Sentilla Blog

What do 15,000 Java developers have in common? Besides a love of object-oriented programming languages and an oddly-shaped mascot named Duke, Java developers act en masse. How do we know? Sentilla was commissioned by Sun Microsystems to instrument the Moscone Center in San Francisco with over 200 pervasive computers during the 2008 JavaOne conference. Sun wanted to have greater insight into the behavior of attendees during the conference so that organizers could adjust energy-usage in real-time and better plan for future events. Each morning, John Gage presented Sentilla's findings.

When I attended the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum last October, there was a pervasive excitement for a bright future---ballasted by so-called Green Jobs. The keynote speaker Van Jones, as well as a number of other speakers in the forum, spoke of the new "Green-Collar economy," in which unemployment is all but eliminated since everyone is going to be retro-fitting old buildings, inventing new technologies, and analyzing energy consumption.

At the polar opposite of the spectrum, we have some members of congress who have recently commented on such green jobs, calling them "artificial." The crux of their argument is that proponents of green jobs are trying to create jobs out of thin air, where labor is not really needed, under a thin guise of environmental responsibility.

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.

Recent studies indicate that, as IT professionals look to trim power expenditures and move toward ever greener IT solutions, energy efficiency metrics will become an ever more critical data point in their decision-making process.  According to a recent Gartner
study, many IT and data center managers consider green IT a top priority, but have yet to embrace measurement and monitoring infrastructure critical to determine energy-saving measures and satisfy government regulations.

Efficiency metrics span the gamut from the GreenGrid's PUE and DCIE to the E.U.'s Code of Conduct for Data Centres Energy Efficiency.  In all cases, energy utilization measurement and analysis is a necessary step to understanding how IT architecture and provisioning can be improved.  Data indicating a server's idle power usage, work done per watt, comparison of energy usage for comparable equipment, and sustained efficiency over time merely scratch the surface.