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Yippee, I just hit 605 RSS subscribers.
I’ve been a little slow with my writing, over the last few months, but I have a bunch more coming as I am now researching many more topics in the New Year.
I don’t have the exponential growth of some sites, but I like the slow and steady, sustainable method anyway.
One of the lessons I from Donald Trump, is there are only two things important to executives – does it work and I am getting a deal.
Bottom line: out of all the complexity of Green projects, all the various issues, there are only 2 things an executive wants to hear.
- Is it working?
- Did we get a good deal?
Anything else is not important.
With the current economy and deployment of virtualized solutions, virtualization has reached the stage of commoditization, and now users are looking for deals. To find the best value, requires looking at the Virtualization Solution holistically and adding up the total costs for the solution. The first place people look is the processor and virtualization software. Experienced hardware oriented people know RAM, Storage, I/O, and networking are next in costs and can have a dramatic impact on the overall performance of a virtualized solution. Next is the monitoring and management of the virtualized environment and how that data can be used to optimize the solution while meetings SLAs. With rising power costs and climate change managing your cost the performance per watt is prudent.
A term used frequently for this approach is rightsizing. Keeping all these issues in mind, picking the right server hardware and software configurations has a huge effect on your efficiencies. Whether you are in production for web, database, or applications; or development and test; the choices of what configuration you pick and what combination of virtualized environments are now the big decisions on how efficient you are.
This exercise is analogous to picking your vehicle fleet and your method to load those vehicles. Think like the experts at UPS what vehicle you pick, the route chosen, and how it is loaded all effect the overall cost and service level. Speaking of UPS they have an interesting white paper on category management. Category management is one approach to commoditization of things.
Model
This last step enhances the category review step from the original eight-step process. The category review process has typically involved perhaps hundreds of work hours to complete. This step needs to be backed by decision support and modeling capabilities. Category managers need to be able to simulate category performance results from changes in various inputs – category strategies, definitions, roles and tactics.
UPS has added the step of modeling which is done by few.
To get you started on virtual system modeling check out this DMTF document.
The CIM system virtualization model, including CIM schema additions and a set of supporting profile documents, enables the management of system virtualization. Virtualization is a substitution process producing virtual resources which change aspects of the way consumers interact with the resources. These virtual resources are usually based on underlying physical resources, but they may have different properties or qualities. For example, virtual resources may have different capacities or sizes than the underlying resources or may have different qualities of service, such as improved performance or reliability. In system virtualization a host computer system provides the underlying resources that compose virtual computer systems and their constituent virtual devices.
fool.com posts on the next bull market, and mentions IBM’s efforts.
Just as Roosevelt's New Deal brought electricity to rural areas during the 1930s, Obama is planning to bring high-speed broadband Internet access to "every community in America," to ensure that even lower-income areas have access to information and technology resources. That could be good news for companies like Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), who could vastly expand their customer base and broadband infrastructure to meet Obama's ambitious goal.
It's also good news for IBM (NYSE: IBM). When Obama's transition team asked IBM whether investing in Internet infrastructure could create jobs, CEO Samuel Palmisano reported that expanding broadband access, digitizing health-care records, and improving the electrical grid could create almost 1 million new U.S. jobs!
And it's no coincidence that Obama reached out to IBM. As a world leader in building energy-efficient "green" data centers, it's well-positioned to scoop up some of those lucrative government contracts for expanding our broadband infrastructure.
As IBM reported record profits
IBM Bucks Tech Slump, Issues Rosy 2009 Outlook
By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
Bucking the trend of high-tech competitors, International Business Machines Corp. posted a 12% increase in fourth-quarter profit and gave an upbeat outlook for 2009.
Although facing "an extremely difficult economic environment," IBM said it expects to continue to benefit from the growing profitability of its software and services businesses. Despite the global slowdown, customers are continuing to sign up for outsourcing and other services contracts, IBM said.
WSJ also summarizes the Obama transition team briefing.
International Business Machines Corp.'s chief executive, Samuel Palmisano, advised the Obama transition team last month that $30 billion in government investments in expanding broadband access, computerizing health-care records and improving the electrical grid could create more than 900,000 U.S. jobs.
