Matt Deacon's digestive blog : Green IT

Four reasons to go Green!

matt deacon — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:08:00 GMT

So by now we all pretty much know that we need to take significant action on climate change but the question is how do you get others to act?

Here's my paper that spells out the four arguments to use in arguing for change within your organisation:

The Environment
The Customer
The Government
The Money

Enjoy and let me know your thoughts ... I am really keen to flesh out more on the customer argument in particular and examples would be great.

Direct Connect - kick out your gnarly ol'VPN!

matt deacon — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:54:00 GMT

I blogged some time ago about the "Shrinking Enterprise" and wouldn't it be neat if we could do away with VPN. Well the other day I came across Steve Riley who works in Trust Worthy Computing. Seems he's been talking about just this for quite a while and in this posting here he describes "an idea of using IPv6, IPsec, NAP, and group policy to build a pretty slick replacement for clunky VPN gateways"! Cool Eh!

Sustainability from Datacentre to cloud

matt deacon — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:20:00 GMT

Here's a copy of the deck I presented at the Architect Forum in Bradford yesterday. Great event with lots of great discussions especially about green IT.

"Gen 4" Modular Datacentres

matt deacon — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:47:00 GMT

We've been talking about container DCs for a while now but this announcement today formalises this into a pretty compelling vision of how DCs might look in the future ...

"The concept behind the modular data center builds on the learnings and innovations garnered from our research and data centers like the Chicago facility, which was designed to house hundreds of shipping containers packed with up to 2500 servers each. From our experience in designing Chicago and exploring the benefits modularity can provide, we have developed our vision for the future. Our “Gen 4” modular data centers will take the flexibility of containerized servers and apply it across the entire facility, which will be composed of modular “building blocks” of prefabricated mechanical, electrical and security components, etc. in addition to containerized servers. These facilities can be built incrementally as capacity grows and deployed in only 3 to 6 months, reducing capital costs and construction wastes, packaging and energy, etc. Modular data centers will enable smart growth and efficiency that is scalable and sustainable, ensuring that our global footprint is only as big as capacity demands that it be."

For full background on our modular data center vision, take a look at Mike Monos' blog, as well as this video posted at Soapbox.

Sustainable IT: From datacentre to cloud

matt deacon — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:06:00 GMT

Just realised I'm speaking next week at the QCON in Finance Exchange on the 8th October:)!

Sustainability @ Microsoft

matt deacon — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:34:00 GMT

Deck I recently used at the HP Innovating for a sustainable future event last week.Full of fun pictures if nothing else ...

Growth in ‘green’ agenda

matt deacon — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:37:00 GMT

Thought it worth sharing the following data from a recent study I conducted with Freeform Dynamics.

What I find interesting is how much the “Green” agenda has moved up over the course of the past year. This was clear and evident for large organisations but is now significant for the medium to large sector of 250-10,000. I’m digging into this group further so expect more data as it comes.

The second element that relates more directly to the focus of the report we have just produced is the significance of architecture. There is the appearance of a growing gap between those that ‘get’ architecture and those that do not. The latter is increasingly significant within the medium sized organisations where the overwhelming majority view IT as a cost centre. This in my opinion is rather large cause for concern and well worth further investigation.

For more information on the report then drop me a comment and I’ll ping you a copy.