Microsoft’s Smart Grid Water Solution, OSIsoft Vancouver, BC Video

I just blogged about IBM’s Water Smart Grid, and my readers pointed out there is an existing solution from Microsoft with OSIsoft as a partner.

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The below video has details.

Environmental Sustainability IT Software by OSIsoft
Environmental Sustainability IT Software by OSIsoft

The above picture is CEO of OSIsoft Pat Kenndy, and here is a case study that discusses some of his views.

OSIsoft

Cleaner Air, Cleaner Water

At age 64, J. Patrick Kennedy still plays a great game of tennis. But, as he’s the first to admit, it’s not the same game of tennis he played almost half a century ago in high school.

“I find that as I get older, the game is less about pure force and more about placement,” says Kennedy. “It’s about conserving your energy and directing the ball right where you want it to go.”

Kennedy might just as well be talking about the environmental sustainability. That’s another interest of Kennedy’s—a professional interest this time, given that Kennedy is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of OSIsoft, the San Leandro, California-based maker of the PI System: a real-time performance management infrastructure that measures and records the activity of equipment, products, and processes throughout a company.

Although Kennedy and OSIsoft didn’t set out to become major players in the global effort for environmental sustainability, that’s the way it’s turned out. OSIsoft’s software products help companies worldwide to address this pressing global issue. Many companies know only their aggregated energy or water consumption and their carbon emissions—long after the fact. OSIsoft provides companies with timely information about exactly where and how energy is being consumed and emissions generated. This information is made available to those who can act on it in a timely way, and see the result. Companies use this data to identify work practices and faults that result in resource loss, address those inefficiencies and, thus, reduce greenhouse gas production while lowering their resource consumption.

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Another of OSIsoft’s customers is the Halifax Regional Water Commission (HRWC), the first regulated water, wastewater, and storm water utility in Canada. HRWC is a fully-metered utility that provides drinking water to about 325,000 residents of Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) through a 1,300km (more than 1,000 miles) pipe network.

The PI System enables HRWC to collect, analyze, and disseminate data from more than 120 meters across its treatment and distribution facilities. With this information, it can then determine the period of a leak, the amount of leakage, and narrow the location to a specific district-metered area. Consequently, the PI System has been a key contributor to HRWC’s daily reduction in leakage of almost 9 million gallons of potable water. This reduction translates to a savings of more than U.S.$550,000 per year.

And, you can use OSISoft in the data center, Microsoft does.

OSIsoft software is also helping to address energy consumption in an area that affects virtually every large company and every person with an e-mail address or access to the Internet: the data center. Data centers may account for between 1.2 and 2 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States—and, if counted as its own industry, would be the fastest-growing electrical energy consumer in the U.S. and one of the top five in terms of energy use. Microsoft, which is rapidly expanding its datacenter operations to support its Microsoft Live and related service offerings, is one of the growing number of companies using OSIsoft software to help conserve data center energy consumption.

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Green Software Unconference, Aug 19, 2009 - DCeP

Just saw tomorrow, Aug 19  is an unconference on Green Software in SJ.

An Unconference About Green Software: Exploring Its Meaning and Applications
by Zen Kishimoto

The Green Software Unconference is scheduled for August 19 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Since this is an unconference, there is no set agenda or program. But its theme is clear: What is green software and what can we do with it?

As everyone knows, IT includes many elements, such as hardware, software, systems, services, and staffs.  Yet, when it comes to green IT, most of the focus has been on hardware. For example, one aspect of green IT is to cut power consumption. When you consider the power consumption of IT equipment, you measure power consumption by hardware devices, such as servers, even though hardware devices consist of both hardware and software. Most discussions have centered on how to make hardware devices more energy efficient. The well-known data center metric PUE (power usage effectiveness) primarily concerns hardware. The newer and supposedly better metric DCeP (data center energy productivity) still measures hardware performance alone, although software running on a hardware box may make a big difference in energy efficiency.

If anyone attends, feel free to contact me and I’ll write see if I can write a blog entry.

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Fund your Virtualization Project with Utilities' Energy Efficiency Incentives

VMware has a page useful for looking for Energy Efficiency incentives from Utilities.  This list is good to use even if you don’t use VMware.

Help Pay for Virtualization with Energy Efficiency Incentives

Virtualization is a proven solution for increasing energy efficiency, and many major utility providers now offer financial incentives for virtualization projects that result in the reduction of physical servers in the datacenter. By participating in these incentive programs, you can achieve even greater financial savings with VMware virtualization solutions while significantly reducing the carbon footprint of your IT infrastructure

Several major utility providers in the United States and Canada currently offer such incentives, including:

Many other utility companies are investigating similar programs; contact your local utility provider for more information.

Energy efficiency incentives are typically paid following the completion of a qualifying server consolidation project. These incentives cover direct energy savings (cooling costs are excluded) and can result in incentives as high as $400 per server..

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Washington State Sales Tax Drives Microsoft Windows Azure Servers to Texas

Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNnet picked up news on Microsoft’s decision to remove USA- Northwest from a deployment choice for Windows Azure.

Tax concerns to push Microsoft Azure cloud hosting out of Washington state

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:55 am

Microsoft is making preparations to move applications that developers are hosting on its Azure cloud infrastructure out of its Washington state datacenter, due to a change in the tax laws there.

Microsoft warned customers testing their apps on the Azure test release about the planned change earlier this week. Microsoft is readying a migration tool to help testers with the move, company officials said.

Cloud-computing and .Net expert Roger Jennings put together all the various reports and clues into a detailed August 5 post on his OakLeaf Systems blog.

Mary Jo does a good job of referencing where the news came from.

The Windows Azure team.

