Users need More Data to Make Better Decisions, Energy Star for Computer Servers

The Energy Star Program Requirements for Computer Servers has been out for weeks, and HP just announced the first Energy Star Server.

HP gets a gold (Energy) Star

By Andy Patrizio on June 5, 2009 8:09 PM

HP is the first server vendor to earn an Energy Star Seal. A few weeks back, the EPA launched a program that would allow servers to slap an Energy Star logo on their servers, giving vendors some new bragging rights.
The EPA said the program would allow current models to meet the specs, because it designed the spec based on current technology, not something out in the future.
Well, HP is the first to earn Energy Star for Enterprise Servers. As of June 1, the ProLiant DL360 G6 1U model and three configurations of the DL360 G6 2U model get the star. No doubt Dell and IBM are working feverishly for their stars as well.

But, I held off on on blogging the release of the specification as there was plenty of media coverage.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with and getting to know the group of people who work on the energy star server specification, and we just met this last week to discuss where things are and what is next.

One of the questions I have been thinking about is why users should care of the specification. A simple approach is to use the idea of User Stories.

A user story is a software system requirement formulated as one or two sentences in the everyday or business language of the user. User stories are used with Agile software development methodologies for the specification of requirements (together with acceptance tests).

So, if you apply the user story idea to what the Energy Star program for computer servers.

'”As an enterprise consumer I need server performance and energy data to make decisions on what is the right server for our IT loads.”

As news.com reports.

The specification, which has been under development for a few years, is designed to give buyers a starting point for evaluating the energy-efficiency of servers, according to Andrew Fanara, a program manager for Energy Star at the Environmental Protection Agency.

It includes a common "power and performance data sheet" that reports energy data in a common format. Compliant products will also have relatively efficient power supplies, which means they will give off less waste heat.

Other criteria are the ability to report energy-related statistics to data center management software and relatively efficient idling, Fanara said.

Sounds like version 1.0 is a good step in the area of meeting consumer requirements of needing data. I don’t think it is nearly as important to have a energy star logo, as have data that is measured consistently across different servers.

How would you like it if car manufacturers weren’t forced by consumers to use numbers like MPG, HP, Torque ft-lbs, 0-60, lateral g, etc.

I think if the Energy Star group started it’s presentation with the story.

'”As an enterprise consumer I need server performance and energy data to make decisions on what is the right server for our IT loads.”

A lot more people would understand why it is a good thing.

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Carbon Emissions Monitoring Patent, a Good or Bad PR stunt?

News.com reports on a carbon emissions monitoring patent.

by Martin LaMonica

Verisae, a small Minnesota-based company, has received a patent for a system to track and report greenhouse gas emissions with software, a business attracting a growing field of companies.

The company on Wednesday said that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent to Verisae for a method for calculating a corporation's emissions. The patent, filed in May of 2007, describes a business process for gathering corporate emissions data, generating reports, and managing carbon credits.

Verisae is already offering hosted carbon accounting software focused primarily on retail companies, basing its tracking and reporting on the protocols established by the nonprofit Climate Registry, which sets guidelines for emissions reporting.

This is clearly a PR stunt as Verisae has their press release that the patent was awarded on Oct 21, 2008. 

This may be good pr on the surface.  or is it bad PR? There are many governments who want open source solutions. Having a patent is good for your shareholders, but do customers want patented software for carbon emissions?

News.com reports on other companies getting into the carbon emissions reporting business.

On Monday, start-up Hara Software, backed by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, announcedits Web-based software. SAP purchased another carbon accounting company, Clear Standards, earlier this year in a sign of consolidation among providers.

If I was going to place bets, the carbon emissions will be consolidated into those who have the customer relationships with finance.

Why isn’t carbon emissions just another feature of the financial reporting systems?

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Green Data Center Tip, Security and Green Monitoring

Just got off the phone with a IT reporter and he was asking about Security and Green IT.

Found this article.

How To Design Green AND Secure Buildings

The secure and the environmentally-friendly almost always conflict when designing a building. But experts at an "intelligent building" seminar demonstrated how security features can actually help make a structure green

» Comments

By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor

March 05, 2009 — CSO —

Put a security guy in a room with an environmentalist and ask them to design a building. Wait five minutes and you'll hear fists pounding tables, chairs hitting walls and a steady flow of profanity.

The problem? Green features are often seen as a vulnerability to the security professional while security features are often considered ugly and wasteful to the designer who wants to make a structure green.

But it doesn't have to be this way, according to a group of experts who gathered in Woburn, Mass., Wednesday for a seminar on intelligent building design. A main focus of the event -- hosted by integrated building management systems vendor TAC -- was to demonstrate how the secure and the green can exist in the same space and even compliment one another.

The key tip was to have one system that can monitor security and energy factors.

"Security performs a lot of the functionality that building automation does to control energy consumption, such as turning lights off and on, controlling thermostats and notifying you when a door or window has been left open," he said. "The same technology used for access control and security can also be used to measure and conserve energy."

Environmentally-friendly access control
For example, he said, surveillance cameras installed to monitor who is coming in and out of a room can also be used to measure light levels and notify building managers if a light is burning too brightly or if something has been left on. Access control can be used to keep tabs on energy consumption just as easily as it can be used to limit an employee's access to certain IT systems and corridors, Hess said.

