Market:
1. The overall market for green IT services will peak at $4.8 billion in 2013, according to a new Forrester report, The Dawn of Green IT Services.It’s a $500 million market for 2008, InfoWorld reports, but Forrester expects that spending on green IT services among enterprise users will grow by 60 percent annually over the next five years.
2. Servers typically run at far below their capacity and on average only utilize 5 to 15 percent of the actual CPU capabilities
3. A recent PC Pro Labs study, showed that 25% leave their computers running all weekend and 65% running a screen saver rather than sleep.
4. Energy costs are expected to be over 50% of an IT budget for a typical data center
5. According to The Climate Group in their Smart 2020 report, transformation in the way people and businesses use technology could reduce annual man-made global emissions by 15% by 2020 and deliver energy efficiency savings to global businesses of over $800 billion.
6. A recent McKinsey report indicates in an analysis of five groups of abatement opportunities, technologies could help to eliminate 7.8 metric gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2020 - equivalent to 15 percent of global emissions today and five times more than our estimate of the emissions from these technologies in 2020.
Information and communications technologies (ICT) are becoming a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Gartner research indicated 2% and growing. We have a responsibility in the industry to reduce the impact, however, as we see above an even greater contribution can be made by using ICT to enable solutions that tackle the other 98%.
I blogged about this some time ago and know these guys from my time in Melbourne, so am quite proud of this Australian firm.......
Microsoft has announced that Prima Consulting's Sustainability SCO2recard solution is the sustainability solution award winner for 2008.
Sustainability SCO2recard applies the principles of corporate performance management to the sustainability aspects of an organisation’s performance and allows organisations to align their sustainability initiatives with corporate strategy, linking the sustainability outcomes with the economic performance of the organisation.
Sustainability SCO2recard enables organisations to;
• Manage all aspects of sustainability as defined by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
• Facilitate production of a GRI compliant Sustainability Report
• Produce data to comply with Australian Green House Gas emission reporting requirements
• Understand the relationship between financial and sustainability outcomes
Verdiem’s Edison is a free energy-monitoring application for eco-conscious consumers. You can use it to more actively control your PC’s energy consumption — and subsequently your household’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
This is an easy to use application that allows users of those 1 Billion+ PC users in the world to reduce the energy consumption. Take the challenge - if 10M users use the tool, it is estimated that savings of 3.5M tonnes of CO2 can be saved.
Endorsed by Microsoft and Climate Savers, Verdiem’s Edison enables consumers to measure, monitor, and manage their PC energy efficiency in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.
Read more on how Microsoft is addressing Environmental Sustainability.
A colleague sent me a link to this interesting site. The Breathing Earth site shows map of the world with birth and death rates, population and CO2 emissions in real time.
The rate of population growth is astounding and for every individual there is an increased consumption of resource which underlines the challenge.
For a UK viewpoint on population see http://www.optimumpopulation.org/.
It is also worth noting that around 40% of CO2 emissions are the result of decisions taken directly by all of us as individuals (Source: Defra UK).
So we can all start by reducing where we can - travel less; use less fuel and electricity and consider diet. Where is your food coming from and what energy did it take to put on the plate.
Producing 1kg of beef results in more CO2 emissions than going for a three-hour drive while leaving all the lights on at home, scientists said today (source: The Guardian, 19 July 2007).
Maybe those vegans have a point - though make sure it is organic and better still grow your own !
The winners of Imagine Cup 2008 were announced recently and I am proud to say it was an Australian team that won the Software Design category. For background on Imagine Cup see previous blog posting.
Team SOAK (Members: David Burela, Dimaz Pramudya, Ed Hooper, Long Zheng) won with an entry that had the aspiration of helping farmers achieve sustainable use of their land. This is achieved through the integrated use of environmental sensing, rich visual front ends to display the information to the farmer, and a subsystem which controls farm equipment such as sprinkler systems.
Theirs was an innovative combination of web services technology from Microsoft and BT that included the latest .NET framework, Silverlight and Virtual Earth and Windows Mobile device. Read more...