The IBM presentation came in response to a November request from the Obama advisers for an analysis of the job-creation impact of information-technology investments. IBM said that Mr. Palmisano made the presentation in a conference call with transition team members including Carol Browner, who has been named the White House coordinator of energy and climate policy, and Julius Genachowski, a top technology adviser for the president-elect.
It's unclear how much of the advice, if any, will be incorporated into a two-year stimulus plan that the Obama team and lawmakers are working on. Elements of the plan will include some traditional infrastructure spending and tax relief, Obama aides said over the weekend.
Chris Caine, IBM's vice president for governmental programs, said that after the election, the Obama's transition team asked IBM to provide analysis of whether investing in IT infrastructure could help stimulate job creation. "There are lots of econometrics on the number of jobs from traditional infrastructure investments," Mr. Caine said. "There aren't any metrics for these kinds of calculations" regarding IT.
I blogged about Consumer Reports raising issue with the Energy Star program for Refrigerators.
Well it turns out the issues is big enough that for the first time some refrigerators have been suspended from the Energy Star program.
Fridges lose their Energy Star
LG-LMX25981ST
For the first time, some refrigerators have been suspended from the federal Energy Star program, under a November 2008 agreement between South Korean manufacturer LG and the Department of Energy.
Made by LG and sold under the LG and Kenmore Trio brands, 22 French-door models with through-the-door ice and water dispensers consume too much energy to qualify for Energy Star, an issue brought to light by recent Consumer Reports articles about some Energy Star appliances. Energy Star refrigerators must use at least 20 percent less electricity than the maximum allowed under the DOE standard, but one model we reported on currently consumes 23 percent more than the DOE maximum.
Hopefully vendors who sign up for the Energy Star program for servers and data center efficiency, will be aware of this first time suspension, and make input for accurate tests.
Ann Patchett writes in the WSJ about the Triump of Reading.
There will be those who attribute the rise in reading to our current decline of cash, and if that is actually the case I would at least be able to think I forfeited my retirement account to a worthy cause. It's true, as a source of entertainment reading ranks somewhere between cheap and free, depending on where you get your books. A movie can give you two hours of entertainment, but a book can go on for days or even weeks. My friend Lucy loved to point out that she started reading "War and Peace" on the first day of the first Gulf War and was still reading when the war was over. But I do not give all the credit for reading's rise to the collapse of the global financial markets. I believe as a nation we have touched the cultural bottom and are ready to be smart again. I think we're reading more because we've seen as many episodes of American Idol as our collective consciousness can bear and even if we weren't flat broke we'd still be in the mood for a book. Everyone improves under good leadership, which is why we all appreciate a teacher, a librarian, or a bookstore clerk who is willing to steer a child toward a copy of William Steig's "Doctor DeSoto." When Barack Obama, our soon-to-be-author-in-chief, announced on "60 Minutes" that he'd like to see poetry readings in the White House, I found myself thinking that change was going to come.
Adam Niklewicz
It is interesting to think why people are reading more. Is it because of the economy, or Patchett points out “we have touched a cultural bottom, and ready to be smart again.”
Whatever your view, the good thing is all this reading is greener than most other activities. the NYTimes has a blog post about NRDC going after game consoles.
Consumption Study Takes Aim at Game Consoles
By JOE HUTSKO
In a new study about how much energy video game consoles consume, the Natural Resources Defense Council found that consoles in use today consume “an estimated 16 billion-kilowatt hours per year,” which, the report goes on to translate, is “roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego.”
Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at NRDC and the study’s lead researcher, said gamers often leave consoles on when they’re not playing in order to return to the middle of a level that can’t be saved and reloaded in the same place if the power is turned off.
“That’s the main reason some people don’t turn it off,” Mr. Horowitz said, adding that “although Microsoft and Sony have added power settings options to automatically turn off the consoles after a set amount of time,” console owners often ignore the option “because they’ll lose their place when they’re done.”
…
In terms of overall energy use for the best-selling consoles — whether regularly turned off or not — the report describes Nintendo’s Wii, which draws 16 watts of power when in use, as a “juice sipper.” Microsoft’s Xbox 360, drawing 119 watts while active, sits in the middle. Sony’s PlayStation 3 was rated as the power hog, at 150 watts while in use.
