Teblog

Time for a WEEE change?

Whoever dreamt up the name of the WEEE directive clearly did not check with how it would go down in Britain. But it's been a long time coming and the sounds of our sniggers have long since died away. In some quarters, they've been replaced with the sounds of gnashing of teeth.

First of all, let's be clear: any attempt to encourage responsible recycling of waste electronic products is to be applauded. This, after all, is the intention of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. The idea is that end of life products are separated into their constituent parts and usefully recycled.

But, as often happens with matters European, things aren't that simple. The rules, such as they are, are implemented differently country by country. Belgium wants 39 different classes of IT waste accounted for whereas the UK settles for just two. WEEE is not a standard, it's just an umbrella term under which countries can make their own decisions. IT companies which work across national boundaries (and that's all of the big ones) waste man-years just to ensure their compliance with these sometimes pettifogging local regulations.

But who cares? These companies are rich enough to cope. Maybe. But what do they and their customers get out of WEEE? The answer seems to be, "not a lot". They have the cosy feeling that they're doing the right thing by recycling. But they have no idea what happens next. There is a disconnect between the WEEE world and the manufacturers who are, increasingly, designing their products with easy recycling in mind. I think I've mentioned that Sun uses a lot of metal cases these days, and Hewlett Packard has cut its printer plastics from over a hundred to just five types. Both measures are intended to improve the reuse value of the materials.

Sadly, the chances are very high that when the plastics and metals are chopped up into tiny pieces, ready for re-use, they'll all get mixed together thus destroying their inherent value. So, in the example of plastic, they get shoved into some low grade object like a park bench. Where's the environmental gain in that? A wooden park bench, by contrast, is functional, good-looking and it contains sequestrated carbon.

Someone, somewhere, needs to find a way to separate plastics and metals more sensibly and make it easier (and more rewarding) for IT manufacturers to participate in WEEE recovery loop.

Link: Can email save the planet?

Date: 28 Oct 2007

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Can email save the planet?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's small business blog

Date: 28 Oct 2007

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Can email save the planet?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's small business blog

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Can email save the planet?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's small business blog

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Can email save the planet?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's small business blog

Link: Wanna help Mariella?

Date: 26 Oct 2007

Audience: Information Professionals

Link: A chance to help Mariella

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

HP optimises data centre power use

The data centre with its huge potential to gobble power and generate heat has long been the focus for green computing initiatives. And quite rightly so. The alternative is arrange rooms so that cold air is delivered to where it's needed most, usually by careful room and rack planning. This still leaves the possibility that power is being wasted because each area has to be designed for the worst possible environmental conditions.

Just under a year ago, HP Labs started talking about Dynamic Smart Cooling. The idea was to place a network of temperature sensors on the racks, providing information back to a control centre which, in turn, controlled the cooling fans in real-time. Such an approach was designed to minimise the energy requirements and, therefore, the costs. And as a by-product, of course, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere.

All very well, but competitors complained that this was merely an announcement of future intent. A touch of greenwash, perhaps? Except that Hewlett Packard could demonstrate the system working in the labs. Now, though, the company has its first internal data centre implementation running and and has announced its general public availability.

The first site outside the laboratory is in the company's newly-consolidated data centre in Bangalore. This 70,000 square foot centre is already operational, although it has yet to bring up all of the planned 2,500 racks. The company's six new US data centres are scheduled to be ready in early 2008.

All of these data centres are the result of consolidation and this is, "when the power bill hits you in the face," according to John Sontag director of virtualization and datacenter architecture for HP Labs. In Bangalore, the issue is complicated by the fact that the centre has its own diesel-powered generators and a requirement for diesel oil storage. This is because public power supplies cannot yet be relied on in this part of the world.

With diesel oil in India providing a kilowatt-hour for around 25 cents, Sontag estimates an ROI of six months for the Dynamic Smart Cooling system. Where power costs are lower, the payback time will obviously be higher. Perhaps twice as much in California, say. The company estimates power bill savings of up to 40 percent over conventionally cooled datacentres. Once fully optimised, the Bangalore operation (a consolidation of fourteen centres), is expected to save Hewlett Packard 7,500 megawatt-hours annually and reduce carbon emissions by approximately 7,500 tons. (Based on the figures given, that suggests the DSC cost was just under a million dollars. Anyone from HP care to comment?)

The DSC can be retrofitted to existing data centre racks and legacy equipment. It just requires that the fan drives be variable-speed and have industry standard controls. The controller (accessible remotely as a web service) is the smart bit, able to calculate what fans need to run at what speeds to deliver cooling to the right places at all times. Sontag  explains that if a modern high density (30kW) rack loses its cooling, it could overheat in 90 seconds. By the time a human has received and reacted to a warning, it would already be too late.

It's certainly a seductive argument. Hewlett Packard believes it's first with such an intelligent adaptive system. Others will, no doubt, follow. Systems that respond to changing needs will remove a lot of risk from data centre planning while at the same time cutting both energy bills and carbon emissions.

I wonder if anyone's working on tying virtualisation and intelligent cooling systems together?

