Political Jockeying around Colorado River Water, $30 - 35 million dollar event

Water is a critical resource, and allocation is a political battle for its use.  This problem has been occuring in the Southeast as well as the Southwest. The NYtimes writes about a 60-hour release of water to improve the fish environment in the Grand Canyon with an electricity cost of $30 - 35 million dollars to replace.

Torrent in Colorado River Is Unleashed to Aid Fish

Matt York/Associated Press

At the Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Ariz., water jetted into the Colorado River on Wednesday to benefit fish in the Grand Canyon.

The 60-hour release, being presided over by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, was the latest chapter in a long-running tug of war between the department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the two major Colorado River dams, and the National Park Service over how to balance the Southwest’s need for hydroelectric power against the needs of an endangered fish, the humpbacked chub, for water flows that mimic the natural rhythms of the river.

The water poured out of the dam as if pumped through a gigantic fire hose, at the rate of 41,500 cubic feet per second — enough to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes. This release, which engineers call “high flow,” was meant to scour the river bottom and deposit silt and sediment to rebuild and extend sandbars and create new, calm backwater areas where the fish can spawn.

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Green IT Consulting will Mushroom, $4.8 Billion by 2013, says Forrester

News.com has post on Green the latest opportunity for consulting firms, and cites Forrester Research:

Green IT consulting will mushroom into a $4.8 billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester Research. The firm polled 130 companies and found that only six used a green IT service provider, but that 6 percent more were planning on it, and another 18 percent were considering it.

Some of the beneficiaries could be firms like Accenture, Deloitte, and EDS, which will start to provide holistic advice on energy efficiency and green corporate practices. IBM already has put together a fairly large effort to capture some of this work and is working with traditional IT customers but also utilities.

I wonder if HP is smiling about its acquisition of EYP.

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Google Demolishes Presbyterian Church, do no evil?

InformationWeek has a picture gallery of Google's data center construction in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  One interesting picture for company with the motto of do no evil is below where a Presbyterian Church will be demolished as part of the construction.  A funny point made by one blogger is do no evil  is an anagram for o no devil seems to be appropriate.

Photo Gallery: Google's Iowa Data Center Emerges

Nearby Presbyterian Church will be demolished.

Photograph by Joshua White/The Daily Nonpareil

For the curious, the reporter also has pictures of the Google The Dalles facility.

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Cool It! Data Centres writes Economist.com

A good friend, Joe Ternasky sent me the link to this Economist article. This article should work well to get the attention of CxOs.

The data centres that power the internet demand a lot of power. Time, then, to make them more efficient

Google

AS ONE industry falls, another rises. The banks of the Columbia River in Oregon used to be lined with aluminium smelters. Now they are starting to house what might, for want of a better phrase, be called data smelters. The largest has been installed by Google in a city called The Dalles. Microsoft and Yahoo! are not far behind. Google's plant consumes as much power as a town of 200,000 people. And that is why it is there in the first place. The cheap hydroelectricity provided by the Columbia River, which once split apart aluminium oxide in order to supply the world with soft-drinks cans and milk-bottle tops, is now being used to shuffle and store masses of information. Computing is an energy-intensive industry. And the world's biggest internet companies are huge energy consumers—so big that they are contemplating some serious re-engineering in order to curb their demand.

The traditional way of building data centres such as Google's is to link clusters of off-the-shelf server computers together in racks. Hundreds, even thousands, of such servers can be combined to achieve the sort of arithmetical horsepower more usually associated with a supercomputer. But the servers all require energy, of course, and so do the electronic links that enable them to work together. On top of that, once the energy has been used it emerges as heat. The advanced cooling systems required to get rid of this heat demand the consumption of more power still.

All of which is expensive. Though the price of computer hardware continues to plunge, the price of energy has been increasing. The result is that the lifetime cost of running a server now greatly outstrips the cost of buying it. A number of researchers are therefore looking for ways to operate big computer centres like the one at The Dalles more efficiently.

The article continues and discusses energy efficient designs by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and IBM.

But, one of the main things this article draws attention to is the point,it is time to make these data centres more energy efficient (greener).  Do you hear the sound of gov't regulation coming?  And, the programs are going to be based on the amount of power you consume, not necessarily the price of your power.  So, even though companies have done like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo move to cheap power, and economically they have side-stepped the issue of power costs, gov'ts could still require energy savings programs be put in place.  And once this starts you need a conformance system to validate your results, and now you are in EPA type of audit situation.

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Microsoft Demos Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning at TechFest

Microsoft Research has a post about one of their Green projects at their TechFest event.  If you are not familiar with Techfest here is a google news search and the Microsoft website.

Auto Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning

Green, as we now know, is, indisputedly, the new black. Seems like you can't turn on the television or pick up a newspaper to read about the latest green initiative. Lots of people are talking.

Feng Zhao is doing something about it.

Zhao's Networked Embedded Computing group is showing a TechFest demo called Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning, which addresses server resource management for Internet services, such as Live Messenger and Hotmail. Data centers for such services require potentially expensive decisions about how many computers to allocate and how those are deployed.

"No. 1," Zhao says, "you have to buy the servers. No. 2, once you buy a server, you have to manage it. And third, you have to have an infrastructure, such as power supply. In this particular study, we looked at the power usage of the servers that are running one of our largest Web services. If you look at the load as it varies over the course of the day, it peaks around noon and slows down around midnight. That clearly shows that not all the servers are needed all the time. Can we shut down some of the servers? Can we actually save energy?"

This demo is the same paper I referred to earlier in another post.

The blog entry continues with the following points made by Feng.

"We also have all these sensors in the data centers," Zhao says. "Some of the machines work harder than others. If we can move the workload around, from hotspots to cool spots, the air conditioning doesn’t have to work as hard, because of the efficiency of cooling the hottest spots. If you move that workload and even out the temperature disparities, that means good energy savings. Incorporating environmental-sensor readings such as temperature and humidity, and couple that with smart scheduling and workload migration, and we believe we can even save more resources."

That sounds green, indeed--and economical, too. 

"What it translates to," Zhao concludes, "is that you use less power and that, with these smarts, we can figure out that maybe we don’t need to buy that many machines to start with, because we can do the same work, with very little difference in performance, and actually run it on a smaller set of machines. Reduce energy cost and reduce hardware investment in the first place--that would reduce service cost, reduce staffing, and reduce the space you need to build."

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