Groves Green IT

UC Santa Barbara 1st Summit on EE

 

In foggy Santa Barbara today, a group of scientists and industry leaders has gathered to discuss new technologies, policies regarding energy efficiency, and the research environment at universities contributing to both.

As we all know, 80% of energy needs are now supplied by burning hydrocarbons (oil, coal, and natural gas). 

Fred Chong, Computing Solutions Group Head, at the Santa Barbara Institute of Energy Efficiency laid bare his plans for his 20 plus team and how they see their research mandate.

“We want more than Moore. We’d like exponential gains of 1000x more efficient computation in 10 years and 100x more efficient cooling in 10 years.”he said, and went on to define his goals.

Goal #1  is 10x more efficient data centers within the next 5 years, by making energy use proportional to load.  The pathway is virtualization and consolidation software, energy aware data management and network protocols, new server architectures.

 Goal #2 is 100x more efficient servers and datacenters with new computing and communication technologies using optical signaling, nanoscale devices, new computing architectures, in a timeline of 10x bin 5 years and 100x in 10 years.

 Goal #3 is more efficient cooling of data centers of 10x in 5 years and 100x in 10 years.  Their pathway is liquid/vapor cooling technologies integrated with scheduling of computations, precise airflow management, and new sensors and control.

 A data center is a prototype of what we’d like to see in buildings in general. So the efforts are to build experimental infrastructure that will flow over to all buildings, percolating down to embedded systems in pcs and pervasive computing.” said Fred.

in a description of the milestones achieved at Google, Luis Barroso talked about Energy Proportional Computing.  It  says the following:  no work,  no power consumed. some work, some power consumed, and lots of work, lots of power consumed. Therefore, since we know that processors are idle, energy use could be halved and peak data center power could be as well. we get there with better designed energy proportional components.  He concluded by saying that energy proportionaly should be a first-order design goal because data centers have different needs than handhelds.

Feng Zhao, Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia began with The Power Spectrum. he said that computing on a dime (10 to the minus 2 in watts) has 9 orders of magnitude in power difference with computing in a warehouse (10 to the 7th power in watts) with tradeoffs in energy and performance across the scale. He talked about an ongoing Microsoft project called "Data Center Genome" focusing on software and hardware sensors. The wireless sensors, 10,000 manufactured for Microsoft are deployed across MS data centers to save energy and improve operation efficiency by collecting, archiving and understanding operations data.  

Tens of millions of concurrent users are on Windows MSN Messenger Connection Services at any time. The backend servers in clusters of 60, are doing authentication, address book etc, concurrently before a connection is established. This means that server loads fluctuate over time and they need to handle peak load worldwide. provisioning those machines for peak or very low power states is the goal to yeield significant energy savings.  "It is tricky to do.  To repurpose and consolidate workloads is difficult.  while average utilization is predictive, black swan events where everyone goes online at once, requires a robust buffer and requires load-balancing and load-skewing strategies. We can save 30% in energy when we get the algorithms right," Feng Zhao said.

Software activity and hardware components have been detailed in an energy profile in Microsoft's "Joule Meter". Different models for different machines have been tried. These include trace collection, and resulting profiles for estimation errors, application energy, componentenergy  and application/component.  Having these models makes virtualization strategies more successful.

For Feng Zhao, making energy a 'first-class citizen in design' implies considering energy complexity, racknowledging that there are many opportunities to exploit relevant power knobs at multiple layers of systems and apps, and to think holistically across workload, performance and energy.

Have a green day!

WHAT: Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency, by the Institute for Energy Efficiency - http://iee.ucsb.edu/sbsee

 

WHEN: May 20-21

 

WHERE: UC Santa Barbara

 

WHO: Other presenting organizations include:

+ U.S. Department of Energy

+ Intel Corporation

+ Sempra Energy

+ Southern California Edison

+ UC Davis

 HIGHLIGHTS:

+ May 20 Special Energy Leadership Lecture by Time magazine's "Heroes of the Planet" award winner, William McDonough, architect, designer & author.

