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