Sentilla Blog

As you and your team are grappling with the ever increasing complexity of delivering more services with less resources, increased governance and shrinking budget’s, you are now also being asked to deliver these services and applications within a sustainable environment and have a Green IT initiative….its enough to make you see Red.

There are a number of socio-political considerations driving sustainability and Green IT for CIO’s and it is shaping their approach to the challenge.

European IT teams have conversations that revolve around the current and pending legislation by country. You are focused on compliance and meeting the requirements of the law – that will usually mean meeting the minimum of the requirements. Your focus will be on cost of compliance, planning for delivering your Green IT response, based on meeting the law of the land, not on what the ROI will be or how you and your team will benefit.

The theme at this year's SAP TechEd conference is "Innovation without Disruption".  What a fitting theme for Sentilla as well, as we share SAP's desire to bring innovation to the data center without causing any disruption. The idea is simple: if you build a platform that leverages the existing architecture but bridges it to new technologies, you can migrate a customer from a legacy approach to a modern approach without disrupting their applications. As you can imagine, this is important with big ERP, CRM, PI, etc systems that must be available.

The Amazon Kindle is a compact device that uses e-ink display technology that doesn't consume power when displaying a static image. The act of reading a book generally involves long views of static images. As a result, the Kindle can achieve very long battery life when used for normal reading.

In a continuing trend to examine everything possible with a green magnifying glass, the Cleantech Group has recently released a report about the effective carbon footprint of Amazon's Kindle eReader. In particular, they compare the carbon footprint of the Kindle to the carbon footprint generated by reading the same amount of books on paper. Since the release of the Kindle, this question has been posed a number of times, but this is the first comprehensive report to take an at least somewhat rigorous approach to the problem.

When it comes to "efficiency", there's a lot of different definitions for what makes a data center efficient.  Fundamentally, efficiency is how much work is done per unit of energy.  And when it comes to Cyber Monday, today is the most efficient day for many data centers.

Just think about it -- normally servers are sitting around idle, waiting for a job a to do.  They have low utilization, but are needed for availability to ensure that all customers can access your websites and make purchases without any hassles when the demand picks up.  Most servers in data centers run at a utilization rate of around 8 to 12%, but what's even more frightening is 83% of data center managers don't even know what the utilization of their systems is.  When it comes to ensuring availability of compute resources on heavy demand days like Cyber Monday, it is scary to think that most don't even know how much headroom they have.

Kevin O'Marah from AMR Research claims that Green IT receives a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other green initiatives.  His blog has stirred some discussion in the office and here I'm weighing in on the topic.  Understandably, Kevin's post was likely intended to stir up discussion, so I realize I'm playing into what the blog was likely designed to accomplish.  (Oh, and try googling "carbon accounting" if you want to catch the hype curve.)

With the Carbon Reduction Commitment (now CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme) turned into a flat tax and delayed by a year, many are questioning whether carbon regulation is real.  Last year, Mike Manos described a doomsday "CO2K" scenario similar to Y2K.  Now that some time has passed, governments have changed, and we've interviewed data center operations about the impact of carbon regulation, I'm weighing in on the issue.  Let's put it this way -- unless carbon tax is about FIVE TIMES the cost of electricity, there's no financial motivation to change behavior.  That means CO2K is more likely to be like Y2K -- essentially a lot of hype but ultimately a bust. Check out the video blog below, or at Data Centre Solutions.

Over the last few months, I've had the pleasure of getting to know the team at SAP. What has been interesting in working with SAP is the wealth of products and business intelligence that they bring to the table, not to mention their diversity. With a tremendous presence in Europe as well as the US, they really have a global look at how enterprises are dealing with sustainability. SAP's acquisition of Clear Standards last year enhanced their portfolio with a carbon and financial management solution (renamed to SAP Carbon Impact). It is still an emerging market, and there's a number of players to watch (Hara, ENXSuite, and C3 just to name a few).