On Sept 9 - 10, I was able to meet in person with Avanade's Toby Velte, as a follow up to my post, Avanade's Anti-Greenwashing Initiative, Part 1.

Toby was nice enough to give me the first copy of his book, but then we met with Christian Belady and we gave him the first copy as it seemed appropriate given Christian's contribution to power and cooling efficiency in the data center and IT equipment.

As we discussed Toby's book, it reminded me to go Green requires a network of expertise. To go Green requires a learning mindset where you you can compare what you are doing vs. others, and integrate ideas that work given your environment.

Toby's book gives you a high level overview of the network of information you will need for a Green IT/Green Data center initiative. Many of the ideas will be ones you've heard before, but some will be new. I don't know of any other source I could point at to help people see the holistic set of issues they face in going Green.

Meeting people like Toby is what makes this Green Data Center area so interesting, and I am having more fun than I have had in a long time.

Oh, I did my own copy of Toby's book and Toby signed my copy.

I like Toby's new tag line.  "Let's DreamIT, then we'll GreenIT!"

You can order Toby's book here.

Part 3 on Avanade Green IT will be coming up when I meet with Avanade's Stephen Fink at Data Center Dynamics Chicago on Sept 16.

Cloud Computing continues to get lots of news.  Here are a few to get you thinking about the impact.

Nicholas Carr discusses Google’s Chrome browser and how it is the client side browser for Cloud Computing.

The cloud's Chrome lining

September 02, 2008

Google's release today of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet "cloud." I distinctly remember when, back in 1988, Apple Computer added MultiFinder to its Macintosh operating system, allowing my beloved Mac Plus to run more than one application at a time. That was, for us Mac users, anyway, a very big deal. Chrome - if we can trust the comic book - promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously. Indeed, it is the first browser built from the ground up with the idea of running applications rather than displaying pages. It takes the browser's file-tab metaphor, a metaphor reflecting the old idea of the web as a collection of pages, and repurposes it for application multitasking. Chrome is the first cloud browser.

GigaOm discusses the move to a hosted Desktop in the cloud model.

Broadband service providers are looking to add higher-value services to their offerings, services that could soon include a virtual desktop for consumers. Indeed, the idea of a service provider offering a PC as a Service (PCaaS), essentially a PC in the cloud, may be coming to your broadband connection sooner than you might think. Here is how a virtual desktop would work: You’d have an access device at your location, called a thin client, which would connect your keyboard, video screen and mouse (KVM) to the service provider’s broadband network. (For more detail on thin clients, see Stacey’s recent post.)

Cassatt’s CEO Bill Coleman writes on Cloud Computing moving in the Enterprise.

Cloud computing is gaining attention among technologists and the wider public, yet its definition remains a bit, well, cloudy. If you wouldn't mind one more cloud computing definition, I rather like mine.

In cloud computing, you care deeply about access to computing, storage, and network resources. You could not care less about where the servers carrying out these processes are located (as long as you keep in mind a few compliance requirements), nor how they are implemented. With cloud computing, what you don't see is what you get, and as long as you get that resource availability for an affordable price, there really is not much need to ask what is going on behind the scenes.
This "traditional" concept of cloud computing has some big stumbling blocks at the moment. My belief, however, is that many of these issues can be addressed by doing something intriguing with the cloud computing idea: bringing it inside your own datacenter.

Gear6’s VP of Marketing, Gary Orenstein, positions his product in a changing infrastructure for Cloud Computing.

The emergence of cloud computing as a way to build and deliver always-on, pay-by-the-drink IT services has emerged as one of the hottest topics this year. Major players -- including Amazon, EMC, Google and IBM -- have promoted offerings that proclaim near infinite-scale computing, storage, database and related Web services that can be easily leveraged by talented developers with a browser.

This paper will specifically focus on how Web-scale and commercial enterprises can benefit from current cloud computing technology trends to build a new class of datacenters that are more autonomous and dynamic than traditional implementations. It also will examine how new cloud computing models enable the rapid scaling and reallocation of resources to a wide variety of customers, delivering core cost and agility benefits to purveyors of cloud computing services. And, specifically, we will explore how the change in application workloads is driving a need for accelerated file services to maintain optimized performance.

Initially, I blew off the Google Chrome browser, but after looking at the comic book description of the product I am going to give it a try as my most common reboot is caused by Internet Explorer.  I don’t know which is more frustrating Outlook or IE.

Had an interesting conversation with an ex-coworker Rob Oikawa  who now works in MSNBC.COM as an architect. We're both old timers for the industry who enjoy thinking out of the box.

After kicking around a bunch of ideas and discussing the Green topic, Rob hit upon a good observation.  He said, "Dave you look for the truth as part of being Green."

2 a (1): the state of being the case : fact (2): the body of real things, events, and facts : actuality (3)often capitalized : a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality b: a judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true <truths of thermodynamics> c: the body of true statements and propositions

Simple observation.  Makes sense.

A green technique is to look for the truth. 

Why add the metering and monitoring to your systems? To look for the truth of performance and consumption.