Click for more on the other winners.
The Imagine Cup 2008 World finals are on next month. Innovation in action.
This year the challenge set to a worldwide audience of the best and the brightest technology students to "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment."
Microsoft invited them to harness their creativity, technical know-how and most of all, their personal passion in an urgent mission: To use the power of technology to help the planet.
Each year the Imagine Cup chooses its theme from the UN Millennium goals: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
This year, Microsoft is calling on young programmers, artists and technologists around the world to We're challenging students to bring their ideas to life in a multifaceted competition that comprises nine categories, each catering to a different technological or artistic affinity. Students' work will reflect valuable, real world solutions, while giving them the opportunity to compete for cash prizes. When coupled with the power of technology the potential of young people is unlimited and the ideas they develop for the Imagine Cup could significantly improve the lives of millions of people around the world.
"We Project A Peak Of $4.8 Billion In Green IT Services Spending In 2013" - Forester, The Dawn of Green IT Services
In case you were thinking doing something about the environment was just a CSR issue.
Apart from being good corporate citizens, there is a very real market opportunity for organisations that have solutions which assist other organisations in assessing their environmental impact and more importantly helping them implement initiatives to meet their sustainability targets.
BT Global Services are one such services company who are building services such as the BT Carbon Impact Assessment offering to bring the expertise they have developed in tackling climate change* to the wider market.
In April 2007, Gartner estimated that the ICT sector was responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions, The ICT industry is a significant contributor to climate change, and are acting to reduce their collective footprint.
However, ICT will also enable significant reduction for the remaining 98% of global emissions through solutions which reduce and optimise travel; offer efficient online services alternatives, and optimise embodied and operational energy usage on both the desktop and in the data centre - to name some obvious applications in the Enterprise.
The percentage contribution by ICT technology maybe needs to grow as we apply innovative solutions to tackle the shift to an environmentally sustainable world.
*The telecoms firm has cut its own carbon emissions by 60 per cent since 1996 and has a target to shave off another 20 per cent by 2016.
When saving the environment (and reducing costs) sometimes the simple things make an impact.
- Do you really need to print it out?
- If you must print select duplex and consider 2 to a page. While you are at it think about narrower margins? Is it a draft or final? Why not make these settings default and create office templates?
- If you are an IT administrator consider creating standard templates for Office and Group Policy to set default print options.
- Consolidate printers, faxes, scanners: Next refresh cycle think about Multi function device.
- Consider implementing "FollowMe Printing" which requires the user to be physically present to get printouts (save those mounds of wasted prints that no one collects).
- Turnoff Printers at night.
- Are you printing on recycled or FSC Certified Paper.
- Are toner cartridges recycled ? The quality of recycled cartridges has improved - especially if you use a reputable company such as Cartridge World
I also came across this in recent edition of Vista magazine so thought I would share.....
GreenPrint eliminates wasteful pages in any printout automatically, saving you time and money, and maybe more importantly, saving trees, reducing greenhouse gasses, and decreasing waste.
GreenPrint's patent-pending technology does this by analyzing each page of every document sent to the printer and looking for typical waste characteristics (like that last page with just a URL, banner ad, logo, or legal jargon).
Feel free to post other tips.....
Ever wanted to take a birds eye view of the diminishing rainforests in South America? Or perhaps gazed in awe at the night sky pondering life in the universe?
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.
Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.
WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelenghts: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way. These are just two of many different ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the WorldWide Telescope. Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.
WWT is a single that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface.
Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before.
Microsoft have launched a new environmental portal pulling together all the great work we are doing helping to address environmental challenges.
This is a great resource site which talks about what we are doing in the internally, in the industry and the community to reduce our environmental impact.
"Microsoft works to translate our environmental commitment into meaningful actions through technology leadership and innovation, responsible corporate environmental practices, and global partnerships to address critical environmental challenges. "
Infoworld writes on Microsoft's release of a set of best practices for Energy Efficiency Data Centers.
