Green (Resource Efficient) Food winning vs. Organic

June 24, 2008 Dave Ohara

WSJ has a few interesting articles on Green efforts winning vs. other industries due to the fact that Green strategies uses less resources. This article compares Monsanto an engineered food company which claims it is 30% more efficient in using land, water, and energy to produce food than other food. The article then goes on to compare the stock price of Monsanto vs. Whole Food. Monsanto is the winner.

Food Shortage Recasts Image of 'Organic'

By KAREN RICHARDSON
June 25, 2008

The salad days of organic salad are wilting in favor of high-tech tomatoes.

As global food shortages threaten to ignite social and economic instability from Nigeria to India, the popular aversion to genetically modified foods is turning into more of a luxury for the wealthy than a practical option for the masses.

This trend is evident in the share price and earnings growth of Monsanto, the world leader in agricultural biotechnology by market share. Its stock has soared 22% this year, trading at a breathless 37 times estimated 2008 per-share earnings. On Wednesday, the company is expected to report a third-quarter profit of $1.39 a share, up 35% from a year earlier.

Gourmets' fears of "frankenfoods" that make corn taste like cardboard seem to be taking a back seat to the growing global demands of feeding emerging middle classes in developing countries with limited natural resources.

Monsanto's seeds produce insect-resistant, drought-tolerant crops. It has pledged to double crop yields by 2030 for corn, soybeans and cotton and to reduce the need for water, land and energy by 30%, an effort to position itself as a solution to concerns about mounting strain on the globe's natural resources.

The firm is in a strong position. Farmers who want to raise their yields of corn for feed or ethanol have to pay the price, while buyers of that corn have to eat it. Monsanto has already increased its earnings outlook several times this year because of demand and higher prices.

It stands in stark contrast to Whole Foods Market, the supermarket for all things organic. It is a price taker that can't easily pass higher costs to its customers. From 2001 to the end of 2006, the company's earnings grew an average annual rate of 25%. In 2007, earnings were down more than 10%, and they're falling further.

Engineered food is clearly getting an upper hand.

Information Week tours Microsoft’s San Antonio Data Center under construction

June 24, 2008 Dave Ohara

Information Week was given a tour of Microsoft’s San Antonio data center under construction.

Seeding The Cloud

Posted by J. Nicholas Hoover, Jun 20, 2008 02:39 PM

Recently, I got the chance to visit one of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s mega data centers for a tour while it was under construction. I'll just say this: creating the infrastructure needed for cloud computing isn't child's play.

Microsoft rolls out data centers as if they were aircraft carriers in the United States Navy. There's the Quincy-class, there's the Dublin-class, and there's the Chicago-class. I myself was at the Quincy-class San Antonio location, a monstrous ship of the online if there ever was one at 475,000 square feet.

And that's only one of the numerous (Microsoft won't give a number) $500-million-or-so data centers the company's got under construction or up and running around the world. With all that going on, Microsoft's got to have a plan in place to figure out when and where to build.

The company uses what Microsoft data center services general manager Mike Manos calls a "continuum strategy." It starts with Microsoft mapping out the world to identify the company's important data center markets. From the maps, Microsoft (duh) determines where new data centers are needed.

There isn’t anything new in this article that hasn’t been reported on previously. But, Microsoft gained more eyes and the writer speculates on the software + services strategy.

P.S. For all of those who read this and say, OK, but what is Microsoft going to use this ridiculous amount of server energy for, check here for more, starting on Saturday. Remember that top Microsoft execs have said that almost every Microsoft product will have a services component or a version delivered as a service going forward, and that Microsoft execs also have hinted at the possibility of utility computing services a la Amazon Web Services. That's a lot of Windows Servers, SQL Servers, and so on. You can be sure that come the end of October, you'll know a lot more.

Google gets an F, Chevron A+ on California Sustainability Report

June 24, 2008 Dave Ohara

With the kids out of school, Environmental Leader wrote.

Chevron ‘A+,’ Google ‘F’ In Sustainability Reporting Efforts

An analysis of the social responsibility reporting efforts of California’s largest corporations finds that some, like Chevron, Hewlett-Packard and Walt Disney, publicized their sustainability on their Web sites, while others, like eBay, Google and Apple, rarely mentioned the subject, if at all.

The 132-page report, “Analysis of Sustainability Reporting of Fortune Companies in California” (PDF), produced by the Roberts Environmental Center of Claremont McKenna College, contains a compilation of Pacific Sustainability Index scores evaluating the environmental and social reporting of all California companies on the 2006 Fortune 1000 list. It scores companies based on the reporting, intent and performance of environmental and social sustainability efforts and is the center’s the first geographically based analysis of corporate reporting.

While the center’s scoring sheet contains only topics it thinks all companies should report on, not everyone agrees with the results, writes the center’s director J. Emil Morhardt.
. . . Sarah Bulgatz, Director, Corporate Public Relations, The Charles Schwab Corporation, took strong exception to our comparison of her company with manufacturers and refiners. We have printed her comments (with her permission) as a guest editorial on page 43, along with details of why we gave her company a grade of D+ for environmental and social reporting.
Morhardt says the center wants to encourage socially responsible companies to be more vocal about their efforts, and encourage those that have not addressed sustainability issues to do so.

From the actual report page 66.

