Microsoft’s Mike Manos Throws Olive Branch to Uptime, will Ken Brill Accept Peace or Keep up his Insanity & Propaganda?

November 3, 2008 Dave Ohara

OK, I was a skeptic of Ken Brill’s craziness accusing Microsoft and Google of being the data center enemy, but Mike Manos has a post referencing one of his staff was at the event where Ken spoke.

In disappointment, there is opportunity. . .

November 3, 2008 by mmanos

I was personally greatly disappointed with the news coming out of last week that the Uptime Institute had branded Microsoft and Google as the enemy to traditional data center operators. To be truthful, I did not give the reports much credit especially given our long and successful relationship with that organization. However, when our representatives to the event returned and corroborated the story, I have to admit that I felt more than a bit let down.

I am in the process of writing an interview of Sun’s Dean Nelson, and Dean specifically credits Microsoft and Google’s data center openness as being one of the best things for the industry. I bet most of you agree with Dean.

Does anyone agree with Ken Brill?

Mike took the high road and offered an Olive Branch of Peace.

Lets not Overreact, There is yet hope

While many people (external and internal) approached me about pulling out of the Uptime organization entirely or even suggesting that we create a true non-for-profit end user forum, motivated by technology and operations issues alone, I think its more important to stay the course. As an industry we have so much yet to accomplish. We are at the beginning of some pretty radical changes in both technology, operations, and software that will define our industry in the coming decades. Now is not the time to splinter but instead redouble our efforts to work together in the best interests of all involved.

Others are curious what is motivating Ken. Is he on drugs? Has he gone crazy? Accusing Microsoft and Google as being the enemy?

1: one that is antagonistic to another ; especially : one seeking to injure, overthrow, or confound an opponent

2: something harmful or deadly <alcohol was his greatest enemy>

3 a: a military adversary b: a hostile unit or force

If Microsoft and Google are the enemy, if you believe in what Microsoft and Google’s methods of focusing on PUE are you too an enemy of Uptime Institute?

Is The Green Grid an enemy?

Is the EPA an enemy given their efforts to work with Microsoft and Google?

Uptime’s next Symposium is about Lean, Clean and Green.

SYMPOSIUM 2009: LEAN, CLEAN & GREEN

Grapple with the challenges of enterprise IT in the era of power grid shortages, escalating consumption, cost increases, and carbon footprint growth at the 4th Annual Institute Research Symposium: LEAN, CLEAN, and GREEN (April 13-16, 2009, Hilton New York Hotel).

Share knowledge on innovation in alternative energy, efficiency transformation, non-toxic recyclable electronics, and truly green data center operations.

Help the industry develop approaches to high-density data center computing that are more economically, operationally, and environmentally sustainable.

To be Lean, Clean & Green you think Microsoft and Google are your enemies. So, Microsoft and Google believe in fat, dirty, and brown?

All this illogical.

Sounds like Uptimes is practicing propaganda.

Propaganda is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of thecognitive narrative of the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda.

Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

—Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion

It is sad, but I don’t think Ken will accept the Olive Branch and set a path of peace with Microsoft and Google.

NOTE: I used the war/energy analogy to show how silly this is to call Microsoft and Google an enemy.

Microsoft CIO Uses MPG Analogy for Problem with Green IT

October 24, 2008 Dave Ohara

Ran across this post by Microsoft’s CIO Tony Scott on news.com

You are here for an environmental conference, EcoForum. I'm curious what is going on in that area? I know power is a big issue
Scott: Most CIOs have come to recognize that both their employees and the customers of the company want to know that the company that they are either working for or buying products from is acting in an ecologically responsible way and that you take these issues seriously. From a Microsoft standpoint, we have some great products on virtualization. We're also here talking about that and here learning what other companies are doing.

In our own space we've gone from 8 percent to 25 percent virtualization in our data centers in just a year. Next year we think we are going to hit 50 percent. That's as dramatic a progress as I've seen, any company anywhere.

One of the things I am convinced of is that the entire technology community is going to have to come together to solve some of these issues. I came out of automotive. There was a day when if you wanted to know car gas mileage you had to write down the mileage, then drive and write down the mileage again. Then you went to the gas station and did long division to figure out what your gas mileage was. Eventually as the world got interested in this a chip got built in every car. Most cars have a chip built in to tell you what your miles per gallon is.

We don't have the functional equivalent to that in the IT world. As a CIO, you really want to know, what is this app costing me, all up? It's the people resources and the energy costs. The tools to do it are emerging but we are not there yet.

It shouldn't be that hard. If the technology community works together and develops the right standards and interfaces, one day you will be able to say here's my compute factor or my miles per gallon in terms of the technologies we use. With that we should be able to do a better job of managing our resources. I'm hopeful we could get that done.