 + May 21 Town Hall Meeting: "Policy and Technology: Conflict or Synergy?" Moderated by Forrest Sawyer, Emmy Award-winning former ABC, NBC and MSNBC news anchor, with panelists from Kleiner Perkins, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and United Technologies.

soundbites: useful quotes from the sustainable computing circuit

I have to admit that I have a lifelong obsession with taking notes - and then forgetting to go back and review them for long periods of time.  Sometimes when I look back at my notes, their significance eludes me.  Sometimes there is some value to be gleaned from my notes.  Upon rereading some of my notes from the last year, I realized that occasionally presenters at workshops or conferences say something with enough clarity that the phrase retains its meaning even if the rest of the content is no longer that urgent.  Therefore these are the ones I saved before discarding the paper it was written on:

In 2008, 70% of TV audiences had their pc open at the same time.

In 2008, 11% of the online minutes in the USA were spent on Myspace.

Virtualization is just a feature set.

Mobility changes everything (with reference to the power of virtualization)

SOA: consumption happens in ways you didn't anticipate.

In SOA the service becomes the atomic unit of service to monitor and policy. 

Decouple your services and put them in the cloud. The value is in the connection, not the individual service.

Separate, consolidate, aggregate, automate (your virtualization mantra for sequencing processes)

If you set up a virtualized data center, you’d have a mini-cloud in your data center.

In 2012, 1 gigabyte will cost $1.

IT headaches are unmanaged pcs, data leakage, disaster recovery, and security vulnerabilities - unless you can separate the system data from the user data. 

Virtualization is a quality of life tool: you can do fixes, patches, upgrades, etc. during business hours.  It is an insurance policy for IT staff.

It takes twice as much energy to manufacture a computer as it will use in its lifetime.
HAVE A GREEN DAY!

Michael Patterson of Intel weighs in on thin clients

I am interviewing Michael K Patterson, PhD, PE, Senior Power/Thermal Architect, Eco-Technology Program Office, Digital Enterprise Group at Intel.  (That’s quite a title - I am glad I was able write that rather than say it outloud…)   Michael:

 

 1.    I understand you have written a white paper about the energy efficiency of thin client desktops.  Can you briefly talk about that? (when it was published, where it can be found, etc.) 

 Yes, Lorie Wigle and I co-authored a paper for the Electronics Goes Green 2008 conference in Berlin last September.  The paper, titled “Alternative Compute Models: End-to-end energy impact”, looked at the total energy impact, including the servers and extra data center energy required for thin clients for a number of different compute models.  So we looked at thin clients, desktops, and laptops.

 2. Your research concluded that thin client desktops are not energy efficient when considered end to end, right?  It sounds counter-intuitive so perhaps you can help me out with this.

Well, no, that’s not exactly what we found.  The results showed that thin clients, laptops, and desktops all can be very energy efficient when done correctly.  The key finding was that thin clients are not always the most efficient model, even though there has been a lot of press claiming they are.  In fact the most efficient model was a laptop.  Of course to keep it fair, if you add an LCD display to the laptop for in-office use things are a lot closer.

 For desktops (and the laptop) the key is using the latest CPUs with the best efficient performance, LCDs instead of CRTs, and actively managing the clients and turning on power management features. 

 The thin client model energy efficiency depends on a couple of factors.  First, how many thin clients can be supported per server?  Second, how efficient is the data center that those servers reside in?  Let’s focus there a minute.  A typical data center Power Usage Effectiveness or PUE is 2.0.  That means that the total power going to the data center is 2.0X times how much goes to the servers.  That extra power goes to cooling, power distribution, and lighting.  All these energy uses need to be attributed to the thin client model.  As I started with, the other key factor is how many clients per server.  Our analysis showed that in an inefficient data center (PUE=3.0) you needed about 60 clients per server for the thin client model to be as efficient as the desktop.  In a very efficient data center (PUE=1.5) you only needed about 30 clients per server to make the thin client model equivalent.  Interestingly, when compared to a laptop, even with an LCD, you would need to run over 100 clients per server to have the same efficiency.

