Carbon footprint of a Tweet, Energy/Tweet approx 100J, CO2 0.02 grams

April 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

Earth2Tech reports on the Energy per Tweet.

How Much Energy Per Tweet?

By Katie Fehrenbacher Apr. 19, 2010, 12:00am PDT 1 Comment

2 0

Every time you send out 140 characters over the social application Twitter, how much energy does that consume? According to some back of the napkin calculations from Raffi Krikorian, a developer for Twitter’s Platform Team, each tweet sent consumes about 90 joules. That means each tweet emits about 0.02 grams of C02 into the atmosphere.

For the roughly 50 million tweets sent on average per day, that’s the equivalent of 1 metric ton of CO2 per day. (1 metric ton of CO2 looks kinda like this).

Raffi Krikorian's passionate talk on energy use of a tweet starts at 2:50 into this video. It is only 5 minutes long.

Apr 15

From #chirp: Energy / Tweet ≈ 100 J ± something / Tweet

Last night at Chirp, I gave an Ignite talk entitled "Energy / Tweet". Taking a few liberties, some assumptions, and running all of Twitter in development mode on my laptop, "energy per tweet" comes out to about 100 J / Tweet.

You can catch me talking (and introduced by @brady) starting at 2:50 in this video:

You can also just get the slides here:

Excuse this comment, but it illustrates the passion Raffi has as at 8:10 he says we can be less of a "planet fucker."

This is the kind of thinking that is going to get people thinking what is the carbon impact of code just like Microsoft posted last week.

eBay understands the energy per listing. Google understands the energy per search. Twitter understands the energy per tweet.

Do you have energy consumption for your IT services?

Twitter knows it has to be more energy efficient look at its growth.

The new numbers blow past Pingdom’s stats. Some of the highlights:

- In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day.

- By 2008, the number grew to 300,000 tweets per day.

- By 2009, around 2.5 million tweets were sent through Twitter every single day.

- Tweet growth shot up by 1,400% in 2009, reaching 35 million tweets per day by the end of the year.

- As of now, Twitter sees 50 million tweets created per day.

Great Job Raffi for waking up your development community on the energy / tweet.

Social Security Administration picks the wrong data center site, mistakes in power costs, telecommunications access, and cost of construction

April 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

This would be funny, if it wasn’t a potential $500 million data center built by the US Gov’t by the Social Security Administration. The Office of Inspector General caught the error.

In particular, when developing the mandatory selection criteria, it does not appear that consideration was given to the serious fiscal impact that exclusions would have in the electrical power cost arena over the life cycle of the data center. Finally, in evaluating the telecommunications criteria concepts, SeBS found only limited information.

SeBS, Strategic e-Business Solutions uses system engineering techniques.

Service Offering: Systems Engineering Services
· Provide full range of system engineering support for aerospace and telecommunication systems including manned and unmanned aircraft, satellites, shipboard systems and fixed facility installations.
· Oversea engineering change requests, conduct systems acceptance testing, test and evaluation and system IV&V.
· Develop Performance based specification for obtaining resources to perform customer service support services from the vendor community.
· · Provide full lifecycle support in requirement development and validation.

From the reading the report, it seems like the SSA site selection team became obsessed with a few criteria that are uptime risks (man-made and natural disasters), and who cares about the power bill or whether there is access to fiber. And, SSA picked a site that was hard to build a data center.

SeBs evaluation found that in general, the Social Security Administration (SSA) developed a highly sophisticated set of selection criteria with which to evaluate general geographic areas of consideration and prospective individual properties. The Agency’s decision criteria avoided major areas that potentially are hazardous to the operation of a data center (including both natural and man-made risks). In addition, the criteria define major site and data center construction issues that would ultimately have a significant impact on the site
property to be selected. However, questions remain concerning SSA's process employed in narrowing the site properties down to a short list. In addition, the initial mandatory selection criteria applied to the geographic regions under consideration may have excluded too many locales.

SSA accepted 22 of 25 recommendations from SeBs.

I wonder who the original vendor was who consulted the SSA for site selection.

Thanks to the folks at DataCenterDynamics reported on this issue, and I found the SSA OIG document.

Equinix CTO 10 year perspective, data center changes in highly connected Internet services

April 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

I had the pleasure of interviewing Equinix's CTO David Pickut as part of Equinix reaching its 50th data center.

Equinix Opens 50th Premier IBX Data Center

Equinix’s 50th IBX Data Center Opens in London; Will Help Company Service Global Demand From Financial Services Firms and Cloud Service Providers

FOSTER CITY, CA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – March 30, 2010 – Equinix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EQIX), a provider of global data center services, today announced a major company milestone: the opening of its 50th premier International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center. This announcement demonstrates Equinix’s ability to help its customers fully leverage all of the benefits of an interconnected world.

If you are not familiar with David here is some background.

David Pickut

Chief Technology Officer

Dave Pickut joined Equinix in 2004 and served in several roles before settling into his current role as Chief Technology Officer. Prior to joining Equinix, Mr. Pickut held Vice President positions with a Tier 1 ISP and an IT products/services company, with responsibilities for data center operations and business management. His engineering experience encompasses both consulting services and product design related to mission-critical data center power, cooling, security, controls, and fire protection systems.

Mr. Pickut received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University and is a registered professional engineer, a member of the IEEE and NFPA.

The perspective I was looking for is David's view of the past 10 years and what the future looks like. Over the past 10 years, Dave has seen three big changes in data centers.

Energy density in racks has gone up.
Energy Efficiency awareness has increased.
Transition from stand alone data center mindset to highly connected data centers.

