Greenpeace says Bill Gates Climate Leadership is not transferred to Microsoft, says Google is the Leader

June 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

Greenpeace is an organization which wants to drive changes. In this blog post they start out pointing out Bill Gates Climate position.

Does Microsoft Do as Bill Gates Says on Climate?

Blogpost by Jodie - June 2, 2010 at 10:00 PMAdd comment

In January, Bill Gates published an argument about solving climate change titled “Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation”. As you may have guessed, Gates’ point is that energy efficiency alone will not achieve us the emissions cuts scientists say are necessary to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Innovation, Gates says, is key to getting the bulk of emissions - those from transportation and electricity generation - down to zero.

The points out the inconsistency of how Microsoft performs as a company. Bill is still Chairman of the Board.

Given the scope of the problem, combating climate change is going to require all of the above -- innovation, private and government sector investment, and regulation. Perhaps a more important question, then, given Gates' power and influence as the founder and current Board Chair of Microsoft, is whether he can influence the company to offer the innovative solutions needed to fight the climate crisis.

Is Gates putting his money where his mouth is?

We recently evaluated Microsoft on its climate leadership efforts and discovered that, even in the realm of innovation, Gates’ company has a way to go if it intends to meaningfully address climate change with technology. In fact, Microsoft receives only 31 points out of 100 on the latest version of the Cool IT Leaderboard.

Then they hit a pain point.

Thus far, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has failed to articulate the urgent need for government policy to drive a clean energy transformation. By comparison, Microsoft’s competitor, Google, is the top scoring Leaderboard company on advocacy for the clear position taken by its CEO, Eric Schmidt, in support of political action to drive transformative investment in clean energy technologies.

And close by stating a paradox.

If innovation and government encouragement are what IT pioneer, Gates, says will get us to zero emissions, shouldn’t an IT behemoth like Microsoft be demonstrating stronger leadership to get us there?

Watch out for the author Jodie if that is really their name. This is the same author who scared the Uptime Symposium audience.

Greenpeace strikes fear in Uptime Symposium, continues No Coal Data Center efforts

I was talking to a friend who was at Uptime Symposium and he asked if I heard that Greenpeace was there and Greenpeace asked Mike Manos a question in his CO2Kpresentation. The fear in the crowd reached levels not typical as they knew they knew Greenpeace has target data centers as the IT polluters like the way Greenpeace has targeted Facebook, and no one knew Greenpeace was attending. No sane data center event is going to promote that Greenpeace will be there. See below for Greenpeace's latest move versus Dell.

He commented that the Greenpeace question to Mike was a softball question. I told him of course, Mike is out there discussing issues Greenpeace supports. They are not going to attack Mike.

Another friend send me a link to the Greenpeace blog post based on Uptime attendance.

Ubuntu's Founder saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks

June 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

Mark Shuttleworth writes a post that got my attention.

At our last UDS in Belgium it was notable how many people were interested in the ARM architecture. There have always been sessions at UDS about lightweight environments for the consumer electronics and embedded community, but this felt tangibly different. I saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks, for example, and in desktop tracks. That’s new.

Who is Mark Shuttleworth?

Biography

Mark is founder of the Ubuntu Project, an enterprise Linux distribution that is freely available worldwide and has both cutting-edge desktop and enterprise server editions, and has become very popular.

The founder of Ubuntu felt tangible different at the Ubuntu Developer Summit seeing enthusiasm for ARM based Servers and Cloud Computing.

And Mark is excited about the Linaro announcement.

So I’m very excited at today’s announcement of Linaro, an initiative by the ARM partner ecosystem including Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI, to accelerate and unify the field of Linux on ARM. That is going to make it much easier for developers to target ARM generally, and build solutions that can work with the amazing diversity of ARM hardware that exists today.

Linaro is using open source ideas, and Mark plans to keep Ubuntu in sync with Linaro.