 And that’s the main issue for the thin client model.  It all depends on the work being done by the employee.  If it’s just data entry or terminal-like work, it can be fine.  But as soon as you ask the server to support 30 clients all running typical office applications like word processing or spreadsheets it really slows down.  Then if you get into any more intensive applications using graphics, streaming media, or advanced analysis, you really need to have far fewer clients per server.  It’s all in the paper and the references, but at a very high level a rule-of-thumb would be that for today’s knowledge worker, doing more than just data entry, a core-per-client is a good target.  So a quad core, dual processor server could support 8 clients with roughly the same level of performance as the managed desktop.  At these levels, thin clients are the least efficient model.

 3. Were you surprised by your own conclusions?

In any of this we should not judge what’s best until we do the whole analysis.  And of course, energy efficiency is only part of the analysis.  TCO, security, and manageability all come into play, as does the ability to work remotely.  When I presented the paper in Berlin I joked that I wish I had a thin client.  Everyone looked at me puzzled until I explained if I had a thin client I could have watched the movie on the flight over instead of catching up on my email. 

Each site needs to do their own detailed analysis.  But when you think of how precious the data center space is, these results shouldn’t surprise anyone.  I have heard people who have to build and pay for them say “let’s get the Powerpoint out of the datacenter”.  When you do the math, it makes a lot of sense.

4. Can you give specifics on better solutions for call centers, doctor’s offices, and other traditional thin client environments? 

 For these typical thin client applications, thin clients can be a great choice.  Again one needs to look at the whole picture.  In any situation where thin clients are being considered, my best advice is “pilot”.  Set up a pilot, at the proposed number of clients per server, and see how the employees fare. If there is no negative impact the thin client model should get a very strong look.  On the other-hand, if the thin client stalls, or can’t keep up with the dedicated desktop or laptop you need to be very cautious.  The productivity loss will far outweigh any energy efficiency or other TCO gains, particularly when summed over the life of the thin client installation.

5. What would be the best way to obtain energy efficiency gains throughout an entire IT life cycle, i.e., where the data center is just one aspect of the entire picture? 

 When one talks to someone about the possibility of a thin client application, the first question to be asked is “What’s the PUE of your data center?”  If they don’t know, there are a whole lot of areas for efficiency gains before they should even consider the thin client model.  The big challenge is not rushing into something that just sounds good.  And one of the problems here is that the impact, once it’s been implemented, may never be measured.  The impact to the site energy can be very difficult to determine.  The data center energy use and the office space energy use are not usually measured together or compared, the impact may be mixed with other changes in the building or IT inventory, data center loading, or even the seasonal variations on the heating or cooling loads.  So it’s really best to do the detailed analysis up front.  The best way to gain energy efficiency in the IT space is to use the latest hardware, get rid of CRTs, enable the power savings features, and manage it all centrally.  That’s true for thin clients, desktops, and laptops.

 6.  Well of course that doesn’t include embedded energy, and I know Intel is studying the impact and that recycling more computer hardware is uppermost in your research.  Separately, do you have ideas on added original research to be done on this topic?

 Hmmm, original research?  I can’t think of any specific scientific research needed on this as much as we need better tools to help the end-user to do the full analysis.  If all we do is look at the specific watts of an individual desktop, laptop, and thin client and pick the thin client because it is lowest, we could very well regret that choice.  That’s where more work can be done, tools for analysis.

 Thanks so much, Michael! Great to talk to you… 

  and likewise Deborah, it’s always a treat to talk to you. You always push me; with good questions and though provoking ideas, thanks!

HAVE A GREEN DAY!