![clip_image002[10]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/joev/WindowsLiveWriter/MicrosoftReleasesaSetofBestPracticesforE_B119/clip_image002%5B10%5D_1.jpg)
Caption: Graph of how many servers are in the data center and how much power is being consumed. This information helps educate the data center operator on historical capacity and corresponding power consumption, which can be leveraged in future data center planning.
Microsoft will release a set of best practices for administrators running datacenters, focusing on energy-saving strategies the company is implementing in its own operations, CEO Steve Ballmer announced at CeBIT 2008.
Those tips will covers issues such as how to pick a good site for a datacenter, how to deal with heat, and how to manage power consumption, Ballmer said during a keynote presentation at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.
The move is in response to growing concern over the release of carbon dioxide, one of the byproducts of burning fossil fuels to create electricity. In addition, power demands are ever-increasing, Ballmer said.
"If you look at non-travel power consumption in the world today ... information technology is one of the most rapidly growing power consumers on the planet," Ballmer said. "We think we have a real responsibility ... to reduce power consumption by the IT industry."
The paper can be found at this location.
Here is an interesting example of building on mapping technology that can indirectly positively impact the environment. Clearflow is a technology out of Microsoft Research Labs that uses AI to recommend shortest route based on traffic. Less time in the car - less green house gases and cleaner air. Only available in selected US cities at the moment it will be a feature to Live Maps. See New York Times article
The Story of Stuff captures environmental and social issues associated with rampant consumption and externalising costs. Worth a look.
A great article appeared in this months TechNet Magazine on Build a Green Datacenter by Dave O'Hara. One area he talks about is the need to make business units accountable for the costs of the IT infrastructure of which an increasing component is energy.
Here are the top 10 traits to look for:
- Meters are used to break down energy usage to the level of components (such as a 2U server, a 4U server, a switch, a SAN, and a UPS) and which business units are charged for the power being used by those components.
- Energy usage is continuously monitored to determine peak and low energy demands.
- Energy capacities are monitored on a total datacenter level all the way down to circuits to make sure all circuits are within acceptable limits.
- The energy savings plan is documented and rewarded.
- The energy savings plan is reviewed regularly and corrective action is taken to address failures.
- Determining how costs are charged back to business units is used to shape behavior, encouraging energy savings among independent business units. This point must be driven at the executive level.
- CPU throttling is enabled on the servers, and the performance lab measures the range of power consumed under a variety of loads.
- Thermal profiling is used to identify hot spots and overcooling.
- IT performance engineering includes energy efficiency measurements.
- Feedback of live data is available to individual organizations, allowing them to react appropriately.
“Of course, a power monitoring system on its own isn't enough—you'll need a plan for how you will use collected data to better manage energy consumption and ultimately see a return on your investment. Consider the Canadian company Abitibi Consolidated, the world's largest producer of newspaper and paper products. In 2001, when the Ontario electric power market was to be deregulated, Abitibi Consolidated was exposed to fluctuating market pricing and availability. To optimize its energy purchases, the company implemented a monitoring and metering system. The new system paid for itself within a few months, thanks to a 1 percent savings the company realized simply by buying their energy more efficiently.”
– excerpt from Dave O’Hara's Build a Green Data Centre TechNet Article
Microsoft Research Sustainable Computing have announced the Power Aware Computing RFP
This worldwide RFP seeks to stimulate novel research into increasing energy efficiency, thereby reducing the power consumption of computing. We are soliciting work that has the potential to become part of a large research portfolio, and we encourage proposals that are outside the usual line of enquiry.
Goals & Objectives
This RFP seeks to stimulate research across a broad range of disciplines that has the potential to significantly improve energy efficiency in computing. It is intended that the RFP proposals will open new and deeply innovative avenues of research, and raise the awareness of power as a critical resource to be managed.
Last date for submission of proposals:
- March 11, 2008, 14:00 PST [Note: PST= -8 UTC/GMT]
The RFP URL is: http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/RFPs/PowerAware_RFP.aspx