Virtualization and Networking, VMWare & Cisco provide Best Practice Guidance

June 23, 2008 Dave Ohara

After prodding VMware’s Guy Brunsdon, Director of Network Marketing, he has started his own blog on networking on VMware blogs http://blogs.vmware.com/networking/. His first entry is:

Anyway, so what better time is there to announce the publication of an in-depth deployment paper jointly authored by Cisco and VMware. We posted this paper about a week ago on the vmware.com/go/networking site. It's around 90 pages, so no short read; but it delves into many of the considerations, architectures, etc in deploying VI with Cisco switches.

As Guy mentions the paper is 90 pages, but here is the about to see if it is right for you if you have are using VMware in a Cisco networking environment. But, even if you are using XenSource or somebody else’s switches this document is probably useful.

This document is a collaboration between Cisco and VMware. It documents a set of suggested best practices for deploying VMware Infrastructure (VI) 3.x and VMware ESX Server 3.x in a Cisco network environment. The document provides details regarding the internal constructs of the ESX Server and their relation to external Cisco network devices are discussed.

This document is intended for network architects, network engineers, and server administrators interested in understanding and deploying VMware ESX Server 3.x hosts in a Cisco data center environment.

The XenSource guys have this small wiki page. http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenNetworking

I looked on the Microsoft Virtualization blog, but found networking entries which were years old. And, when searching for VLAN, found nothing.

Virident Announces Flash Memory platform, an Enterprise Server Version of Microsoft Windows Vista ReadyBoost feature

June 23, 2008 Dave Ohara

Virident announced the GreenGateway product to enable integration of Flash Memory into servers. I had the opportunity to interview Virident CEO Raj Parekh to get a better understanding of the Green Gateway and how the product enables a Green Data Center.

The WSJ has coverage as well.

What is the Virident Green Gateway? One simple way to look at this is this is the Microsoft Windows Vista ReadyBoost feature for Servers, but with a lot more.

Windows Vista introduces Windows ReadyBoost, a new concept in adding memory to a system. You can use non-volatile flash memory, such as that on a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional memory "under the hood."

The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache—that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Windows ReadyBoost relies on the intelligent memory management of Windows SuperFetch and can significantly improve system responsiveness.

A bunch of companies have been evaluating flash memory for servers, but no one has a product meant to work with most existing servers.

For more about the GreenGateway here is an excerpt from Virident's press release.

Virident GreenGateway™ turns Flash into DRAM-class memory enabling high-capacity, industry standard data-centric servers

SAN FRANCISCO – June 24, 2008 – Virident Systems announced today that it has developed the first data-centric technology platform to deliver a new class of green memory, servers and applications for the data center. Virident’s high-performance, low-power platform solution enables Internet data centers to cost-effectively keep pace with the rising performance and energy demands of Internet-scale.

GreenGateway™, conceived and developed by Virident, turns today’s compute-centric servers into large memory data-centric servers. This new class of servers offers random access, low-power, non-volatile, high-performance flash memory to applications such as internet search, social networking, data analytics and content distribution. The new memory solution provides DRAM-class read performance with larger memories, improving server efficiency and application throughput immediately. Ultimately, this sets the stage for several revolutionary changes in Internet server design and power efficiency to be announced in the future by Virident. Spansion’s (NASDAQ: SPSN) EcoRAM™ is a MirrorBit Flash-based product built on the Virident platform, utilizing GreenGateway™ technology.

Back to the interview here are some details from notes my interview with Raj.

The Software and Hardware Virident developed has multiple functions acting like a flash memory controller to address Flash Memories weaknesses and maximize the strengths, making GreenGateway perform like RAM, but with lower power consumption for a greener solution.
GreenGateway loads custom drivers in Linux (their target market is Linux first, and other OS's later), creating expanded memory that provides up to 1/2 TB of low power flash memory for a server.
Data Redundancy and Data Failure are examples of issues Virident have addressed in their software given issues like Flash Memory Wear.
GreenGateway handles the movement of data between Flash and RAM, but they do have the ability for customers to handle this movement themselves. This is a good customer feature as it reminds me when working on OS's Virtual Memory functionality is designed for the masses, but you have a customer like Adobe Photoshop on the desktop, saying get out of way, we want to handle memory mapping between RAM and HD ourselves as we know how our app performs. Virident has the ability to ship custom SW/Drivers which tunes the performance for specific user scenarios. I think this is one of the smartest things they have.
Given the persistence of Flash, it is possible to create a diskless server, working completely from GreenGateway memory. It is rumored Google does this on some of their servers, loading from Linux from PROM.
At this time there is no compression in memory system
The first steps of Virident is to make Flash perform like DRAM. Next step is total performance of system and optimization analytics.
Virtualization is of course a scenario for GreenGateway, but it is very dependent on what users are virtualizing to know how well GreenGateway will work.

The first version of GreenGateway is meant for existing servers, but what will be interesting is if servers like Dell XS23 and IBM's iDatalplex integrate GreenGateway. It will be interesting to see some performance per watt figures once they are available. Raj gives his view of the potential business value.

“Today’s servers were not built with the data-centric needs of the internet in mind. As a result, compute-centric servers in internet data centers can be made far more efficient with faster access to larger main memories. We created GreenGateway to enable alternative memory technologies to replace DRAM and deliver performance and energy efficiency. The GreenGateway platform will enable internet companies to access far larger main memories, achieving growth while living within the pressing power, space and cost constraints of the data center. Ultimately green technology will save the data center. At Virident, our goal is to make green and growth possible.”