 

Symposium from NYC in progress: pictures to follow next week

This has been an exciting few days with tracks that include the innovations and best practices in data center energy efficiency fare from my good colleagues Fred Mapp and Friends of Fred Mapp, and Ken Brill's extensive rolodex of brilliant CIOs that are discussing the urgency of energy efficiency but also some new faces with messages of innovation in related disciplines.

From speaking to colleagues in the hallway at The Uptime Institute annual event, the most popular talk was that offered by Deloitte's CIO Larry Quinlan, who had a very approachable speaking style that betrayed a similar management style - the audience found his message very compelling.  When Larry spoke about putting together a green team with very tangible responsibilities for each team member, it resonated with the data center operations staff in the audience who often felt that the milestones are not specific enough and responsibilities not well delegated. 

Over and over, the message came across that IT and Real Estate/Facilities need the assistance of the C-Level Suite to start and manage data center energy efficiency initiatives - AND, the process is iterative, and continuous, not a one time project.  One speaker recommended that IT approach the CFO with a multiyear program on data center energy efficiency so that the amount of dollars requested is larger and more significant, and requires the CFO's commitment over a longer period of time, thus bypassing an annual "ask" by IT. 

In one case study, one company said that while their data center comprised just 4% of their campus real estate, IT's contribution to the electricity bill topped 45%.  In cases where that huge percentage was not yet determined, discovering advocates just isn't that easy.  

Having consulted on the new content for the symposium, I was glad to see many new faces with different job responsibilities (who hadn't been Symposium attendees in prior years) join the audience.   So while there was a small audience for the panel on what bloggers report is important to sustainable computing, the panel of Matt Stansberry, Rich Miller, Kevin Heslin and David Ohara enjoyed trading their insights on what is urgent or important or both to their readers.  Similarly, the panel on the EMEA's response to IT and corporate social responsibility was faced with a very vocal contingent from Europe expressing their differences from the American model of carrots for industry leaders v regulation as it exists today in Europe. 

Two of the highlights were the presentations by Tom Friedman (author of Hot, Flat, & Crowded) and Christine Ervine, former president of the Green Building Council.  Tom, condensing the research reported in his excellent book, while admitting the damage to worldwide floodzones from just 1 degree centigrade average annual temperature increase, said "I am a cautious optimist... we have just enough time (to resolve global warming) if we start today" and Christine Ervine with more optimism, showed how much the LEEDs certification has accomplished in a short number of years with photographs of beautiful buildings that sent shivers up my spine.  So much to do within the next five years.  IT department managers (we!) cannot sit back and act indecisive because simply holding even will not halt the warming already starting to take place.  "A rollback is required by all of us. we need a green revolution, not a green party" warned Friedman. I'll post photos when I return to my office...Other presentations by Bill Wiehl of Google, Lauralee Martin of Jones Lang Lasalle, Steve Sams and Rich Lechner of IBM, Mark Ascolese of EDSA, Neil Rasmussen of APC Schneider, and Bonnie Nixon of Hewlett Packard offered up varieties of innovation on the topic - the kind Tom Friedman will be been proud of.  Have a green day!

Speaking of Google's container hangar data centers

First of all I have to make a correction based on a comment from Jon Koomey, that he posted but that he'd like to see in the body of this blog. Here it is with apologies to Jon:

Corrections: It was me (Jonathan Koomey) not Bob Metcalf who showed the graph about data center electricity use being comparable to Mexico. I did NOT say that growth in data center electricity use was speeding up (in fact, it's slowing down as the industry focuses on the issue). And I also did not say that sending a letter uses 300,000 times more energy than emailing a PDF--I compared the mass of material in the electrons needed to send the PDF to the mass of a 5 g sheet of paper--that's where the factor of 300,000 comes from. It's an illustration of the power of dematerialization, but it doesn't translate directly to energy.

Now to Google's container hangar announcement yesterday.  This tells you about their announcement. Thanks Rich Miller for taking good notes. I want to tell you about my impressions. 

