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Archive for the 'Energy Camp' Category

Apr 29th, 2009 | Brian Chee

VMWare: Virtualization is soooo green.

Brian Chee

VMWare is joining the InteropNET team again this year and helping the NOC to be a bit greener, while increasing the overall reliability of the network services we’re providing. The overall concept is that we create virtual machines just like you would sysgen a normal machine, but instead of installing directly to the metal (i.e. installing onto a new physical server) this time you’re installing under the VMWare management system. These images can be started, stopped, paused or moved depending upon the business rules you’ve defined. We just happen to be running our virtual machines (VM’s) on a blade server, but you could just as easily run them on a mixed bag of legacy servers that you already have. In fact, I’ve been consulting with a couple credit unions on using VMware to leverage their existing infrastructure while still expanding the types of services they provide.

Heck, add in a Coyote Point load balancer and you can load balance, auto-stop/start VM’s and all kinds of stuff. Sure is sounding like a greener future.

200904291006.jpg

This diagram shows how the VMWare virtual infrastructure provides a way to share resources, but the real story is just how green this really is. Ok here’s the story: take a good hard look at your web servers. I betcha they’re probably only running in the 7-20% utilization range. Now look around the back and they might be using anywhere from 700watts all the way up to monsters sucking down over a 1500watts. Now consider this, even the new energy star power supplies don’t reach maximum efficiency loafing along…they actually get more efficient as the load goes up.

Now what if we take those very same servers, toss on a virtualization layer, and now run say a half dozen web servers on it? Each project group (assuming each project group owns their own web server) still gets roots access to “their server” and can still patch it and add to it as they see fit. However, now with a half dozen servers running, the underlying server is now probably running into the 60-70% range….aaaahhhh…much more efficient and we’ve just turned off perhaps as many as five 700watt power supplies. VERY GREEN.

Green enough that Pacific Gas and Electric has an incentive program going to help folks jump into virtualizing their environment, AND save a whole heck of a lot of bucks.

While I didn’t manage to snag some video of the VMWare engineers while at hotstage, VMWare does have some mighty fine podscasts talking about the technology.

Sep 16th, 2008 | David Spark

VIDEO: Energy Camp NYC @ Interop_NY: Save energy costs by temporarily shutting off your redundant servers

David Spark

I spoke to Jerry Cuomo, the CTO of the IBM WebSphere group who brought up some really radical techniques to saving IT energy costs like shutting down servers during slow times. I talked with him about that and some other ways to uncover power savings in the IT infrastructure, like reducing CPU cycles to process XML code.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from Interop NY.

Sep 16th, 2008 | David Spark

VIDEO: Energy Camp NYC @ Interop_NY: David Berlind on how the unconference format is always relevant

David Spark

David Berlind who is the general manager of the live events group at TechWeb organized the Energy Camp event at Interop_NY. Berlind talked with me about the unconference format of the show and that the benefit of such a format is the information is always relevant because it’s what the attendees want to talk about.

Here’s more information about that greening your IT starter document David talked about.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from Interop NY.

Sep 16th, 2008 | David Spark

Energy Camp NYC @ Interop_NY: Start up guide to greening your IT…

David Spark

Looking for a start up guide to greening your IT and data center? Well, so was David Berlind. He didn’t find a freely available document, so he decided to start one, a wiki at Energy Camp.

There’s already tons of great energy saving information on the wiki thanks to The Green Grid, which focuses on savings in the datacenter and Climate Savers Computing which focuses on energy savings with each individual PC. Fostering user-to-user advice, Energy Camp aims to fill in the gaps in between.

Energy Camp NYC Agenda

After the Energy Camp unconference, Berlind invited the attendees to fill in their notes from all the sessions they created and attended. The information collected will go into the document. Until then, here’s a link to the most recent best practices PDF compiled from the last Energy Camp in Las Vegas.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from Interop NY.

Sep 16th, 2008 | David Spark

Energy Camp NYC @ Interop_NY: Simplification and optimization is the key to green IT

David Spark

The real cost to IT is complexity, said Gennaro (Jerry) Cuomo, IBM’s WebSphere CTO. The real problem is rigid software and hardware. Both are significant contributors to the explosion of carbon footprints in the data center, Cuomo said.

WebSphere CTO, Jerry Cuomo

In his presentation at Energy Camp @ Interop in NY’s Jacob Javits Center, Cuomo argued the solution is simplification and optimization of computing and the data center. That’s the first step to energy savings. IBM is one of the sponsors of Energy Camp.

There are energy savings all around, but you’ll see the greatest opportunities across the IT stack (applications to middleware to hardware). Like with most project, you’ll see the greatest benefits when implemented from the top down, but getting adoption is not easy.