With all Microsoft’s talk on PUE the data is in the data center on power consumed by servers.

The next step is getting the applications to calculate power used to complete the work, publishing a watts per unit of work.

Hopefully one of these days the application developers will pull their head out of a feature focused view, and think about resources they consume.

Fuel-Saving Devices for the Car

October 21, 2008 Dave Ohara

There are three devices now out there for saving fuel in the car.

Building a DIY Fuel-Saving Gadget, Cheap Tech Gets Big Results

Recently, I discussed a couple of high-tech gadgets for fuel economy, theScanGauge and the HKS CAMP2. Both plug into the OBD II port on your 1996-up vehicle to give you a real-time mileage readout. These devices are really great to help you fine-tune your driving style for the best fuel economy. And I've just started evaluating a third device, the PLX Kiwi, which is so consumer-oriented and so much fun to use, it might even help retrain the driving habits of all those nongearheads in your family.

I have a carchip device.

If you want to get more monitor and meter your car consider one of these devices.

The carchip is the cheapest device $100, but is not a real time feedback the way the other devices are.

Plus I only drive 3,000 miles a year. Recently added amazon.com prime and a kindle to my list of purchases, so I get out less and less. More time to think. :-)

Sun use DCiE (1/PUE) in its Eco Services Offering

October 6, 2008 Dave Ohara

Looking up what companies are leveraging PUE or DCiE, I found this marketing document on Sun's website, Accurately Measuring Datacenter Power Efficiency.

You can tell this was written by a marketing team as there is no mention of DCiE or PUE, even though it shows this formula.

I ran a search on IBM's website and I can't find any mention of PUE except in a powerpoint presentation by Eaton.

Maybe Sun can help Google measure its data centers below 5MW.

Google says they eliminated data for facilities below 5MW.

Such a strong claim demands evidence, especially in light of recent criticism of companies "gaming the numbers." On this page we will explain our measurements in detail to ensure that they are realistic and accurate. It is worth noting that we only show data for facilities with an actual IT load above 5MW, to eliminate any inaccuracies that can occur when measuring small values. This section is aimed at data center experts, but we have tried to make it accessible to a general technical audience as well.

If we believe Google's claim that you can't measure accurately below 5MW (google's definition of a small value), then the majority of data centers have an excuse for not publishing their numbers as they can't be accurate according to Google PR/Marketing.

What is the true reason why Google excludes data centers below 5MW?

Too expensive to instrument.
Google doesn't have any data centers it built below 5MW.
The PUE of these data centers is high.
Google doesn't have good data on the data centers below 5MW.
There are a lot of less than 5MW data centers, and it was easier to talk about a few big energy efficient data centers.
Instrumentation is inaccurate at less than 5MW.

Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints, Transportation Less than 1% of footprint

October 6, 2008 Dave Ohara

WSJ has an informative article on the carbon footprint of six products.

[The Journal Report: Environment]

First came organic. Then came fair trade. Now makers of everything from milk to jackets to cars are starting to tally up the carbon footprints of their products. That's the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that get coughed into the air when the goods are made, shipped and stored, and then used by consumers.
In the Gelsi household, reducing their carbon footprint is a family affair -- they even wrote a musical about it. MarketWatch reporter Steve Gelsi offers tips for saving the environment and saving money while doing so.
So far, these efforts raise as many questions as they answer. Different companies are counting their products' carbon footprints differently, making it all but impossible for shoppers to compare goods. And even if consumers come to understand the numbers, they might not like what they find out.
For instance, many products' global-warming impact depends less on how they're made than on how they're used. That means the easiest way to cut carbon emissions may be to buy less of a product or use it in a way that's less convenient

Patagonia had a dose of reality calculating transportation was 1% of the carbon footprint.

Patagonia Inc.'s Talus jacket looks like a naturalist's dream. In fact, its carbon footprint is 66 pounds. That, Patagonia notes on its Web site, is 48 times the weight of the jacket itself.
Over the past year, the Ventura, Calif., outdoor-equipment maker has computed and posted on its Web site the carbon footprints of 15 of its products. Because most of Patagonia's products are made in Asia or Latin America and sold in the U.S., the company expected that a big chunk of the carbon footprints came from transportation. It was wrong.
The fabric for the Talus is made in China, the zippers come from Japan, and the jacket is sewn in Vietnam. Yet all that transportation adds up to less than 1% of the product's total carbon footprint, Patagonia says. The majority of the footprint -- 71%, or about 47 pounds -- comes in producing the polyester, which originates with oil.
"If we had listened to the rhetoric out there at the time, which was all around miles, we could have spent years rearranging our supply chain to reduce transportation, when really that's not the bulk of our concern," says Jill Dumain, Patagonia's director for environmental analysis. "There's a lot of reasons to have a tight supply chain, but environmentalism isn't one of them."