As Jennings noted, on August 3, the Windows Azure team announced plans to disable the “USA - Northwest” option for new Azure-hosted applications. (Existing applications that are part of the Azure beta may be allowed to remain hosted in the Quincy, Wash., datacenter, as the Microsoft blog post says. Later on, the team appears to contradict that fact, however, saying all apps and storage would be moved.)

From the Azure team’s post:

“This change is in preparation for our migration out of the northwest region. Due to a change in local tax laws, we’ve decided to migrate Windows Azure applications out of our northwest data center prior to our commercial launch this November. This means that all applications and storage accounts in the ‘USA - Northwest’ region will need to move to another region in the next few months, or they will be deleted.”

One error is she references data center knowledge this year, but it was actually a year and a half ago in Mar 2008 where Rich Miller reported on the Washington state sales tax change.

Earlier this year, there were reports that Microsoft (and Yahoo) had halted datacenter construction in Quincy. At that time, many company watchers believed the halt was likely temporary and was due to the poor economy. It turns out it was due to a Washington state tax change, as DataCenter Knowledge explained.

“Late last year Washington State attorney general Rob McKenna ruled that data centers were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment.”

I wrote my own blog entry Mar 2008.

The details of what is in the interpretation are:

In their Nov. 21 written response to Holmquist, McKenna and Assistant Attorney General Suzanne Shaw found that the state law establishing the tax break intends that "manufacturing does not include 'the production of computer software if the computer software is delivered from the seller to the purchaser by means other than tangible storage media, including the delivery by use of a tangible storage media where the tangible storage media is not physically transferred to the purchaser.' As we understand it, with respect to data accessed and manipulated by the Internet companies' customers under the circumstances about which you inquire, there neither is a sale nor transfer of electronic data through a tangible storage medium."

So, if there was an energy consuming wasteful retail software facility, the companies would get the tax break.  But, given they use the Internet to deliver software, no tax break. How wasteful is that?

Ultimately, this is all about Washington State going after tax revenue in a year when they are going to have shortfalls, and long term they are going to drive data centers to other states.

Here is the Windows Azure blog entry http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/08/04/migrating-from-usa-northwest.aspx

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Instant Virtualized Physical Infrastructure – Stratascale addresses market for hybrid physical and virtual servers.

Just interviewed Reed Smith, Director of Product Management for StrataScale and discussed their IronScale product.  Their announcement is here.

This is an interesting extension of service from Raging Wire collocation services to host a virtualized infrastructure.

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In many ways the Stratascale offering is a greener data center solution for companies with 50 – 500 employees who run their own servers on site or even a collocation offering. Why? Because the solution is designed with Virtualization as an assumption.  The good thing is versus services like Amazon Web Services you can also choose to have a no virtualization and be direct on hardware.  Also, the servers are not share with other customers. The virtualized servers are all yours.

This was my first chat with Reed, but I am sure I’ll be talking to him again to discuss Stratascale’s solution.

Part of Stratascale’s value is its UI for system provisioning.

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You can watch a demo here.

The physical servers are listed.

Available in 3 levels of automated integrated bundled environments, IronScale is built on real, physical dual- and quad-core x86 servers.

Level 1 Server...2 cores, 4GB RAM, 70GB storage

Level 2 Server...4 cores, 8GB RAM, 70GB storage

Level 3 Server...8 cores, 16GB RAM, 70GB storage

Each server bundle features:

Dual-/quad-core Intel® Xeon® CPUs

70GB of local RAID 5O storage

Your choice of a Red Hat® Linux® or Windows® Server OS

1 Mbps dedicated bandwidth

2 networks and 8 external IP addresses per client

100 internal IP addresses per network

VPN for 1 site-to-site and 5 remote users per client

24x7 Monitoring and Management

KVM access

The data center facility is listed is run by Raging Wire.

Our Tier IV Data Center

Staff

Multi-disciplined, certified engineering staff and 24x7 support team of IT experts is rigorously trained, has extensive industry expertise, and is committed to clients, standards, and best practices.

World-Class Facility

Tier IV class "A+" 200,000+ square foot data center

Engineered for 99.999% availability

Power and cooling is scalable beyond 200 Watts per sq. ft.

Carrier neutral high-speed Internet, over 20 Gigabits of bandwidth

N+2 minimum system and component redundancy for concurrent maintainance and fault tolerance

On-site, 69Kv power substation and well

Financial-grade physical security

Their PUE is not advertised, but given the highly virtualized environment the performance per watt should be high.

Environmental Responsibility

At RES, we have a healthy respect for our environment. Which is why we have always built common sense and green practices into everything we do. But being environmentally responsible isn't just good for the community and the planet - its good business. For our efforts, we have received numerous environmental awards, but we don't stop there. We constantly refine our processes to improve our power and resource efficiency, reduce and recycle wastes, and help us to operate more productively.

Efficiency and sustainability is key to everything we do.

Our power conservation efforts have saved more than 4,000,000 kWh of electricity.

We've increased our chilled water plant and cooling efficiency, conserving an additional 250,000 kWh of electricity per month.

Our two chemical-free water treatment systems have eliminated chemical use entirely and reduced our water discharged by 80%.

We recycle 100% of the cardboard, steel, copper, and aluminum we use for construction and other activities. In paper and cardboard recycling alone, it is equivalent to 36+ mature trees per year.

We recycle 100% of our lead acid batteries, over 700,000 pounds worth, and donate the proceeds to the United States Wolf Refuge.

We recycle more than 2,000 pounds of electronic waste per year, from both our own company and as a free service to our valued clients.

Our social and environmental responsibility is an essential part of contributing to and protecting the community we live in.

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