This was another good example of Novel Innovative Collaboration.  What I mean by that is Google moved the state of the art forward quite a bit yesterday by sharing their server design that includes a 12 v battery attached to each one. James Hamilton, who also spoke, said it was brilliant, because the redundancy is at the lowest possible denominator. Here are some of the notes I copied from his blog:

99.9% UPS Efficiency (Ben Jai presenting)

o   Distributed on-board UPS

o   Single voltage motherboard (12v)

o   Motherboard provides 5v to disk and all step downs needed by on board requirements

o   Installed a lead-acid distributed UPS to ride through power sags

o   Avoids double conversion of many central UPS

o   Only enough power in UPS to allow generators to start or to switch to other A/C supply

What was inspiring to the audience was that the eco-system is so positive when an enduser company shares its experiences.  While waiting in the lunchline, I spoke with someone familiar with Toyota's joint venture with General Motors, the  NUMMI plant in nearby Fremont California, a showplace for car manufacturing best practices. He remarked that in the industrial sector, this kind of sharing is far more prevalent than in the IT world. 

I can acquaint the announcements yesterday to Microsoft's Gen4 data center design announcements late last year.  (See my earlier blogs on the topic).  With Microsoft and Google leading the way by showcasing their innovation, it raises the bar for Yahoo, E-Bay, and Amazon to do the same. 

With near-simultaneous announcements of adjacent technologies, we have the opportunity to innovate as an industry very rapidly. Now Novel Innovative Collaboration is kicking in! With invited participation from the Uptime Institute, (Ken Brill was a panelist yesterday) the attention to CAPEX and OPEX opportunities is squarely in the middle of the conversation.  With the addition of the The Green Grid (John Tucillo gave a great overview of where TGG is today), a methodology for defined and agreed-upon metrics that are Unrecognized, Reported, Registered or Certified through The Green Grid, aids member to distill options in the context of their own data center similarities to the model data centers.

My take on yesterday was that with Andrew Fanara's participation, we saw more of a NGO type event, a non-governmental organizational approach to problem solving, than a contentious industry event. With the private and public sector working so closely to motivate small, medium, and large data centers to improve their energy efficiency without any fancy technologies, we are improving PUEs even beyond Andrew's expectations in his important report to Congress. 

And in case you haven't read this before, although I feel like I have written it several times, Jon Koomey did the early research that got this whole conversation in motion. 

I am encouraged. How about you?  Have a green day!

Where Green & Networks meet

Yesterday I went to this GigaOm event  to find out where Green and Networks meet...Actually, it is still a stretch to make that tagline comprehensible because it is deliberately ambiguous whether networks refers to internet nets, social nets, or both, or neither. It was a confluence of people with diverse interests, agendas, and knowledge, together because of their admiration for the reputation of GigaOm. 

San Francisco's charming Mayor Newsom opened the conference with a rousing talk about San Francisco's greenness. He expressed his optimism based on the green milestones the City has already reached: in one case, he said, "It took only a pen, a paper, and a signature", explaining that a lot of existing regulation, not lack of technology or money, that stood in the way of solving problems. I believe he said that San Francisco has roled back its carbon usage to 6% below its 1990 levels while still adding 100,000 more residents.   "San Francisco is a lab for innovation", he summarized, and welcomed entrepreneurs' and investors' ideas.

He was followed by Gavin Sparks of AMEE, the world's energy meter!He asked an interesting question of the audience: Where do we draw the boundaries of ownership and responsibility for CO2? if you can answer that, you can standardize easily.  A similar observation was made by Saul Griffith when he said that every person in the USA has an average number of USA infrastructure CO2 tucked into his personal CO2 emissions quota, for roads, highways, airport runways, etc., averaged across all of us. Gavin Sparks said that a new laptop weighs roughly 25kg but to manufacture it required 460kg of C02. Amazing, isn't it?  The average American uses 11,200 kg of CO2 per annum, so when you acquire a new laptop, you use up the equivalent of 25% of your annual allotment - or you run over that year...