Just a thought.

Link: Siemens removes communications pain

Date: 22 Oct 2007

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Siemens removes communications pain

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's small business blog

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Siemens removes communications pain

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's small business blog

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Siemens removes communications pain

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's small business blog

Link: Facebook the facilitator

Date: 18 Oct 2007

Audience: Information Professionals

Link: Facebook the facilitator

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Date: 18 Oct 2007

Audience: Information Professionals

Link: Facebook the facilitator

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

What if the lights go out?

Got up early this morning to get on with life. Switched on computer. All humming along nicely until I tried to collect email. Two of the accounts were dead. Not a flicker of life. And they were hosted by two different companies. But a third was working so it wasn't my system or my connection, it was something 'out there'.

Next step, go to my web pages. presshere had vanished, so had brainstormsw. I forgot to check tebbo but, since that's hosted by the same provider as presshere, I assume that had gone too.

Then I went to the servers themselves or, at least I tried to. Couldn't get near them. Then went to the hosts' pages - one host was active but no reported issues,  the other couldn't be reached. I checked that all my hosting bills had been paid.

I could get to my startup pages: Netvibes, Google, BBC and Facebook, so at least the world as a whole hadn't disappeared. But what if it had?

The internet is supposed to be resilient, but what if it isn't? What if we were suddenly and permanently disconnected? What impact would it have on our lives if this utility that we take for granted were taken away from us?

Call me sad, but I found the prospect utterly alarming.

The environment, Sun and the sun

I can't be the first to have noticed that Sun, rather conveniently, shares its name with our star, the source of all of our energy. Whether it's fossil fuels, wind, waves, water or (obviously) solar, they are all derived from the sun's warmth.

Interestingly, Sun is one of the pioneers in taking an environmentally responsible approach to its business and to those of its customers. I know that Hewlett Packard was the highest placed IT company for environmental responsibility, so I'll be coming back to it in another post.

Richard Barrington, Sun's head of Sustainability and Public Policy, spoke to us recently about Sun's environmental credentials. They're impressive, providing you ignore the fact that kit has to be junked in order to replace it with Sun equipment. How about a desktop thin client that consumes 4 watts and lasts 21 years? Or datacentres that don't require you to wear a fur coat? Or virtualisation slashing energy needs? These are all decent stories and withstand examination. Sun pioneered much of this stuff, even if others are beginning to catch up. The record is there to be seen.

More important are some of the big, thought-shaping issues, raised or triggered by Barrington's presentation. One of the most important for all is that humans are pouring out toxins, waste and carbon and consuming the planet's resources unnecessarily. For the good of future generations, we should change our behaviour.

Don't even begin to debate what is causing global warming, or climate change as we're now supposed to call it. It's happening. It doesn't matter whether you believe Al Gore or Martin Durkin, common sense tells us to make change, for the good of our pockets as well as our grandchildren. The planet, incidentally, couldn't care less. It will survive without us.

Sun's conference agenda was all about growth, a theme which sits uncomfortably with minimising our use of resources. But Sun is finding its growth in environmentally concerned organisations such as Betfair and Strato. They both chose Sun datacentre equipment because it balanced cost, service and energy use better than its competitors. Sun's dream is to spot the next Google, so it can supply all the kit.

Interestingly, some electricity companies are offering rebates to customers who buy Sun's Niagara servers. Suddenly, you realise that they'd only do this if they were concerned about their potential capacity. Energy companies actually face the real prospect of running out of steam. (No pun intended.)

Reflect on that a bit more and you'll realise that clean sources of power are even more finite than conventional sources. Strato made a smart move by securing hydro-electricity supplies, giving them the right to claim its use of 'carbon-free' electricity. Not strictly true if you think about transmission and plant building etcetera, but you can see its point.

Getting away from energy, what about toxicity and waste? Buying companies need to look at the entire life cycle of their suppliers' products or services. According to Barrington, "it takes two tons of raw material to make a PC." One ton of that is water. Whether it is reused, I have no idea, so one must exercise a degree of caution with the figure. But, two tons for a product that weighs a few pounds and is more or less useless after three or four years seems insane. Unless, of course, the components can be recycled into something of equal or higher value (see McDonough and Braungart's Cradle to Cradle book for more on this theme). Sun has moved to all metal construction for maximum recyclability, not to mention the avoidance of plastics which are made from expensive and harder to recycle hydrocarbons.

Have you considered tape storage from the perspective of energy use? It uses none, except when looking for stuff. Have you considered the changes in lifestyle that certain computing activities bring about? For example, remote working and videoconferencing save travel while online transactions save paper and postal deliveries.

It's actually time to stop simply thinking about virtualisation and datacentre optimisation as the big environmental improvement opportunity. Before long this will be as much a novelty as the 3-1/2" floppy disk was in the mid-eighties. CIOs and their fellow board members will need to consider how IT helps companies to meet their wider environmental obligations.

Link: Data Protection Obligations

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Small/Medium Businesses

Link: Data Protection Obligations

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: SmallBizPod's Small Business Blog

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review