Electricity Home Monitoring Solutions, 19 ZigBee products registered

Ready for the confusion, 19 home electricity monitoring solutions have been registered.

In recent months, 19 energy-management products have been certified for ZigBee interoperability. These include communicating thermostats costing $50 to $200, controllers costing $10 to $60, and in-home displays costing $50 to $200.

The WSJ reports on the momentum for home electricity monitoring solutions for the home.

People Power

The more you know about your energy use, the less energy you may use

A revolution in smart electronics is going to give consumers unprecedented ability to control energy consumption and save money.

Making it possible is the introduction of inexpensive electronics -- including thermostats and controllers -- that can be assembled into simple home networks able to control equipment such as air conditioners, lights, water heaters and furnaces.

The home systems, in turn, are the building blocks of a smart grid that seamlessly flows information on energy usage and cost from consumers to utilities and back again.

There are lots of vendors out there.

In August, ZigBee joined forces with the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, which promotes devices that use a building's wiring as the communications path. So wireless ZigBee devices soon will be able to work with HomePlug devices, which are being developed by companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Comcast Corp., Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc.

What happens with consumers behavior is the unknown.

In Boulder, Xcel Energy Inc. is ramping up a program, through its Public Service of Colorado utility, where customers will test the company's technologies and report back about what works and what doesn't. The goal is to get about 10,000 metered customers, about 20% of the city's population, doing some sort of energy management in the next year or so.

"We want to be somewhat agnostic and not influence people, because we're trying to learn more ourselves," says Sandy Simon, director of utility innovations and smartgrid strategy for Xcel.

Many test homes will be equipped with technology from GridPoint Inc. that connects to an information portal operated by the Arlington, Va., firm. GridPoint Chief Executive Peter Corsell says consumers will log onto a site and home networks will be able to tell them how much they can save, in dollars or kilowatt hours.

"You'd say, 'Cut my bill,' and it will find a way that's least painful for you," says Mr. Corsell. The system "might interrupt your water heater from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., for example, or change the setting on your thermostat."

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Oops, Not the Right “Christian”

Saw a user hit my blog entry about Christian Belady’s data center opinions from 10 years ago.

Curious, I wanted to see what the user was searching for.

Oops, they were were searching for “Christianity 10 years ago” and my blog entry showed up.

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The interesting thing is there is a Christian Data Center entry.

The Christian Interactive Network has followed that vision to secure God’s data and ministry networks. Protecting God’s people and the Gospel from the digital warfare we face today.


From the early days of the Christian Interactive Network, in 1992, we have had a burden to provide a Christ-centered approach to harnessing technology and the interactive “online” world for Christian ministries, churches and organizations. We have watched as many well-intentioned organizations, while spending in excess of one-hundred and eighty million dollars, have failed to succeed according to ’their’ plans! We’ve (collectively the Christian providers) spent too much time concentrating on the ‘uniforms’ we’re wearing, instead of how we can work together for Christ’s sake!

And they have built a Tier 2 data center to house the church’s data.

CIN has been blessed with the ability to occupy a portion of the former Humana Cypress Creek Hospital, which has recently commenced renovation in to one of the nations leading Christian Resource Centers. This Category 5 facility is equipped with generator, filtered / redundant power, filtered air-conditioning and multiple fiber-paths for a true Tier Two level data-center.


Ministry partners will be able to take advantage of world-class firewall and intrusion-detection technologies and the best in security and data storage.


CIN is building a secure data-center much like Nehemiah did when he built the walls and gates to protect the city of Jerusalem. The current facility and improvements represent an initial cost in excess of four million dollars. However, we must raise an additional balance of approximately six hundred and fifty thousand dollars by October, 2006 in order to complete Phase I of the Nehemiah Project. We believe God is raising up individuals, corporations and foundations to accomplish this goal. Pray about how you can participate and be part of this exciting project.

Good thing the Christian Interactive Network does not know a church was demolished by a developer to make room for Google’s data center.

The notion of Google demolishing a church to make way for a data center makes for a spicy headline, and may be seized upon by some who are skeptical of the company’s “do no evil” motto. The church actually sold the property to the local economic development corporation - all before Google was in the picture.

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HP’s POD – Container Data Center

GigaOM has a post on the HP POD (Performance Optimized Data Center) – the Container Data Center.


