The Green Data Center Battle, setting the standards

November 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

Many think the green data center topic is not important and have moved on to other issues, but consider this article from the Harvard Business Review.

Winning in the Green Frenzy

by Gregory Unruh and Richard Ettenson

Don’t let your competitors control what “sustainable” means in your industry.

Right now somebody, somewhere, is defining what sustainability means for your industry, business, and products. Almost everywhere you look—textiles, communications, agriculture, autos, high tech—green competition is shifting from a race to launch ecofriendly products to a battle over what constitutes a green product in the first place. The definition can vary from one industry, business, or product class to the next. But whatever your business, if you’re not engaged in the debate and in shaping the rules, you risk being assessed against sustainability standards you can’t meet. Worse, you may be left behind by a shrewd competitor that has strategically positioned itself as a certified paragon of the new green ideal.

HBR points to the coffee industry as an example of the battle.

Producing sustainability standards is a multiplayer melee we call the green frenzy, because it is like a feeding frenzy in the wild—a tooth-and-claw competition among a growing pack of stakeholders including environmental activists, think tanks, bloggers, industry associations, consultants, and your rivals, all clamoring to establish and impose their own green standards.

In the coffee industry, for example, more than a dozen standards currently compete, affecting everything from pesticide use to workers’ housing to bird friendliness. (Just one of these, the Rainforest Alliance sustainable agriculture certification for coffee production, has some 100 criteria.) Each of the various standards has a constituency working to define the benchmarks for “sustainable coffee.” Some are backed by nonprofits such as the Audubon Society and TransFair, others by companies such as Starbucks and Nestlé.

Imagine Greenpeace being one of the most vocal groups on what green data center standards should be.

What's in Dell's move to Quincy, WA? Competing with IBM and HP?

November 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

Wenatchee World has the story on Dell coming to Quincy, WA for a data center.

Secret's out? Dell headed here

Blog: Everyday Business

By Mike Irwin

November 2, 2010

Dell, the world's third-largest computer company, has purchased property in Quincy that could become the site of the Columbia Basin town's newest data center, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce reported this morning.
Underway for months, the top-secret purchase — known as Project Roosevelt — would add the computer manufacturer to Quincy's list of tech industry standouts, such as Microsoft and Yahoo.

DataCenterKnowledge has more details.

Officials with the Port of Quincy have confirmed that the deal is related to Project Roosevelt, the code name for a data center that could include grow to 250,000 square feet over time. The initial specifications call for 7 megawatts of power, ramping up to 30 megawatts over time. The search also considered sites in Douglas County.

Why is Dell building 7 MW with growth for 25 MW? Perot systems is the competitor of HP/EDS and IBM services. Perot systems doesn't have the data center inventory that HP and IBM has.

Converged infrastructure is a hot topic, and it is much easier to sell a converged infrastructure solution when you have the data center contract. The Dell data center is most likely a cost effective solution for hosting, gives a low carbon data center alternative, and becomes a showcase for Dell/Perot.

Dell announced today the acquisition of Cloud Solution SaaS company Boomi.

Dell to Acquire Boomi; Adds Industry’s No. 1 Integration Cloud™ Solution to SaaS Capabilities

Date : 11/2/2010

Round Rock, Texas

Dell today announced it has agreed to acquire Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration leader Boomi to help businesses reap the full value of cloud computing. Powered by its revolutionary AtomSphere technology, Boomi offers the industry’s only pure SaaS application integration platform that takes the cost and complexity out of integrating applications by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications with no appliances, no software and no coding required.

Intel is a Mobile Chip company

November 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

I was reading a Forbes blog entry on Intel and the Atom chip.

Intel Should Be $26 But Not Because Of Atom Chips

Nov. 1 2010 - 5:17 pm | 6,417 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments

posted by TREFIS TEAM

Intel's Atom is a market share champ but doesn't do much for the stock price.

Since their launch in 2008, Intel’s Atom microprocessors have dominated the global netbook market. In addition to netbooks, the Atom microprocessor is used in a variety of other places including smartphones, tablets, car infotainment systems, smart TVs, low power consuming servers, and energy management systems.