This is best illustrated by drawings David provided. Here is what data centers looked like 10 years ago.

And this is what data center design looks like it 2010

Note in the upper left of each of these slides the external forces affecting data centers. This is proof I was looking for that Equinix is on the right path to Green (low carbon) Data Centers.

The mass media industry will cover Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple data centers. But, here is a simple way to understand the future of data centers. David and I chatted about many more things regarding the future 10 years, and he said it is easy to build energy efficient cost effective data centers. The hard part is accounting for the accelerating rate of external factors that now affect data center design. Those who put their "head in the sand" and geek out are setting themselves up for unexpected reactions like Greenpeace's focus on Facebook's coal powered data center.

Facebook Responds on Coal Power in Data Center
February 17th, 2010 : Rich Miller

An architectural rendering of the new Facebook data center planned for Prineville, Oregon.

Facebook has responded to growing criticism of its power choices for its new data center in Prineville, Oregon. This is one of the first cases in which a data center’s energy sourcing has attracted this kind of public attention, but it won’t be the last.

I am looking forward to more posts on what Equinix is doing, and their willingness to share ideas, and what the future of data centers look like. In 2010, there is SaaS, Cloud Provider, Ethernet Exchange, and Mobile Carrier. Can you imagine what 2020 will look like?

Apr 29, 2010 deadline for NY St Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award

April 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

There are two more weeks to submit for NYSERDA's data center energy efficiency leadership award. Here are the details.

2010 New York State Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award

The 2010 New York State Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award, sponsored by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), recognizes an organization within New York State that demonstrates leadership in pursuing policies and projects that promote data center energy efficiency. New York State data centers’ energy consumption is equal to the energy consumption of nearly 700,000 single family homes per year – 4.5 billion kilowatt hours. According to Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories, if this trend continues, energy consumption by servers and data centers is forecasted to double over the next three to five years.

The winning organization and its project will be showcased at the Uptime Institute Symposium on May 19, 2010 in New York City and will be highlighted on the NYSERDA website. The award recipient has the exclusive right to identify itself as the award recipient on its public relations and marketing materials.

DESCRIPTION

The New York State Data Center Energy Efficiency Leadership Award will be presented to an organization that demonstrates leadership in pursuing policies and projects that promote the efficient use of energy in its data center. The winner of this award will serve as a model within New York State of an organization that is dedicated to sustainable, efficient load growth in its data center.

ELIGIBILITY

The winning organization’s policies and/or projects must be implemented in a data center that is located in New York State. The award will be presented at the Uptime Institute Symposium on May 19, 2010 in New York City. A representative from the award recipient’s organization should be available to attend the Symposium on May 19th.

I'll be looking at what gets submitted as I am part of the evaluation panel, but I will not be at Uptime Institute Symposium award ceremony this year. I was at Uptime last year as a blogger, and got an interesting view from a media perspective.

Different perspectives help you see what is of value to others. I regularly am amazed at how easy this is for me to shift, but I can lose people as I bounce from different perspectives. Luckily the people I interact with often know my brain is running free form. And, part of what organizes my thoughts is writing this blog.

GreenM3 search results "dan barber fish farming" example of search engine optimization

April 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

Part of running www.greenm3.com blog is to understand how successfully I can write content that has high Google search results. I am surrounded by Microsoft friends where I live, and people regularly ask why I don't use Bing search. Because over 90% of my search comes from Google.

And my top browser traffic is from Firefox.

Which are interesting insights into the technical audience for my blog.

Mobile is small traffic, but interesting distribution.

I had fun writing the blog post on Dan Barber's Sustainable Farming. Yes, I have fun writing some entries which is why I write so much. :-) When I first wrote the entry I realized I was behind the curve. The TED video had gone live Mar 10, 2010 and there were multiple media/bloggers who wrote about Dan's video. My post went live on Mar 26, 2010, two weeks after others. And, when I checked on Google search, I was buried down in 4th page of 10 results.

But, today I just got this Google Search, making it up to spot #8.

Which is kind of mind blowing that my one post beats so many other professional media sites.The traffic from you is what drove my Google Search ranking up. I had about 800 views/hits over the past 2 1/2 weeks. On average, I get about 400 views/hits per post.

One site with more details on the fish farm Dan Barber references is on Monterey Bay Aquarium's blog.

The Future of Fish Farming?

It's a story that almost sounds too good to be true -- except that it is true, and it says a lot about the kind of world we're creating for ourselves. It's a world we can live in, for the long term.

I first heard the tale from chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill during theSustainable Foods Institute we put on last month at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He described his delight in touring a multi-species aquaculture farm in Spainthat is a seamless part of a wetland restoration project in the Guadalquivir Marshes of Andalusia. Where the farmers produce abundant, high-quality seafood -- sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp -- AND where predators like flocks of flamingos are welcomed as a sign that the ecosystem is flourishing.

The Vera La Palma web site is here.

www.time.com has an article on Sustainable Aquaculture.

A ABEND / ISLA MAYOR Monday, Jun. 15, 2009

CHANNELING NATURE: Veta la Palma pumps estuary water into rehabilitated wetlands

Daniel Perez for TIME

It is rare for a farmer to appreciate the predators that eat the animals he raises. But Miguel Medialdea is hardly an ordinary farmer. Looking out on to the carpet of flamingos that covers one of the lagoons that make up Veta la Palma, the fish farm in southern Spain where he is biologist, Medialdea shrugs. "They take about 20% of our annuel yield," he says, pointing at a blush-colored bird as it scoops up a sea bass. "But that just shows the whole system is working."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902751,00.html#ixzz0l7yJldTZ

Thanks again for visiting GreenM3 blog.