How many people design one system to do security and environmental monitoring? 

To drive home the point, seminar organizers began the track of security presentations with an overview of new buildings planned for the University of Massachusetts' Amherst campus. The university's $640 million capital improvement plan for new research buildings and other structures are full of green features. But when pressed by attendees, UMass facilities planner Thomas Huf admitted the plans were lacking in terms of security controls.

"We don't have a central security design at this point," Huf said.

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Technical Greenmetrics Conference, June 15 2009

fyi, there is a SIG Greenmetrics conference on June 15, 2009 in Seattle.

GreenMetrics 2009 Workshop
June 15, 2009 - Seattle, WA
*Subject to Change*

Monday, June 15, 2009

08:00 -- 08:30

Opening Remarks and Introduction

08:30 -- 09:30

Keynote: Charles Kalko, Operation Excellence Program Lead, eBay
(Title TBA)

09:30 -- 9:50

COFFEE BREAK

9:50 -- 10:30

Session 1: Networks
"Energy Efficient Management of two Cellular Access Networks," Marco
Marsan and Michela Meo (Politecnico di Torino,)
"Fair Greening for DSL Broadband Access," Paschalis Tsiaflakis
(Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Yung Yi (KAIST), Mung Chiang
(Princeton), Marc Moonen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

10:30 -- 11:10

Session 2: Servers and Data Centers
"Blackbox Prediction of the Impact of DVFS on End-to-End Performance
of Multi-Tiered Systems," Shuyi Chen (UIUC), Kaustubh Joshi (AT&T
Research), Matti Hiltunen (AT&T Research), Richard Schlichting (AT&T
Research), William Sanders (UIUC)
"Quantifying the Sustainability Impact of Data Center Availability,"
M. Marwah (HP Labs), P. Maciel (UFPE), A. Shah (HP Labs), R. Sharma
(HP Labs), T. Christian (HP Labs), V. Almeida (UFMG), C. Araujo (UFPE), E. Souza (UFPE), G. Callou (UFPE), B. Silva (UFPE), S. Galdino (UFPE), J. Pires (HP Brazil)

11:10 -- 11:50

Session 3: Industry Initiatives
"Product Environmental Metrics for Printers," Jason Ord, Scott
Canonico, Tim Strecker and Ellen Chappell (Hewlett-Packard Company)
"The Sustainability Hub: An Information Management Tool for Analysis
and Decision Making," Steve Cayzer and Chris Preist (Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories)

11:50 -- 12:00

Closing Comments

Registration is here.

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Problem: Carbon Neutral Marketing Paints an Environmental Target on Companies, Google’s Latest Pains

News.com has a post on Google’s Carbon Neutral marketing.

May 7, 2009 2:42 PM PDT

Do Google's carbon offsets add up to much?

by Martin LaMonica

Google, a company that runs power-hungry data centers, employs thousands of people, and operates a corporate jet, said on Wednesday that it was carbon neutral for the past two years. How so? Offsets.

The idea of a carbon offset is to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions of a company or person by investing in a project that reduces emissions from the atmosphere.

Google sees offsets as an imperfect method for lowering their total carbon footprint, among other efforts. To detractors, offsets are essentially greenwashing when companies do little more than buy offsets to meet their environmental sustainability goals.

There are many routes an offset purchase can go: wind energy farms, siphoning off methane from landfills, or making buildings more energy efficient. There's an entire industry around offsets, which can be voluntary--as Google has purchased--or regulated in countries that have climate change regulations.

Without offsets, a company--no matter green--would have a hard time claiming to be carbon neutral simply because energy consumption means pollution. Achieving carbon neutrality is complicated by the fact that there isn't universal agreement on how to account for a company's carbon emissions: should it include just a company's operations or also its supply chain and end use of its products?

But, here is part of the problem. This article was posted on May 7, 2:42p. Three days later, May 10, this article is still at the top of the home page on news.com.  This means news.com is getting lots of traffic on this article as it is a combination of google, environmental, and questioning google’s action.

image

I had a nice conversation with Bill Weihl at Uptime’s conference, and he is a technology geek like many of us, and not a marketing guy. What seemed like a simple thing to do to discuss 2 years of carbon neutrality actually made Google a target for many environmental groups.

Even hard-core climate activists see offsets as problematic. Climate advocate Joseph Romm, who writes for the Climate Progress blog, calls them "rip-offsets."

The problem ultimately comes down to how effective offsets are in actually reducing emissions, he says. Offset claims are very difficult to verify, and doing a lifeycle analysis of an offset project--what is the exact net reduction of a landfill methane project?--are very easy to fudge, according to Romm.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office last August published a report saying it's particularly difficult to ensure "additionality." In other words: does a purchased offset truly represent an greenhouse gas reduction above and beyond business as usual. For example, some offsets were tied to a company that was already forced to capture methane to meet existing environmental rules.

Some may see this coverage as bad PR, limiting what can be discussed on this topic and controlling the sharing of information. 

But, I think Google will roll with the coverage, and keep up their efforts with more information. Because, now millions of people have heard Google is carbon neutral.  Yahoo, Dell, and ebay are all carbon neutral as well, but none of them get the coverage Google does.

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