by Angela Miller
A few months ago I wrote a post about attending an American Public Transportation Association meeting on Sustainability and how I felt out of place as the only IT person in the room.  Today I had yet another lonely experience.  I was the only person in the collection of IT professionals in public transit focused on green technology. 

I gave a presentation on how transit entities can take small steps to make incremental progress toward greening their data center.   I’m not sure that my observations could compete with the more exciting presentations like iPhone applications and Google Transit.  But I think the slide that showed how making a simple change in our desktops and monitors had actual dollar savings and a measurable reduction in our carbon footprint made some impression.

by Angela Miller
We had some excitement today at my office.  We noticed around 4:30 this morning that we dropped our connectivity to some of the servers – never a good sign when you are seeing multiple notifications from the automated system.  Turns out that the air handling I’ve discussed in other posts just wasn’t up to the job.  One of the two air conditioners blew, and the second one did not take over as designed.  In under 20 minutes the room hit 117 degrees, and servers started shutting down.

Walking into that environment this morning was a little heart-stopping.  The room was filled with smoke, but fortunately nothing was on fire.  Things generally performed as they should after an incident like this, and most of the servers shut down as they were designed to do.

This incident could have been far worse.  We could have lost equipment, or data, or actually had a fire in the room.  But it is still a wake-up call that we must invest in remediating the data center.  Fortunately, we’re hearing about the possibility of stimulus money from the federal government for transit.  So my goal over the next week will be to brush off the grandiose plans for that green data center and start working on getting together biddable requirements for a project.