All-In-One Approach, Saving Energy by Bundling Functionality

AVM a broadband equipment producer has a press release touting the all-in-one approach to saving energy.

AVM FRITZ!Box Energy Efficiency

Europe Leads Drive for Greener IT Devices

Rising costs for energy and growing environmental sensitivity among consumers is making Green IT increasingly relevant for manufacturers of residential and SOHO appliances. As a result, new all-in-one communication equipment with advanced energy control, adopting the latest EU Code of Conduct, is preventing wasted energy, space and money.

According to the European Commission’s Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, the electricity consumption of broadband equipment in the European Community will rise to an estimated 50 TWh per year by 2015. A new generation of multi-function devices that apply to the EU Code of Conduct can lower energy consumption by at least 50% - saving an equivalent of 5,5 million tons of oil (TOE) and about 7,5 billion euros per year.
Matthew Tyler, country manager at AVM, conjectures: “People probably don’t even consider their broadband equipment when they’re thinking about energy savings – whether because of increasing energy costs or the environment – but, combined, the impact is huge.”

The All-in-one Approach: More than Just Energy Efficiency

As one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of Internet access hardware, AVM ensures that it’s FRITZ!Box series already complies with all standards of the EU Code of Conduct for broadband equipment. But the popularity of the FRITZ!Box products is based not only on energy efficiency only. In addition to the energy savings, users are also benefiting from the seamless integration of a ADSL modem, WLAN N router, print and file server, PBX for VoIP and landline. AVM’s FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270, soon to be available in the UK, includes a fax and answering machine as well as a base station for DECT cordless telephones in one device. The all-in-one approach has proven to be much easier for the user to operate than individual devices and saves valuable desk space. AVM has a track record of building multifunctional, user-friendly devices. All FRITZ!Box series products fully support the eco mode standards, and this latest generation can replace up to 8 individual communication devices. The fully featured FRITZ!Box needs an average of 6 to 8 watts per hour – compared with a combined energy consumption of around 50 watts for the separate devices it replaces, this is an estimated reduction of 85%.

They discuss the idea of turning off the network.  Shouldn't your home wireless and wired systems turn off?

Eco Mode: Only When You Need It

Most devices have a stand-by mode, but the Eco Mode function goes beyond a simple stand-by, reducing the CPU power and clearing unused connections such as LAN and WLAN ports as well as wireless phone connections (DECT) to minimize the power consumption of the FRITZ!Box. The comprehensive monitoring of current and average energy consumption and the individual configuration of all functions within the FRITZ!Box is eco mode at its best.

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Microsoft's James Hamilton Questions Effectiveness of Blade Servers, Where I Think Blades Work

Talking to another Green Guy he mentioned James Hamilton's post. It is quite long, and I've heard many of these points already from others, like Christian Belady's presentation at Data Center Dynamics Seattle.

Why Blade Servers Aren't the Answer to All Questions

This note describes a conversation I’ve had multiple times with data center owners and concludes that blade servers frequently don’t help and they sometimes hurt, easy data center power utilization improvements are available independent of the blade server premium, and enterprise data center owners have a tendency to buy gadgets from the big suppliers rather than think through overall data center design. We’ll dig into each.

In talking to data center owners, I’ve learned a lot but every once in a while I come across a point that just doesn’t make sense. My favorite example is server density. I’ve talked to many DC owners (and I’ll bet I’ll hear from many after this note) that have just purchased blades servers. The direction of conversation is always the same. “We just went with blades and now have 25+kW racks”. I ask if their data center has open floor and it almost always does. We’ll come back to that. Hmmm, I’m thinking. They now have much higher power density racks at higher purchase cost in order to get more computing per square foot but the data center already has open floor space (since almost all well designed centers are power and cooling bound rather than floor space bound). Why?

So, where do blades work?  I've talked to numerous green/energy efficiency professionals and in general they favor Sun or HP blades. The one thing in common from my informal survey is they run fully populate blade enclosures.

How many blade enclosures out there are fully populated?  Not many, the vendors want  you to have an excess of blade enclosures so you'll buy their blades.

Blade Servers work most efficiently when fully populated.

Where the Blade Servers are effective is for HW vendors to lock in customers to purchase their HW.