Linaro is impressively open: www.linaro.org has details of open engineering summits, an open wiki, mailing lists etc. The teams behind the work are committed to upstreaming their output so it will appear in all the distributions, sooner or later. The images produced will all be royalty free. And we’re working closely with the Linaro team, so the cadence of the releases will be rigorous, with a six month cycle that enables Linaro to include all work that happens in Ubuntu in each release of Linaro. There isn’t a “whole new distribution”, because a lot of the work will happen upstream, and where bits are needed, they will be derived from Ubuntu and Debian, which is quite familiar to many developers.

For more information about Linaro here is an executive PDF.

And Mark does an excellent job of pointing out the value of Linaro.

The nature of the work seems to break down into four different areas.

First, there are teams focused on enabling specific new hardware from each of the participating vendors. Over time, we’ll see real convergence in the kernel used, with work like Grant Likely’s device tree forming the fabric by which differences can be accommodated in a unified kernel. As an aside, we think we can harness the same effort in Ubuntu on other architectures as well as ARM to solve many of the thorny problems in linux audio support.

Second, there are teams focused on the middleware which is common to all platforms: choosing APIs and ensuring that those are properly maintained and documented so that people can deliver any different user experience with best-of-breed open tools.

Third, there are teams focused on advancing the state of the art. For example, these teams might accelerate the evolution of the compiler technology, or the graphics subsystem, or provide new APIs for multitouch gestures, or geolocation. That work benefits the entire ecosystem equally.

And finally, there are teams aimed at providing out of the box “heads” for different user experiences. By “head” we mean a particular user experience, which might range from the minimalist (console, for developers) to the sophisticated (like KDE for a netbook). Over time, as more partners join, the set of supported “heads” will grow – ideally in future you’ll be able to bring up a Gnome head, or a KDE head, or a Chrome OS head, or an Android head, or a MeeGo head, trivially. We already have goot precedent for this in Ubuntu with support for KDE, Gnome, LXE and server heads, so everyone’s confident this will work well.

The diversity in the Linux ecosystem is fantastic. In part, Linaro grows that diversity: there’s a new name that folks need to be aware of and think about. But importantly, Linaro also serves to simplify and unify pieces of the ecosystem that have historically been hard to bring together. If you know Ubuntu, then you’ll find Linaro instantly familiar: we’ll share repositories to a very large extent, so things that “just work” in Ubuntu will “just work” with Linaro too.

When you read this and go back to Mark's learning about the interest for ARM Servers, do you have any doubt Linux ARM Servers will be coming soon to the data center?

Thanks to Gulf Spill, Clean Energy Bill gets a second chance

June 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

Mike Manos points out the Presidential address on carbon legislation.

C02K Doubter? Watch the Presidential address today

June 2, 2010 by mmanos

Are you a Data Center professional who doubts that Carbon legislation is going to happen or that this initiative will never get off the ground? This afternoon President Obama plans to outline his intention to assess a cost for Carbon consumption at a conference highlighting his economic accomplishments to date. The backdrop of this of course is the massive oil rig disaster in the Gulf.

As my talk at the Uptime Institute Symposium highlighted this type of legislation will have a big impact on data center and mission critical professionals. Whether you know it or not, you will be front and center in assisting with the response, collection and reporting required to react to this kind of potential legislation. In my talk where I questioned the audience in attendance it was quite clear that most of those in the room were vastly ill-prepared and ill-equipped to this kind of effort.

If passed this type of legislation is going to cause a severe reaction inside organizations to ensure that they are in compliance and likely lead to a huge increase of spending in an effort to collect energy information along with reporting. For many organizations this will result in significant spending.

NYTimes discusses President Obama's speech.

Obama Says He’ll Push for Clean Energy Bill

By HELENE COOPER

PITTSBURGH — President Obama said Wednesday that it was time for the United States “to aggressively accelerate” its transition from oil to alternative sources of energy and vowed to push for quick action on climate change legislation despite almost unanimous opposition from Republicans and continued skepticism from some Democrats.

Seeking to harness the deepening anger over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the advantage of his legislative agenda, Mr. Obama promised to find the lagging votes in the Senate to get the climate change and energy bill passed this year. Last year, the House passed a version of the bill, which tries to address global warming by putting a price on greenhouse gas pollution and provides incentives for alternative clean energy sources.

Mike makes a call to action, but I wonder if the data center managers will be even 10% as passionate as Mike on this topic.

