Teblog

BCS to help data centre decision making

People around the world are tearing their hair out trying to get to grips with environmental issues. well, some of them are, anyway. Should they replace their car or run it into the ground? Should they commute to the office or work from home? Should they buy power-efficient servers or stick with the old stuff?

They've heard that new stuff comes with an embodied environmental footprint, but how do they know what it is? And they know that disposing of stuff can cause environmental damage, so what do they do?

These question and many more, have been around for years but information is hard to come by. It's not like a fridge or a washing machine that has a dead easy sticker on it. It almost doesn't matter what the bars mean if you go for the shortest and greenest then you're doing your bit for the environment.

When it comes to computing, you can find plenty of sources of information, but nothing as simple as a fridge sticker. Energy Star, EPEAT, RoHS and the Carbon Disclosure Project are just a few of the big names. Then you have the so called carbon calculators, device comparators and, in the data centre, computational fluid dynamics, among other things. It takes a lot of time to rummage this stuff and figure out the environmental implications of what you're buying. And, of course, it's constantly changing.

Welcome then, to the British Computer Society's initiative with the Carbon Trust to produce a way of modelling the intricacies and interrelationships of the equipment in a data centre to churn out the cost and energy implications of your choices. The catchily-named BCS Data Centre Energy and Cost Simulator started beta trials last week and is expected to go live next March, but you can get a head start and buy your way into the beta programme for £25k (half price if you're a non-profit). Assuming there are any places left in the 20-organisation trial.

The modeller looks at the following elements of the data centre: application workload, IT devices, PDUs, IPS, air flow, CRACs, outside climate, chiller, power cost energy use and carbon intensity. Variations in each of these are taken into account. For example, the climate varies by location and by time of day. The CRAC load varies by climate. The energy cost varies by thetime it is purchased. The carbon intensity varies by the source of energy.

You get the idea. The project is open source and extensible with new components and XML data. The outputs are clear - 3D wireframe graphs, bar charts and the like.

The modelling system restricts itself to the data centre but it seems to me that it would make a useful component in a broader system. One of the speakers mentioned that the CMA, now part of the BCS, is also working with the Carbon Trust on helping UK businesses make better use of ICT to significantly reduce carbon emissions, with the emphasis on the communications element, as you might expect.

If things go according to plan, you can expect more initiatives from this quarter. I'll keep you posted.

Putting email in its place

A very brave chap I know, called Luis Suarez, has dared to challenge his company's predilection for email. Email was used for everything. File sharing and editing, appointment bookings, conversations, seeking help, status reporting... Whatever the question, email was the answer. Everyone used it. It must be right.

Hmmm. Sometimes 'received wisdom' is absolutely not right. At least not for all circumstances. Have you tried group editing a Word document? It's fine in theory with the Track Changes and all. But it breaks down the moment more than two people are involved. And, even then, it breaks down unless responsibility is handed over with each exchange of the document.

This is why the wiki came about. It allows people to pitch in at their convenience and maintains a decent version history to boot. Word could still be used for final polishing but, for getting the content right, wikis take some beating. They also, it has to be said, take some getting used to for people with an email mentality.

We have become so used to the convenience of creating email - whack in a few cc's and a bcc just in case - we forget that it has a dark side. Unless you have very sophisticated filters, emails crave attention. They arrive, loaded with content which has to be scanned, at least.

Compare that with an instant message, a Twitter tweet or an RSS feed. They are all means of communicating. They're fairly unobtrusive, but they can lead to great value. They can be scanned quickly and only those that require attention be acted on. In a group setting, a chat group - such as those that can be set up in Skype - is ideal. First you can see if there's anyone around, then you might ask, "Hey, anyone know who's organising the Office 2.0 conference?" Someone would answer and all the others know they don't have to bother. Compare that with an email asking the same question. If there are nine in the group, that's potentially eight responses - and each of those would probably be cc'ed to the other seven.

Sure, email has its place, but it's a much smaller place than you'd imagine in group work. It's fine for one on one contact and for confidential exchanges, although not always. While writing this, I've heard from Luis via Skype and Twitter - little things - exchanges of information, planning a visit. Nothing much, not worth an email, but it helped us move two other discussions forward (one on debating behaviour, another on mind-mapping) at a minuscule time cost.

Of course, group collaboration isn't for everyone. It requires an openness, a transparency and a potential exposure that makes some exceedingly nervous. But group working, especially across disciplines and between insiders and outsiders (customer, suppliers) is becoming a vital part of business these days. The firewall isn't going to disappear, but it's certainly shimmering at the edges as insiders and outsiders exploit social media for mutual benefit.

I'm still troubled by the thought that I can't easily find stuff that I know is lying around somehere in all these different pools of information. But that's maybe a problem with the way my life is (dis)organised. And, anyway, I find that the change to my grey matter has so much more value than the actual stored words.

