Audience Analysis of Green Data Centre Panel at IT Forum

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.

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Green Data Centre Panel Discussion

Well, we succesfully presented best scoring panel presentation at IT forum.  For those attendees who attended IT forum, you'll be able to listen to the discussion and how the panel picked on Mike Manos. :-) We didn't have the Jerry Springer moment, but the conversation was lively.

As the moderator, I couldn't ask for a better group of guys to kick off this discussion at IT Forum.  Kevin Sangwell from Microsoft did a great job of recruiting speakers for the event.

The comments tell the story.

  • very good, hardware vendors, chip manufacturers, large companies able to demonstrate what they are doing to reduce the carbon footprint....however it appears microsoft are not doing very much to reduce this footprint! Lets see some commitement from MS.....such as supporting/promoting competitors virtualiastion products.
  • I felt that this format for a session was very progressive and interactive. Unfortunately, the discussion was sidelined a few times and I didn't think the session had enough time to run its course.
  • Good session. Should have been longer
  • Dissapointed that this was the only coverage at ITForum, I would have liked to here something about Microsoft's strategy for solving power consumption in good software design.
  • This was a very good session. I would have liked to continue it but we ran out of time. I got a lot of usefull information.
See http://unthrottled.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3B07BABB3D3318AA!580.entry for Mike Manos' post.

Abstract:

The spiralling cost and environmental impact of data centres is driving some in the industry to design Green data centres. This panel includes representatives from hardware and software vendors plus data centre managers who will share their insight, debate the relative merits of going Green and share the lessons from early adoption.

Speakers:
  • Mr Kevin Sangwell - Microsoft
  • Mr Nigel Bridgeman - HP
  • Mr Michael Manos - Microsoft Data Centers
  • Mr Ed English - Dell
  • Mr Dave Ohara - Green M3
  • Mr Kevin O'Donovan - Intel
  • Mr Harvey Cobbold - Citi Data Centers
  • Mr Ramon Huesa - AMD
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Mike Manos presentation IT Forum - Special Event for Early Bird Attendees

Mike Manos presented at a special event for IT Forum as part of thank you for the attendees who registered early.

Kevin, Arlindo, Frank, and I (http://greenm3.typepad.com/green_m3_blog/2007/11/microsoft-it-pr.html) sat in and were thoroughly entertained with the presentation, and had some good laughs.

One of the most amazing things is Mike was faced with the challenge of presenting during lunch (it is bad to be the presentation keeping people from food) and presenting in the auditorium which seats over a 2,000 people with glaring lights in your eyes. He couldn't see past the first 10 rows to read the audience, and see if anyone was leaving.  Well I didn't see anyone leave and 96% of the people turned in feedback on the session. This was the highest feedback rate of any presentation at the conference, and a great indication of what people thought about the topic of how Microsoft runs its data centers.

Manositforumaudatorium 

Mike had over a dozen people come up after to ask questions.

For those of you who attend IT Forum in EMEA, you can look forward to Mike being on the list of speakers for the next IT forum.

See http://unthrottled.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3B07BABB3D3318AA!574.entry for Mike's entry on his presetation.

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Microsoft IT Pro Evangelists Love Green

I left Seattle 7a on Monday, and arrived 7a on Tues in Barcelona to a sold out 2007 IT forum http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/Itforum.

Thanks to Arlindo Alves http://blogs.technet.com/aralves/, Frank Koch http://blogs.technet.com/chitpro-de/, and Kevin Sangwell http://blogs.technet.com/sanger/; we have momentum building for customers to think about Green Data Centres and how IT can be more efficient in its use of resources.

The early movers/innovators in this area have already increased the efficiencies of their data centers, developing an energy supply chain strategy, saving millions in energy costs.

On Thurs Intel is presenting the following talk.  An interesting Green solution they are presenting is highlighted below on how they are communicating to powered down systems.

SPN203 System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 - Driving Remote Out-of-Band Management    
Lawson Guthrie , Dave Randall
Come see how Intel and Microsoft are enhancing secure management of remote PCs with agent-less, hardware based management solutions. Through Intel vPro and Centrino Pro Technologies coupled with Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or SMS 2003, find out how you can securely manage, inventory or rebuild operating systems without requiring the client agent. You can even make BIOS changes, maintenance and repair tasks if systems are powered down or the OS is non-responsive. You’ll also get a preview of the capabilities of out-of-band management with Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007.   
Thu Nov 15 10:45 - 12:00 Room 111

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First #1 rank for Google Search results = GreenM3

Part of creating this Green Data Center Blog was to learn more about blogs and how to get increase visiblity through search.  I posted an entry about Google Electric Company.  And, when going through my typepad stats I found I was getting hits from www.google.com/search to this post.  I went to google search entered "google electric", and I am the #1 search result.

Pretty cool for only one month of blogging.

  Advanced Search
  Preferences

Web Results 1 - 10 of about 5,670,000 for google electric. (0.22 seconds)

Green Data Center Blog: Google Electric Company - Core Competency?

Google Electric Company - Core Competency? Larry Dignan on http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7149. Wrote a blog about the issue of Google getting into the ...
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EnviroPolitics Blog: Search this: A Google electric car

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Kodachrome Quixote: The New GE- Google Electric

The New GE- Google Electric. Worth a quick read. It's been very interesting to watch Silicon Valley emerge as a counterweight to Detroit for more "clean ...
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Trivia: Google's electric bill - BanglaCricket Forum

In one blog, I have read that google is planning for clean, cheap nuclear energy (!?!) to cope up with their electric power consumption which is their ...
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