Despite this, Atom’s rising market share will have minimal impact on Intel’s stock since these ultra low voltage microprocessors account for only around 2% of Intel’s stock price, based on our estimates. Intel’s Atom competes with AMD’s Athlon Neo, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, andNvidia’s Tegra microprocessors. We currently have a Trefis price estimate of $26.50 for Intel’s stock, about 32% above the current market price of $20.

So where is the value of Intel stock (Note earlier this year I sold all my Intel stock when it was at 24 and luckily bought back when the stock was at 4)? Check out this graphic from Trefis.

If you combine Notebook processors with Mobile chipsets you get 53.5% of Intel’s value.

Never thought of Intel as a mobile chipset company. Energy efficiency is much of what Intel discusses even in its server chips. Doing more with less energy is the future.

Human Spirit and Creativity applied to leveraging hidden assets

November 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

if you discuss energy efficiency and greening a data center you’ll get a long list of PUE, hot-cold aisle, power systems, air side economizers. Rarely do you get creative work. What do I mean by creative? Consider this post on Design Steps to Heaven.

Design steps to heaven

I recently visted Luzern, in Switzerland, for a workshop at the oldest art and design school in Switzerland, Hochschule Luzern.

My host, Andy Polaine had asked me to set students in the first semester of the MA Design a challenge.

The task I gave them was as follows: find a neglected asset somewhere in Luzern, and design a service to increase its value to the city.

The author had a specific area he thought the students would leverage.

As the workshop began, I assumed that some groups of students would focus on the city's new cultural centre [photo above]. Designed by Jean Novel, the building had taken twenty years to conceive and plan. With an overhanging roof 35m 100 feet) above the ground, the building had cost the city 130 million euros to build.

This was an iconic building with a capital "I". I thought it must surely have potential as the focus of some new kind of civic activity.

But, he was surprised by what one first prize. A church turned into a climbing wall.

The first joint winner was called 'Straight way to heaven'.

The team had identified a church as their neglected asset,and proposed to increase its value as a meeting place by opening it up to bouldering in the city.

The group did not expect the church authorities to be thrilled by their idea, but our jury found their service communication to be so engaging that they were made joint winners.

How many hidden assets (ideas) are there in the data center industry?

2nd prize was won by students who created a closed-loop service concept for a cemetery.

The second winning project in Luzern, Graveyard Alive, was especially enchanting. The group had discovered that the city's Friedhof Cemetary contained a lot of as-yet-unused space.

They came up with a sublime closed-loop service concept: offer people the opportunity to donate their bodies, once buried, as nutrients to save endangered plants and cultivate biodiversity.

anti-Green Brown Energy supported by Coal lobbyist, affect future data centers

November 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

Greenpeace has been attacking Facebook on its use of coal power in the Prineville, OR data center.

The social networking site chose the high-desert timber town of 10,000 to take advantage of its cool nights and dry air in hopes of making its first-ever data center an energy efficiency landmark.

But the concept failed to impress Greenpeace.

In a report posted on the Internet last month, the environmental group praised Google and Yahoo for tapping hydro power - but challenged Facebook for building in coal country.

Greenpeace has a 500,000 plus Facebook community in English, French, and Spanish. Will the Coal lobby start a 100% coal energy Facebook page? Here is news on the Coal Lobbyists.

Coal Industry Spending to Sway Next Congress

By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: October 29, 2010

WASHINGTON — The coal industry, facing a host of new health and safety regulations, is spending millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign donations this year to influence the makeup of the next Congress in hopes of derailing what one industry official called an Obama administration “regulatory jihad.”

Multimedia

Graphic

The Coal Shovel

Political spending by the coal industry is on track to exceed that of the 2008 cycle, when the presidency was at stake and Congress appeared determined to move forward with a national energy policy designed to address climate change by cutting back on the use of coal and petroleum.

Over the last two years, the coal industry, along with its allies in oil and gas, electric utilities, manufacturing and agriculture, effectively killed any prospects for climate change legislation in the near future.

Will a pro-coal lobby make it easier to build coal powered data centers? Don’t expect a pro-coal government to make Greenpeace to back-off.

Greenpeace’s recent actions have made many reconsider carbon impact in site selection.

Can you afford a high carbon data center?