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Avanade DreamIT, Then GreenIT, Part 2

On Sept 9 - 10, I was able to meet in person with Avanade's Toby Velte, as a follow up to my post, Avanade's Anti-Greenwashing Initiative, Part 1.

Toby was nice enough to give me the first copy of his book, but then we met with Christian Belady and we gave him the first copy as it seemed appropriate given Christian's contribution to power and cooling efficiency in the data center and IT equipment.

As we discussed Toby's book, it reminded me to go Green requires a network of expertise. To go Green requires a learning mindset where you you can compare what you are doing vs. others, and integrate ideas that work given your environment.

Toby's book gives you a high level overview of the network of information you will need for a Green IT/Green Data center initiative. Many of the ideas will be ones you've heard before, but some will be new. I don't know of any other source I could point at to help people see the holistic set of issues they face in going Green.

Meeting people like Toby is what makes this Green Data Center area so interesting, and I am having more fun than I have had in a long time.

Oh, I did my own copy of Toby's book and Toby signed my copy.

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I like Toby's new tag line.  "Let's DreamIT, then we'll GreenIT!"

You can order Toby's book here.

Part 3 on Avanade Green IT will be coming up when I meet with Avanade's Stephen Fink at Data Center Dynamics Chicago on Sept 16.

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Sun and Microsoft Virtualization Partners

Application Development Trends writes on Sun and Microsoft being Virtualization partners.

Green extolled the virtues of its partner relationships in the virtualization space, which includes Microsoft. He was joined briefly by Microsoft's General Manager of Virtualization Mike Neil, who declared, "Microsoft and Sun share the same vision of virtualization from the desktop to the cloud." Sun recently became a member of Microsoft's server certification program; the certification ensures that Sun's xVM products will integrate and interoperate with Microsoft's offerings.

In a post press-conference interview, Neil told this site that that shared vision included a conviction that that virtualization will become ubiquitous across the data center and even the desktop.

"We're in a unique situation," he said. "The fact that both Microsoft and Sun are operating system vendors allows us to work together to bring a new capability to the customer. The customer is living in a different environment today. In the past he would have bought a machine with a Sun operating system or one with a Windows OS. With virtualization, you have the opportunity to run those disparate systems on one piece of hardware. And both companies believe that management of that capability needs to go from the physical layer to the virtual machines and the applications. Where we're all headed in the future is the cloud."

Sun, the inveterate sloganeer responsible for "Write Once, Run Anywhere" and "the Network is the Computer," offered a new buzz phrase: "Virtualize Everything, Manage Anywhere."

Unfortunately, Virtualization is getting more confusing with all the choices.

On the eve of VMware's VMworld Conference in Las Vegas, the virtualization announcements are coming fast and furious. Microsoft just held the first of its "Get Virtual Now" event series a few days ago. A month ago, Oracle launched its VM Template virtual machines for Oracle apps and Linux. Xen.org, which manages the open-source Xen hypervisor project on which xVM is based, announced the 3.3 version last month. Linux distro Red Hat just acquired a virtualization company (Qumranet) with technology based on another open source hypervisor (KVM). And Hewlett-Packard is expected to make new products at the upcoming VMworld conference.

"VMware is in a tough situation," Neil said, "because they're not an operating system provider. All the operating system providers -- Red Hat, Novell, Sun, Microsoft -- are providing virtualization solutions as part of their offerings. There's no real magic here; everyone is going to have that capability."

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The Under Water Data Center, Response to Risks of Google’s Floating Data Center, Submerge

There has been lots of news coverage of Google’s Floating Data Center patent.

I’ve learned to be a patent skeptic.  Didn’t Google get a patent for Containers? Where is the Google container data center?  Can Google sue Microsoft for the idea of using containers in their Chicago Data Center?  The military has been using containers for years delivering compute in containers.

As Data Center Knowledge asked whether a data center can weather a Hurricane.

Here is another idea Google can patent to survive the threat of Hurricane or Tsunami.

Submerge the data center.

The data center is now save from Hurricane and Tsunamis.  Security is better.  Does Greenpeace own a Submarine?

So, in the end what did Google’s container patent achieve? A bunch of speculation, and in reality Google did not build a container data center.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Floating Google Data Center.

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