I have to take my hat off to Luis Suarez' achievements: during the past six months, he's dropped the number of emails per day from 30-45 per day to 22-30 per week. And he's achieved this within the confines of a large organisation. Okay, his job title is 'Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist' and he has a good reason for promoting these ideas. But he's not from some fluffy social computing startup. He works for IBM.

National EPEATs needed now

It doesn't matter who you ask in the 'environmental IT' world, no-one can point to a single authoritative source of hard UK or EU information on IT purchases. I've rummaged all the reports about how to go about both greening IT and on how to use IT to green the organisation, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty, answers there are none.

We have to scour the spec' sheets then make intelligent guesses, trust the vendors' claims or use another country's standards. And, frankly, the most respected one is in the USA. It's called EPEAT, which stands for Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool. It is mandated in US Federal Government purchasing and it is used as the preferred criterion by many green-aware organisations.

EPEAT offers a self-certifying process to manufacturers, which sounds dodgy, but it isn't. Transparency has become obligatory and, in any case, the EPEAT folk have a verification process. The companies' products have to comply with the IEEE 1680-2006 standard for environmental performance. And so many companies have signed up that it has become a sort of Olympic arena for them to slog it out for bronze, silver and gold environmental medals.

The problem with EPEAT for buyers outside America is that the equipment is quite often configured differently. It would be terrific if the organisation could spread its wings, but there's no sign of this happening, although I do remember reading that Computacenter has adopted and adapted EPEAT to help its own customers.

What we need is something a bit more ubiquitous. One organisation that has been involved in this space for years is UK CEED. This stands for the 'UK Centre for Economic and Environmental Development'. Part funded by government and partly by business, it covers a wide range of environmental issues, including IT. Its chief executive, Jonathan Selwyn, says, "We believe that comparable energy and other environmental data should be made available for all products to consumers.  EPEAT is a valuable first step voluntary initiative that deserves to be supported by all manufacturers and a UK-version is much needed."

Hear hear, matey, hear hear.

Now who's going to step up to the plate?

Hacking through the green jungle

If you want to lead a guilt-laden and depressing life, get yourself a machete and try hacking your way through the environmental jungle. No sooner do you read a news report or a piece of research which raises your spirits, than you read another which dashes them down again.

"Government cuts emissions". Hooray. "MoD admits that a large slice of its savings resulted from the sale of QinetiQ to the private sector." Boo.

Of course it's not just the government, it's anyone and everyone. "Tebbutt slashes carbon in move to smaller home." Hooray. "But then flies to California to discuss sustainability with HP." Boo.

Life is full of these ghastly paradoxes. I was reading about Hewlett Packard's amazing environmental savings. Just like IBM, Cisco and many other IT vendors, it appears to be doing a fine job of becoming planet friendlier. But then I read that the company had to spend billions of dollars to achieve these savings.

Someone once said 'no pain, no gain.' It certainly seems to apply here.

To be fair, the environmental savings were a by-product of the restructuring of HP's IT system. It set out to halve the annual IT bill from four percent to two percent of revenue. And, with a turnover of $109bn, it's not difficult to do the sums. 'Billions' spread over the project's three years could have been a bargain with savings of over $2bn per annum.

Making the decision to spend real money today is not easy. It's a bit like deciding whether to keep the old car with its naff fuel consumption or buy a new car which sips the juice and get a payback eventually. And it's not just a financial issue. The new car comes loaded with an embedded footprint but this, too, will eventually be compensated for by the reduced emissions. Not an easy calculation.

Whether it's cars or computers, you still have the awkwardness of what to do with the stuff you're abandoning. I think the HP kit got re-used if the spec' was up to it or sold on if not.

The opening paragraph of IBM's Vision for the New Enterprise Data Center says "You can't make the world move slower. Or change where markets are headed." This is a fact of 21st century life. And, you won't be surprised if I tell you that HP's percentage of IT spend is firmly tied to turnover. HP, like all the other global vendors,  has huge aspirations in the emerging markets, so the cost of its IT in absolute terms will rise again. And, along with that, so will the HP's impact on the environment. Back to those ghastly paradoxes.

HP isn't alone of course. Listen very carefully when other companies talk of reducing emissions by x percent. You'll find that most of them are talking about per employee, per citizen or per unit of output. In other words, it's still an increase in impact on the planet. I have to take my hat off to Cisco which, when challenged on this very issue, said that its planned carbon savings are in absolute terms rather than relative to its growth.

As I've mentioned before, ICT does have the saving grace of helping to cut emissions from other parts of the organisation - travel, transport, smart grids, intelligent buildings and so on - depending on the nature of the business. 

If we get the equation right, we can exchange the guilt and depression for a net bottom-line gain and a corresponding benefit for the planet.

Update: Bob Sakakeeny at Hewlett Packard wrote to me to say "note that HP's goals are absolute as well.  See http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/gcreport/energy/goals.html "