Bob Metcalf showed a slide that indicated the energy use of data centers worldwide is roughly the same size of all of Mexico's electricity requirements. And it doubled between 2000 and 2005 - and may double faster than every five years going forward...

Jon Koomey gave an excellent overview of IT's role in reducing carbon footprints for all of us around the world. He talked quite a bit about de-materialization, a concept I enjoy discussing without using that word because I don't like new words made from adding prefixes such as pre or de. (pre-owned, instead of used, when talking about cars, for example).   Specifically, Koomey gave the example of mailing a PDF cross the USA by the postal system takes 300,000x more energy than sending it by email via electrons.  An excellent example of how we can save energy using the web.

Participants also heard an excellent panel onf the PowerGrid2.0.  The moderator, Jesse Berst, started out by saying that the Smart Grid has three elements: metering and listening for commands, two way communications, and advanced control systems.  The value to re-creating the power grid across the USA is in the applications you build on top of the new grid. Unfortunately, it is akin to fixing a moving train.  If you were to compare the power grid with the mobile telephone grid, you woul dsee that the cellular network is more secure, more reliable and 1/10 the cost.  However, reliability needs an asterisk next to it, because we all experience frequent outages on our cellphones, and we are intolerant of similar service from our utility companies.  I think it was also at that panel that someone remarked, "It is easier to teach entrepreneurs about utilities than to teach utility executives entrepreneurship."

About 15% of the audience left the room after lunch when the presentations turned to IT - many of the cleantech students, entrepreneurs, and practitioners think it is too technical for them, or else, to esoteric.  They don't yet understand something that both Koomey and Ken Brill, another panelist have been saying for years: IT is the 2% that affects the other 98% of your business.  It cannot be ignored. It has to be strategic, and it has to be energy efficient.

Rob Bernard of Microsoft was another highlighter, and gave an excellent presentation similar to one that I covered in an earlier blog last month.

The end of day was punctuated by a gong show, a pseudo competition among 11 companies for the best product, based on a 4 minute presentation by a founder.  The winner was FarmsReach: the web hub for local grub. congratulations to my colleague Lana Holmes for expressing her vision in such a way that it resonated with the audience.

It was great to come to a conference in the Presidio park, on a sunny, clear day with gorgeous views of the Golden Gate bridge, and bask in the intellectual framework of Silicon Valley discussing how to save the earth when it looks like an impossible task.  Back to work now doing itsy bitsy tasks that might be considered problem resolution.  Have a green day!

Perspectives I am learning along the way

Over the last several weeks, I have conducted podcast interviews on behalf of the Uptime Institute in preparation for their Symposium 2009 event April 13 - 16, 2009 In New York City.  You can go here to listen to the podcasts that have been uploaded.

For example, Philip Morris of Sun Microsystems spent time talking to me about how he became interested in energy efficiency in Sun's data centers several years ago. He gave much credit to the implementation of his ideas, and in fact, their contributions to the strategies as well, to Mark Monroe and Dean Nelson, his peers that have helped Sun to become an industry leader on the topic.  You can read more here.

Christine Ervine, a former Green Building Council President who oversaw the leap in LEEDs certifications gave an insightful overview of that process. I specifically recall that Christine said that in retrospect, with 20/20 vision, one of the most successful aspects of the LEEDs building certifications was that it was made available in tranches - you can participate at silver, gold, and platinum levels. Instead of having an on off switch, essentially, you have a dial to help you decide what level you want to participate at.  Through that interview, I also became aware for the first time, how important the General Services Administration of the US federal government was in promoting LEEDs.  You can read more about GSA here.

