western Digital intends to deploy the GreenPower technology primarily on their desktop and notebook drives - most notably on the 3.5″ Caviar SATA drives and the 2.5″ Scorpio mobile drives. They will launch their enterprise GP drives in the later part of 2007.  Their specifications and cited industry research assert that they can save 4-5 watts over competitor drives in idle mode. I tried to substantiate this number with some simple research of specifications offered by the different main competitors in the space using the 3.5″ Caviar SATA 500GB drive as the primary comparison. Because Western Digital has not yet announced specifications for the enterprise, I chose three primary competitors based on Gartner estimates of the share of the desktop market: Seagate, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and Samsung.

Looking at these numbers is a little like looking at the MPG estimate stickers on cars so it also seemed prudent to see whether any respected technical testing entities had put these drives through their paces. While a review of Tom’s Hardware, AnandTech, ComputerWorld, Storage IO, and The Tech Report, showed that none of these entities had yet tested the Western Digital GP specification, most other specifications came close to the advertised numbers.From an enterprise IT perspective, choosing a drive that natively uses significantly less power than comparable drives will result in energy savings. If a company converts to drives that will use ½ of the power of other drives, the company might save as much as $10/year/drive in energy cost.But as a former IT manager, I would have a few concerns:- In my experience, IT Managers at the enterprise level make decisions about desktop equipment based on the computer vendor rather than components. Rarely would the IT manager specify a particular hard drive, or make a decision on the vendor based solely on the hard drive they offer.- At the enterprise level, IT Managers depend on vendors to provide an overall solution: you could not approach HDS and request Western Digital as a drive vendor when their OEM providers are HGST and Seagate.- None of the drives will attain peak energy efficiency performance numbers without serious consideration to configuration, software setup, and consolidation. The bottom line- one 1TB drive will use less energy than 4 250GB drives.The important take-away from the Western Digital announcement from my perspective: Western Digital is setting the bar higher for energy efficiency and will force their competitors to rise to that expectation in order to retain market share. This energy efficiency innovation will stimulate the hard drive market toward more future improvements.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:GartnerWestern DigitalSamsungHitachi Global Storage TechnologiesSeagateTom’s HardwareAnandTechStorageIOThe Tech Report

by Angela Miller
This week the ecology.IT blog officially moved to a web hosting service that is 100% solar-powered. GreenestHost.com was featured in Ted Samson’s blog 2 weeks ago and officially came online on August 6, 2007.

A couple of things impressed me about this company:

• They worked closely with vendors including AMD, VMWare, and Freus, to ensure they both chose the right technology and configured it appropriately for optimal energy efficiency and cooling.
• They worked with a mature company (AISO) to develop a web-hosting service built on a solid foundation.
• They deployed a solar environment that is self-sufficient and integrated with a battery system for use at night.

While this is not an endorsement or recommendation that everyone should switch to Greenesthost.com as a service provider, it does highlight that there is business sense in establishing and offering green computing technologies.