It’s easier to save energy costs from the bottom up as James Governor also mentioned in his presentation.

IT hasn’t paid energy costs, so they haven’t worried about it

More than half of the energy costs are actually paid by the facilities department, said Cuomo. As a result, that’s why IT hasn’t traditionally been paying attention to these costs. As data centers and application usage is growing, energy costs from IT are now a noticeable blip on the company’s radar. IT must monetize the impact of energy.

Be a “rainmaker.” Save costs through virtualization, cloud computing, business process management, and SOA

For IT energy savings, Cuomo redefines the term “rainmaker” as someone who utilizes virtualization, cloud computing, business process management, and SOA (service oriented architecture) to reduce energy savings for the company.

Cuomo pitched the WebSphere Virtual Enterprise as offering a cost reduction solution by bottling their IBM’s energy savings learnings within the product they ship out - from the individual servers up to an entire WebSphere cloud. For example, one way WebSphere saves money is aggregating all your application servers into a single pool and as requests come in, traffic is prioritized across all servers.

This is not how must applications are deployed in the enterprise, said Cuomo. Most customers simply just add another five servers each time they want a new application. That’s easy to deploy, but over time having these five-server clusters with varying levels of utilization is highly inefficient.

Look across every point in the process to save energy costs. If you only use hardware you’ll only get a fraction of the savings you can get. You need to look at the combination of hardware, software, and usage.

Most organizations have hardware redundancies. If one server fails, there’s another one that can take over the workload to maintain business continuity. To save energy costs, Cuomo recommends organizations force this behavior with soft shut downs or fail overs. He suggests companies purposely shift application loads to a smaller group of servers and even shut down some of the servers during slow times, like night time.

Another area of energy savings is how tough a software application works on a piece of hardware. Cuomo brings up the example of processing XML code. A byte of XML requires 13 CPU cycles on a standard CPU. Cuomo said that on its DataPower XG4 card, a byte of XML only requires one cycle. If you operate a lot of XML code, shifting processing to these cards could save a lot of energy costs.

Detect inefficiencies within the organization and solve it with enterprise 2.0 solutions and flexible SOA

Business processes are often inflexible and inefficient. We all see the time and cost inefficiencies. But as you might imagine, if you’ve got time and cost inefficiencies, then there’s definitely energy costs associated with that. Number one solution suggests Cuomo is the elimination of paper. Get business and IT talking electronically. This definitely feeds into the world of enterprise 2.0 applications which has tons of benefits such as knowledge management, collaboration, innovation, and communications tools that younger workers adapt to far easier than just email and paper.

If you can’t solve your inefficiencies then you’re in trouble. Luckily, SOA allows for the flexibility to model what’s going on, control it, and then deploy the concept in an automatic format.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from Interop NY.

Sep 16th, 2008 | David Spark

Energy Camp NYC launches @ Interop_NY

David Spark

The Jacob Javits Center is a maze. If you ever come here for an event, get here early, walk around and make sure you know where you’re going to be. Very few people who work here actually know where the rooms 4D, 1E and 2F actually are. With that said, the first session of Energy Camp started a few minutes late because EVERYONE had a hard time finding the meeting room.

Energy Camp NYC

The day began with introductions from David Berlind, General Manager of the Alternative Events Group in the Live Events Group of TechWeb and James Governor, a principal analyst of RedMonk, the first analyst firm built on open source methods. Governor is also an editor for Greenmonk, a blog that discusses how to improve environmental outcomes through the convergence of social media, open data, and grassroots efforts.

James Governor at Energy Camp NYC

This is the second Energy Camp collocated with Interop because IT is a cost area for most companies and the energy costs of a company’s overall IT budget are going up. The goal of this unconference is to get the dialogue going about saving energy costs. Not just within the room but also across the Energy Camp Wiki. There’s already tons of great energy saving information on the wiki thanks to The Green Grid, which focuses on savings in the datacenter and Climate Savers Computing which focuses on energy savings with each individual PC. Fostering user-to-user advice, Energy Camp aims to fill in the gaps in between.

Governor realizes that energy costs is something we don’t have control of. People who have jobs in sustainability created their job themselves and it’s all because from the bottom up adoption. It doesn’t come from the top down. Governor also advises anyone interested in learning more should read the Smart2020 report.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from Interop NY.

Sep 16th, 2008 | David Spark

Interop NY: Summary of coverage from Interop NY conference

David Spark

This post is an ongoing summary of all the coverage from the Interop NY conference. Please feel free to link to this post as it will grow with all the coverage from the event.