This should be a clarion call for data center managers to step up and raise awareness within their organizations about this pending legislation and take a proactive role in establishing a plan for a corporate response. Take an inventory of your infrastructure and assess what will you need to begin collecting this information? It might even be wise to get a few quotes to get an idea or ballpark cost of what it might take to bring your organization up to the task. Its probably better to start doing this now, than to be told by the business to get it done.

Marvell planning ARM Server 1/5 power vs. x86

June 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

EETimes has an article about Marvell's next ARM processers for Servers.

Marvell plans 40-nm ARM server processors
Partners include one working on port of Windows to ARM

Rick Merritt
EE Times
(05/10/2010 7:52 PM EDT)

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Marvell Technology Group Ltd. aims to supply silicon for ARM-based servers with 40-nm multicore processors it will ship this year. It is working with multiple partners including one that hopes to port a server version of Microsoft Windows to ARM.

"We have on the road map quad-core symmetric multiprocressing enterprise ARM-based SoCs that will be here soon," said Simon Milner, vice president of Marvell's enterprise group. "There's a huge opportunity here because the market is x86 dominated and ARM can bring power consumption breakthroughs into this space," he said.

The new chips will offer more than a five-fold reduction in power consumption compared to x86 processors that dominate the server market, Marvell claims. Earlier this year, Marvell announced its Armada 310 that runs at a gigahertz while consuming 700 milliW and will scale to 2 GHz at less than a Watt, Milner said.

And there are ARM servers even planned for Windows.

At least one partner is working on a port of a server version Microsoft Windows to ARM, and has access to some of the low level code needed for that job. "That is a large undertaking," said Milner.

Other partners are working on ports to ARM of x86 virtualization software also strategic for the server market. Some server customers are asking for 64-bit support, but "subsets of the server market can be addressed with 32 bits," Milner said.

For Marvell, the server initiative is one in a series of efforts since it acquired from Intel the XScale ARM design and an ARM architectural license.

"We have had significant success in the last five years taking ARM into new segments such as communications infrastructure and networking systems," he said.

ARM Servers used in Smart Meters

June 3, 2010 Dave Ohara

Will the millions of Smart Meters that have a high percentage of ARM processors be the largest server count?

A server is a hw/sw system that provides services to clients that is expected to have high availability.

In computing, a server is any combination of hardware or software designed to provide services to clients. When used alone, the term typically refers to a computer which may be running a server operating system, but is also used to refer to any software or dedicated hardwarecapable of providing services.

I found information about the Smart Meter architecture which provides the services of a server.

Utility companies are starting to deploy electronic metering systems that capture and transmit usage information with the long-term goal to empower and educate users as to the real-time cost and impact of using an appliance at a particular moment in time.

Request More Information

Optimized ARM Smart Meter Block Diagram

The ARM^® design philosophy is centered on low power, energy efficient design and we have spent over 10 years supporting silicon companies that need to design platforms under stringent power dissipation requirements.

ARM processors are architected to minimize current draw, both when systems are fully operational and when they are inactive, providing incredibly power efficient processing for tethered applications. While important for mobile products like phones, this is incredibly important for meters which are expected to operate for periods up to 20 years on a single battery. The highly economical approach of the embedded processors can be coupled with ARM Physical IP power management kits, to reduce the power of the complete SoC. These kits incorporate an optimized set of physical IP libraries, memoriesand standard cells to further improve the useful workload/joule metric of the complete system.

When you look at ARM's definition of what is required for an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), it sounds like a web server solution.

For the vision of AMI infrastructure to be realized, the smart meter must:

Communicate with other intelligent appliances inside the residence or enterprise. The strategy for providing this communication path varies from country to country and in some cases region to region. Zigbee has gained significant adoption in early trials. However, both WiFi and HomePlug offer benefits for certain deployments.

Communicate information securely across the network to preserve sensitive user information.

Incorporate enough latent horsepower to enable the delivery of future services without the need for a truck roll.

Actually when you look at what is defined by AMI you get this in Smartphone as well.

ARM servers are showing up as the always on devices providing services to clients.