Where is the Green Software?

December 29, 2007 Dave Ohara

The Blog Ship Software onTime! presents rules for being a green software engineer.

Then I got to thinking, as software engineers, what’s our responsibility for being green? I did a couple of searches and ended up with nothing. The general view appears to be that software developers are automatically green. After all, how could software not be green? It’s just a bunch of bits, right? Software hardly has an environmental impact, or so is the consensus. Can software be any more green than it already is?

As I thought more about the subject, I realized that in fact there is a huge variance in software greenliness (new word?). The notion of green has always existed in software development under a different name: “Simple!” Yes, simple, is the word we have used to describe the most green software in our industry and some of the most successful software products of all time have been the greenest solutions. I’ll get to some examples in a minute.

I started writing a long response, but I knew I was missing the point. So, after a few days I was able to simplify the issue.

Assumptions are made in what is considered efficient software, the problem almost all these assumptions run open loop. There are no closed loops to measure how accurate the design assumptions were once the software has been deployed. Bringing real time feedback to the developers on how well their code runs and how green it is in production is what will change behavior.

Some companies have started to expose the power consumption of applications in the data center to developers. You can do all the testing you want in development, but until deployment you don't know what really is happening. Most developers have no idea on the costs to provision more power let alone how much power costs.

The call to action for the devolper is to add application instrumentation which allows operations to determine the amount of power used by an application components and/or transactions. Few architects are thinking at this level, but I am finding a few who are.

Green iPhone

December 29, 2007 Dave Ohara

http://stella-arnaldo.blogspot.com/2007/10/green-iphone-it-isnt.html

Infoworld summarizes Green IT for 2007

December 27, 2007 Dave Ohara

Ted Samson from Infoworld does a good job of recapping the Green IT events of the year, providing a high level view of the different vendors who have green IT solutions.

Cisco's Green Guru proposes Cisco be the router of Energy Data

December 27, 2007 Dave Ohara

Cisco's new Green Guru, Paul Marcoux, proposes Cisco be the router of energy data in the data center.

Using open standards, the company wants to get server and storage vendors to collect and share information about their equipment and send it to Cisco routers and switches. The data could include power consumption, operating temperature and more. It's becoming a critical job, and because the network touches all IT resources across the enterprise, data collection should happen there, according to Paul Marcoux, vice president of green engineering.

I think Cisco may find the vendors have other plans for this data then giving it to Cisco. Burton Group raises this issues as well in the article.

Cisco's proposal would represent a whole new role for networks beyond communications, said Burton Group analyst Dave Passmore. Server vendors might go along with the plan, but Cisco can't count on smooth sailing, he said. Centralized power regulation would play a role in overall management of the datacenter, an area where Cisco is attempting to make inroads with other initiatives as well.

"Who controls virtualization in the data center is going to be the new battleground," Passmore said.

Saving IT Energy This Xmas Holiday - Cornell beats Stanford

December 22, 2007 Dave Ohara

SearchDataCenter.com has an article about how Stanford University shuts down utilities saving them $250,000, but their IT infrastructure stays up and running.

Over the Christmas holiday vacation, Stanford University shuts down the utilities in more than three-quarters of its 220 buildings on campus but like most organizations, its IT infrastructure stays up and running, said Susan Kulakowski, campus energy manager.

The Stanford, Calif.-based university saves about $250,000 in utility costs during the annual shutdown. It could save more if a portion of its IT infrastructure shut down, but that's not an option, Kulakowski said.

"There would be a big outcry if we tried to shut down our servers. We scale down IT staff and shut off utilities in other areas, but our students and staff still use the system over the break, so we have to have it available," Kulakowski said.

SearchDataCenter.com searched in vain for an enterprise that shuts down servers over the holiday break and came up with this: Even the most idle servers are kept awake at all times because the prospect of shutting down is just plain scary.

I understand SearchDataCenter.com's frustration finding an enterprise that shuts down servers. I got around this problem, by finding someone who was in the right position to implement the idea, and discussed the benefits of demo'ing the concept. Cornell Medical school's BioMedicine has been turning off servers and the users don't even notice.

This facility is one of the only places I know of that turns off servers when they are not needed. For IT Pros they do the equivalent of turning off the lights when they leave the office this holiday weekend (thanksgiving). Think about how many servers are running these next 4 days from Thurs – Sun with no load on them. Would anyone notice if they were turned off?

The amazing thing is the Biomedicine department has been turning off their servers in a high performance compute cluster for the past 6 months and the users don’t notice a change in service, because they turn off and on the compute nodes in response to the job queue. There aren’t going to be that many research scientist submitting jobs on Thanksgiving day. And, as each compute job is completed and sits idle, there is an automated system that turns off the servers. When new compute resources are required as new jobs are submitted on Monday, the machines are turned back on.