Videos

Photos

Apr 25th, 2008 | David Berlind

Desperately Seeking: Green Tips And Tricks (Big Or Small) That You Think Can Make A Difference

David Berlind

We’re just a few days away from Energy Camp, which we’re holding on the day before Interop in Las Vegas. We’ve got close to 100 people signed up and we’re anticipating quite a few walk-ins. So, we’re on target in terms of the event’s size and intimacy. But even if you don’t plan to be there, I’ve established a way for you to participate virtually by sharing your own energy saving tips and tricks (or just green tips in general). I’m calling it Ways To Save The Earth and it was inspired by some school kids in Massachusetts. Regardless of whether it’s big or small, if you’ve dreamed up a green idea that you think can make a difference …

… then share it with the world by contributing it to the Energy Camp Wiki. It’s really very simple (and a perfect use case for wikis). Just go to the Ways To Save page and follow the directions.

I got the idea from a story I heard on NPR (I can’t find it or I’d link to it). It was about some kids in Massachusetts who lobbied the state Legislature to officially change the margin width for state documents so that less paper is consumed when documents are printed. Apparently, the paper industry is one of the biggest consumers of oil and fresh water (both are consumed in the process of making paper).

The kids came prepared. They showed the math. And that’s what Ways To Save is very much about. It’s about big ideas. But it’s also about the small one that, once you do the math, you discover how a small idea can make a huge difference once a few million people embrace it.

I just established the “program” yesterday and we’ve already got some tips and tricks loaded up. But what I need is your help. Whether it’s a brainstorm of your own or you know of another tip that’s out there on the Web, the goal is to start aggregating all of this information on the Energy Camp wiki.

Your ideas (those of us who care about the Earth all have them) aren’t doing the world a lot of good so long as they’re locked away in your head. So please share them and, perhaps together, we can do our part to make a difference.

Write to me at dberlind@techweb.com if you have questions and I’ll try to answer them as quickly as possible.

Apr 17th, 2008 | David Berlind

The Unconference For When Oil Costs $120 Per Barrel

David Berlind

James Governor, who will be presiding over Energy Camp on April 28 in what is probably the least green city on the planet (Las Vegas: not counting how green in emerald-like color the MGM is), has hit the nail on the head in terms of characterizing the new unconference. He calls it the unconference for oil at $120+ a barrel. The cost of oil reached a new high today of nearly $115 per barrel: a grim reality which highlights the fact that what’s good for the planet also is good for your bottom line. That’s what we’ll be talking about at Energy Camp.

Apr 15th, 2008 | David Berlind

Energy Camp Mentioned In InfoWorld. Are You Coming?

David Berlind

Energy Camp, the IT industry’s first unconference dedicated to establishing a multilateral dialog between all IT constituencies on issues relating to running green technology and reducing energy consumption, was mentioned in a story by Brad Reed in InfoWorld. I, along with Redmonk principal analyst James Governor (author of the Greenmonk Blog) will be hosting Energy Camp in a few weeks. Somewhat ironically, …

energycampheader … we’ll be hosting it in Las Vegas, the city that probably has the worst carbon footprint of any city in the world. Las Vegas happens to be the site of Interop this year and, thanks to the good folks at Interop (a sister outfit to InformationWeek under the TechWeb corporate umbrella), we secured some free space in the Manadalay Bay Hotel (site of Interop) on the day before Interop starts.

Wrote Reed:

Another big theme at this year’s Interop will be green IT, a series of sessions designed to give IT departments ideas for making technology more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. Among the environmental IT issues due to be discussed are eco-friendly technology in data centers, as well as the proper role for the data center in environmental stewardship; tips for deploying a green IP telephony network; a presentation on how companies can invest in green storage; and a presentation on how smartly employing virtualization can save companies’ energy use. Additionally, Interop will host a day-long “Energy Camp” seminar on the day before the conference starts that Heymann says will “open up the discussion to the whole community to ask for their perspectives on sustainability” and ask audience members for their ideas for how to make IT greener.

“Green IT is rising in importance by the minute,” [Interop GM (NYSE: GM) Lenny Heymann] said. “We decided for Energy Camp to move away from some of the more traditional conference formats by inviting more community comments to share their expertise with each other.”

Thanks for the shout, Lenny!

Energy Camp is free to attend and anyone who comes will get a free pass into Interop as well. If you’re interesting in going, we’ve got a registration page set up on the official camp Web site.

Also, we’ve got a wiki set up as part of the site and one of the reasons for the wiki is to tap the wisdom of the “crowd” by keeping track of all the cool ideas (one per page) that people are coming up with to not only save energy, but to help sustain the planet. So, what are you waiting for? You don’t necessarily have to come to Energy Camp to join the “conversation.” Any questions? Let me know at dberlind@techweb.com.

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