Exclusive: First Look Inside the HP POD Data Centers
Stacey Higginbotham, Friday, September 26, 2008 at 6:17 PM PTComments (2)

I traveled down to Houston today to check out a data center geek’s version of paradise — the inside of the factory where HP builds their rack-mounted servers and high-value blade systems. I shot plenty of photos that show how a bunch of chips and boards gets assembled into a blade that I will put in a later post, but I also got to take a tour of the inside of HP’s containerized data center, known as a POD. “Tour” isn’t really the right word, since it’s hard to move around inside the 40-foot shipping container filled with racks, but it was pretty sweet to see all that processing power in one place.

Here is the video
2,000 servers in the container.  Does this sound like this container is on its way to Microsoft’s Chicago Container data center?
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Sun's Intelligent Power Monitoring Service

Sun has announced a new download for Sun HW and Solaris OS to monitor the power consumption.

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Sun Intelligent Power Monitoring Service

Sun's Intelligent Power Monitoring Service is a Smart Energy solution for the data center that makes it possible for you to improve power efficiencies by monitoring, reporting and forecasting energy consumption, cooling requirements and load utilization of server and storage devices.

Start Now

Key Benefits

Make more efficient use of energy consumption, cooling requirements and load utilization for server and storage devices in your data center while maintaining system uptime, so you can:

  • More effectively plan for capacity expansion or unexpected changes by accurately assessing and forecasting dynamic power consumption.
  • Reduce your carbon footprint by ensuring adherence to eco-responsible policies.
  • Know whether your eco-efficiency investments return real energy savings.
  • Lower energy costs and take advantage of energy rebates that yield additional savings.



Key Applications

This affordable service is ideal for all data centers: small, medium and large. Provides immediate insight to help you:

  • Reduce data center operating costs by optimizing energy consumption
  • Enable departmental charge-back for energy consumption
  • More accurately plan for facility expansions, new sites or moves
  • Better manage power utility or facility constraints
  • Meet emerging regulatory requirements for energy reporting
  • Take advantage of financial incentives from energy companies

I am going to try the folks at Digital Sense as they use Sun blade servers for their high density computing, and se if they have given this solution a try.

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Deutsche Bank CIO Prioritizes Facilities Changes, Reduces Energy Costs by 25 - 35%

Deutsche Bank (NYSE:DB), Juan Caballero,VP of IT Infrastructure and Skanska Mission Critical (data center construction/services) gave a joint presentation at Data Center Dynamics Seattle on "The Ultimate Green Move, Fix What you have first".  ZERODOWNTIME magazine followed up with a print article with more details.

Robert Bellantoni, Director of Energy Services - Skanska Mission Critical

It’s not all about new product implementation in the energy efficiency race. Following a very well received presentation at the DatacenterDynamics Seattle conference in August, we asked Bob Bellantoni, Director of Energy Services for Skanska Inc. to expand on their “Fix First” concept.

In response to soaring energy costs and the immediate demands to reduce carbon emissions the Skanska Mission Critical team recently developed and deployed a Data Center Optimization (DCO) program focusing on a ”low tech” approach which is providing immediate improvement of DC efficiency and reduced operational cost.


The “Fix First” concept is based on the needs of current legacy data centers to make immediate and necessary improvements in their operational efficiency without costly retrofit, redesign or timely rebuilding options.


“The fastest way to needed improvement is often apparent and can usually be fixed with minimum cost,” says Bellantoni. “We conduct a physical audit of the as built state of their current cabinets and rack installation. Most legacy data centers are in a ‘mid-life crisis’ mode as a result of an aging design that may have been the bestof- breed at the time, but did not take critical efficiency and rising operating costs into consideration when creating the original design model.”

In the midst of the US Financial crises it is a smart move for Deutsche Bank to improve its PUE by lowering optimizing its existing power and cooling infrastructure early in its effort to green its data center.

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I am amazed at how much money people will throw money at virtualization projects yet they have no funds allocated to improving the energy efficiency of their data centers.

Skanska and Turner Construction have been listed as top Green building contractors, but it is surprising Skanska has a group that will Green Legacy Data Centers as an alternative to building new ones.

Part of the bag of Tools Bob uses is thermal imaging derived from military applications to identify and document heat loses. How good are these thermal imaging devices? I found this youtube video showing heat detected from the stretching of a rubber band.  Pretty cool, no hot.

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