Green Guide to CES

Lewis Curtis sent me this link on The Green Guide of CES.

There are reasons to both love and hate the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — it showcases practically every gadget due to come out in the year ahead (nice!), it has a football stadium’s worth of corporate And booths (yuck), and media events are held every hour for five days straight (fun but tiring). This year, CES is also adding a “green component” that could make it a little more lovable for friends of the environment.

Granted, a lot of it is just green marketing, like Fujitsu’s corn laptop or the show’s own Mygreenelectronics.org site. We like our buddy Dean Takahashi’s (of the San Jose Mercury News) take on the green angle: “Some products marketed as green are not green at all, and the offset programs make you wonder if that’s the only solution for an enterprise that is fundamentally wasteful.” Ah, snap! Still, CES is making a green effort, so here’s our guide to the massive gadget convention “going green”:

Read more

Novell Executive Gets Green Data Center

Part of what I do is look for those executive who gets Green Data Center.  In this article Joe Wagner from Novell explains the issues of using virtualization in manufacturing data center operations.  From reading his article, and looking at his background Joe understands the issues to go Green.  This is refreshing from a software company.  Part of why Joe got my attention is his Chemical Engineering background.  Many people I run into the green data center area are chemical engineers.  Another company who totally gets the green area is OSIsoft executives.

Virtualization is coming to the forefront none too soon for the manufacturing industry. While virtualization can be a tremendous boost to an enterprise's productivity and environmental policy, without the proper automated management tools in place, you will threaten the very benefits you sought in the first place.

Virtualization's promises of reducing sever sprawl, heating and cooling costs, and power consumption are enticing, but they cannot be attained without effective management in place. With orchestrated management tools that automate critical data center processes, organizations can make virtualization a central component in their green IT strategy.

Read more

T-Mobile Data Center joins Central Washington Neighborhood Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, ask.com

Sabey has found a primary tenant for its new data center in Eastern Washington. 

The primary T-Mobile' data center in Bothell, Washington was flooded last month when torrential rains hit the Seattle area. The outage knocked the T-mobile website offline and disrupted new customer activations nationwide. Bothell is more vulnerable to flooding than other data center hubs in the Seattle area. East Wenatchee is in an area of central Washington that has seen a boom in data centers since 2006, when Microsoft announced a major new facility in Quincy to support its new online services.

Wenatchee World gives details on the site and timing.

Talking to a technology executive who was born in Wenatchee and is familiar with the local economy.  He says that past gov't officials had made the decision to invest funds to put in extensive fiber network, including Fiber to the Home.  On page 13 of this pdf you can see where Quincy, WA and Wenatchee, WA are listed as 2 of 7 areas with Fiber to the Home.  This infrastructure coincidentally is good for data center locations along with low cost of hydroelectric power.  Unfortunately, for the local gov't officials who drove this project they were a little ahead of their time and their constituents expected immediate results as they were voted out of office.  Well, the next gov't officials are reaping those rewards as Microsoft discovered how Quincy is a top location for a green data center with excellent Internet connectivity.  Yahoo soon followed along with Intuit, Ask.com to the same area.

So far, this has turned out to have billions of economic construction impact to the area and given the range of companies there is a diversification beyond Microsoft's initial construction.  Mike Manos gives an interview on his data center construction on Channel 10.

So far I haven't run into similar stories about how Google has impacted the local economy as Microsoft has done in Quincy.  Has any one seen anything about the broader economic impact of Google arriving to a local area?

Read more