My interview with Amy Wohl is also an interesting perspective on the current economy and how it will drive certain IT  initiatives forward at a faster speed.  Amy is an economist as well as a well known IT strategist, and she believes that the lower startup cost of SAAS and PAAS will enable those segments of the IT industry to expand while other segments contract over the following 24 months.  Sometime over the next few weeks, look for additional podcasts to be loaded to the same page: it has been a privilege to speak with Steve Sams of IBM, Mark Ascolese of EDSA, Neil Rasmussen of APC/Schneider, Chris Crosby of Digital Realty, and Lauralee Martin of Jones Lang Lasalle and yes! they will all be speakers at Symposium 2009.  The podcasts may be enriching for those of you who are on travel restrictions and won't be in NYC to hear their presentations live.

I will be at the Symposium for all four days, participating on two panels. One of these panels is with Eric Olson of  Business Social Responsibility, a non profit based in San Francisco. 

We will be talking about the sustainability programs that drive BSR clients to include data center energy efficiency in their corporate GHG emissions goals, and how they are reporting their goals through annual reports, websites, etc., in an effort to convey their sincerity and successes. 

On the topic of Novel Innovative Collaboration I will be moderating a panel with Ray Pfeifer, KC Mares, and Bruce Myatt, all participants in the 2008 Data Center Energy Summit held in Silicon Valley last June. We'll be talking about the attributes of the collaboration that made the pilot studies so successful.

Hope to see you in NYC... Have a green day.

IDC Directions in San Jose California on March 4: Dynamic, well attended

You can still attend IDC Directions in Boston on March 17th.

John Gantz of IDC talked about the economic turmoil facing all of us. Finally and thank you! I've been complaining about people on the podium at other industry conferences ignoring the obvious elephant in the room and continuing with their pre-built talks.

Now I don't necessarily agree with Gantz' predictions, but that is another matter: at least we can all talk about them together.  Gantz did begin with this statement: Customers are not freaking out as much as they were in October 2008.  They have a plan now.  And some of them see an opportunity because business transformation that must happen over the next few years must include IT investments.

IDC's august 2008 predictions for Worldwide IT Spending thru 2012 was forecast to be 6%.
The February 2009 prediction for the same spend is 5.7%. 

Both scenarios includes a dive in 2008, a modest recovery in 2009, and a huge uptick in 2010 - 2011.

If I had to give that presentation earlier this week or today, I'd look for a graduated recovery through 2016: I just don't see that level of growth worldwide so soon. I am not an economist, just a worrier, but the economists haven't called it correctly in the recent past, have they?

One bright side for global vendors: 56% of new growth could come from emerging markets, not the USA and EMEA. So increase investment in your non-traditional markets. "Start planning for the recovery" Gantz advised. 

Ga  Gantz' colleague Frank Gens focused his presentation specifically on cloud computing, a bright spot. He said that in 2011, 25% of net new growth will come from cloud v on premises computing.  I believe these following numbers are accurate from my notes: IDC predicts a 15% migration to cloud computing over the next three years, showing a 25% to 40% marketshare, as customers leave the "early adopter" stage and migrate to the mainstream market.  The major reason companies are holding back is because of their fears that logical security at cloud computing centers is not as strong as it needs to be. However, over 50% of the installed base has less secure IT than currently available from cloud providers, Gens admonished. Another key point Gens made is that many IT staff are moving to the cloud with the intent of bringing their applications back in house if the pricing model favors the latter. It isn't necessarily a one-way move, and so they need to be assured that the tools to bring apps back inhouse are available and reliable.

So   Somewhere in Gens presentation he mentioned that between 2008 - 2012m we may expect growth of storage as percent of IT investment to move from 5% to 13%.  I was just reviewing Tom Coughlin's website, where he writes, "By 2010 we expect that close to 26% of total shipped hard disk drives will be used in consumer applications, up from about 14%, AND by 2015 personal content will greatly exceed commercial content and sharing of this content will multiple enormously total storage requirements"  My conclusion from those two statements is that even with the healthy growth in business IT storage, consumer demand for storage is just as robust. 

