I had an informal meeting with a Distribution Logistics executive.  It was fun trading distribution stories of shipping things in interesting ways around the world.  Distribution logistics was an area I developed interest and expertise at while at HP, and believe it or not Apple Computer recruited me from HP to work on their distribution system, and I was escorted out the door the day I said I took a job at Apple Computer.  When I left Apple to go to Microsoft as a TrueType font expert, escorting me out the door was a given.

One of the good lessons I learned working on distribution is to think of things as boxes and the value of the boxes.  Don't get attached to the products, they come and go, the important thing was to figure out how to move boxes efficiently and quickly. Working on IT systems in many ways are information distribution logistics systems.

One of the interesting Green discussions we had is one of the businesses this executive owns is a dozen executive hotels for corporations. Corporations have adding Green factors as part of the requests. How many things do you have to do to be Green. He's talked with his maintenance staff, and they've installed compact fluorescent light bulbs, and looked at list of other things to do, making ROI calculations. The problem is being Green is not a binary thing, it is a commitment, but some people are treating it is a purchasing criteria. 

After thinking about this executive's situation, I would recommend that he first do an inventory for those things he can promote as Green right now, then after creating the customer Green marketing document, see how many are satisfied. You could set your staff off on thinking of Green projects, but you need to be prepared to educate people how to think in the big picture of whether their green idea is really green or not. If not careful, this can be a demoralizing task as employees are frustrated their ideas are not adopted. This is reminiscent of the employee suggestion box, but Green can introduce a fanatical treehugging factor and people are highly motivated to make a difference.

Be careful, and watch out when Green gets added to IT requirements, it is only a matter of time before it shows up.

See http://greenm3.typepad.com/green_m3_blog/2007/11/a-green-data-ce.html for more about making a commitment vs. binary.

Microsoft allowed us to have a panel discussion, but this panel was not meant as a product pitch.  We had wide industry interest in this subject, but we did not want to make this a product pitch for how companies have greenwashed their products.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwash for a description of this practice.  Let the buyer beware.

As much as Green is topical, we had no idea how many people would attend the session.  Given IT Forum are the technical implementers, this was a good chance to see if the issues are getting down to this audience.

As much as we wanted to fill the room, we ended up with an attendance of less than 1% of the conference. The people who did attend were a still a good sample of getting read on the questions and interests.

We surveyed this sampling to see how many were implenting energy monitoring systems, and it was about 10% of the audience, but given these were people of the 1% who chose to attend the conference, then the number is probably less for the total audience.

The rest of questions and interactions indicated that we are still in the early stages of education and awareness, tranisitioning from the early adopters like Microsoft and Citibank's data centers to customers who are looking for best practices and tools.

Is a Green Data Center where it gets power from?

Or is the question of does Green mean it is alive and healthy?

If a data center constantly adapts and reflects to the conditions and decisions are made to be efficient is that better than whether the power came 100% from wind power?

Microsoft Infrastructure Architect Lewis Curtis and I have had numerous conversations on what is a green data center.  We both agree it is not simple binary decision, but a long term commitment to improve the use of resources to provide data center services.

http://blogs.technet.com/lcurtis/archive/2007/09/18/the-green-datacenter-is-an-architectural-commitment-not-a-product.aspx

Corporate IT initiatives to reduce environmental impact and power consumption is here for the long run. Executives are allocating time, energy and money to invest in Green initiatives. Governments are allocating research, regulations and suggesting laws toward Green Datacenter efficiency. Consumers, policy makers and industry influentials are promoting Green Datacenter models.

We didn't see laws and regulations promoted for SOA, or Agile design, or Web 2.0 or SaaS, … Ten years from now, those initiatives might not even exist, but commitments to reduce environmental impact and power consumption will continue to be important for organizations.

Many view the Green Datacenter as a product feature checklist to gain their one time win. But that is an unfortunate illusion. While new technology from the industry will help, it does not replace the ongoing architectural and process commitment needed.

Green Datacenters = An Architectural Commitment, not a product Strategy

For example, A virtualization or a blade environment product decision has the potential to reduce power consumption. But if there are no processes or architectural guidance to go with it, it can encourage server sprawl and eventually increase power consumption. And of course, increasing rack power density without a aligned cooling architecture is a recipe for datacenter disaster.

Environmental Impact and Power Consumption is becoming a crucial architectural systemic quality metric:

In the past, IT architects gave too little attention to security: Eventually suffering the consequences. Environmental Impact and Power are quickly becoming pervasive architectural issues with new initiatives.