Michele Bailey, IDC's data center watcher, confided that just 30% of all data centers have hot and cold aisles. I was surprised to hear it was that low, are you? She also covered containers: 70% of data center operators said they could use containers for disaster recovery or to cope with sudden demand, but not as a replacements for their datacenters, "containers are complimentary rather than disruptive".  Not buying into the Microsoft Gen4 design yet? Maybe just 10% of the market will follow that design concept...

Ha  Have a green day!

 

Teladata Convergence conference 09 provides great value again

It was a very well organized conference in Santa Clara on Thursday, February 19, 2009.  I decided not to bring my computer and take copious notes of each presentation as I usually do, and instead spent my time listening and watching.  So this blog has fewer details and more opinions.  Here were the presentations that left an impression on me:

PK Agarwal, CTO for the State of California started off the morning with a great speech about the computer behaviors of different generations titled "The Changing Workforce". The content was not new to me - about baby boomers, millennials, generation X, generation Y, etc., and their response to technology, so I was free to just enjoy the presentation. He was a great speaker. A memorable one-liner: "How can you tell when you are opposite an introvert or extrovert engineer? Watch his eyes and see whether he gazes at your shoes or his own."  Then at the end of the talk, PK showed a video about collaboration that had me weeping buckets of tears. I had to run out of the auditorium to wipe my face clean of mascara.

I was suitably impressed with the 10 point summary of Dean Nelson/Mark Thiele's Data Center Pulse meeting that emerged at the conclusion of their first face to face membership event But I'd like to recommend one additional point to make it 11: the group should plan to disband in June 2010.  Why? Because we need to take their focused approach and apply it to existing industry groups - redundancy with Green Grid, DoE, ASHRAE, 7 x 24, etc., will not serve us, only slow us down. So Pulse Board: complete your 10 points in a time you can pledge to live with, and then hand it off so your Board can go and influence more topics!

KC Mares was great on the Critical Facilities Roundtable panel that Bruce Myatt organized.  KC really hit hard on vendors who are hiding behind useless server nameplates to legally protect themselves against any litigation for using servers in less than pristine and optimal conditions.  As Michael Tomczyk of the Mack Center at MIT likes to say, "if i can work on my laptop with a long haired cat shedding hair and dandruff all over my laptop, why can't a server take the same beating?"  KC had his facts on humidity and temperature ready to challenge all server vendors: Listen up and loosen up! Let's get this industry into the 21st century now.

Ric Telford of IBM was the only speaker who gets low marks from me. In the nicest possible way, I'd like to ask whether he wouldn't like to trade me a couple of IBM Thinkpad  RS 61-8920s for a chance to do a sanity check on his slide deck for his next presentation?   It was a mishmash of pages that left me distracted about where that $1.3 million number came from (with no context about percentage or absolute spending on the slide or in his comments). 

The Teladata audience deserved better than a goofy presentation from a company with the biggest marketing budget (or close to it). This is the company that created IBM JAM through Mike Wing, the company that put Borobodur back together again. Don't take my high opinion of this industry leader and discard it needlessly.

Next week I am going to see my 7th grade English teacher, Nancy Adrian.  She taught me how to write.  She taught me to refine my arguments.  She also had our class memorize that Robert Frost poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". Here are four of the lines:

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

I have always thought fondly, and literally, of that little horse who knew his way home without direction from his carriage driver, and it reminds me of how often we go on autopilot ourselves, without thinking, ranting on in some fashion because we've given the same speech so many times. So with apologies to Ric for the above admonition, I caught him this time but he may catch me out next month...

Check out Intel's Kevin Bross' new blog here... And thanks to Amy Wohl for this (World Community Grid) and this.   Have a Green Day!  PS. this was a scary blog to write because I don't actually like to criticize people. But Kirk Varnadoe, former Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, said, "Do something scary every day." Occasionally I live by that rule. I just did.