This is interesting … for US$100,600 per machine (White Goat), you will be able to take shredded office papers and turn them into a 40-sheet roll of toilet paper in 30 minutes. Here, have a look (and be amused) >
White Goat?
February 7th, 2010SAP bets on Software for Sustainability
February 7th, 2010A recent article on CNET reported that SAP is trying to get ahead of the curve in environmental sustainability. An excerpt of it has been reproduced below.
What’s an enterprise software company doing getting into sustainability? After all, the environmental footprint from software production pales in comparison to resource-intensive industries such as power generation or even running data centers that deliver Web services such as search. Read the rest of this entry »
The Sustainability Consortium
February 6th, 2010
It all started last July when Walmart announced it would begin surveying its suppliers on their environmental performance in order to one day rate the sustainability of its products. Since that landmark announcement, academics from the Arizona State University and University of Arkansas launched the Sustainability Consortium, a group representing government, NGO, academics and business interests that would develop the standards to be used to rate the sustainable attributes of products. Today, the consortium is made up of 26 Tier-I members and 6 Tier-II members (for clarity on the distinctions between Tier-I and Tier-II memberships and their costs, refer to the consortium’s application form). Read the rest of this entry »
What does Sustainability mean?
February 4th, 2010There are probably many definitions of the term “sustainability”. Asks 10 different person and you’ll probably get 10 different answers.
One known definition of sustainability or sustainable development is by the World Commission on Environment and Development, from a 1987 UN conference, which defined sustainable developments as those that “meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”. This definition provides an ideal premise, but however, it lacks in clarity on what specific human and environmental parameters to be used for modeling and measuring sustainable developments. Read the rest of this entry »
Goodbye www.sun.com
February 3rd, 2010Last week, some of my friends felt a sense of loss when they typed “www.sun.com” into their browsers and wound up on Oracle’s home page. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems took all 9 months to complete – as long as conceiving and delivering a baby – but it did mark the end of an era.
Sun Microsystems, which was founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, was once upon a time a leader in the computing world. During the Internet boom more than two decades ago, Sun made the servers which powered that boom. Those were the good old days. Read the rest of this entry »
Comparing Cold-Aisle vs. Hot-Aisle Containment
January 24th, 2010One of the key contributing factor towards efficiency and energy savings in data centers is preventing the mixing of hot and cold air, i.e. better air management and distribution. This can be accomplished through a containment strategy. Some vendors have products which allows containment of a single individual rack, while others offers containment of a group of racks. Whenever a discussion about containment of a group of racks, often we would hear about debates on the merits and virtues of cold-aisle versus hot-aisle containment and vice-versa.
Most of the time, many fail to realise that it is necessary to take into consideration the cooling architecture whenever we speak about containment. Both are closely related.
I’ve written a short paper providing a comparison of the two containment strategies across the 3 cooling architectures (room-oriented, row-oriented and rack-oriented). You can read the paper here: Comparison of CAC vs HAC.
High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons learned at Facebook
January 7th, 2010Jeff Rothschild, VP for Technology at Facebook, shared some detailed insights into Facebook architecture. Over the past few years, Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month and with more than 300 million users. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition. In this presentation, Jeff discussed the aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and the core architectural components and design principles that Facebook has used to address these challenges. He also discussed emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building cost-effective high performance web architectures.
Here’s the link to the webcast of his presentation. Read the rest of this entry »
Tech companies: 2009 in retrospect
January 2nd, 2010The year 2009 saw many tech companies, big and small, being sold, acquired or going into extinction. Most of these are / were due to the global economic crisis, diminishing demand for product, or ripple effects of a scandal, mismanagement and strategic missteps.
In the beginning of 2009, Nortel went through a slow and painful dismantling since it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. Read the rest of this entry »
Syracuse University Data Centre goes Off The Grid
December 7th, 2009The latest news on the wire is that IBM has taken Syracuse University’s (SU) data centre off the electric grid. SU’s data center will be supported by tri-generation, which burns gas to provide heating, cooling and electricity in one. This is being touted as one of the world’s greenest with the on-site power generation system, liquid cooling and DC power.
In a statement released this week, IBM and Syracuse said that the $12.4 million (£7.5m) , 12,000-square-foot facility is set to become fully operational in January and will use around 50 percent less energy than an equivalent sized facility according to IBM. The computer giant, which is backing the data centre to the tune of $5 million, is also planning to build a Green Data Centre Analysis and Design Centre in 2010 to help other organisations who want to create similar facilities.
IT costs accounting
December 5th, 2009So often, I have heard skeptics who would criticize and cynically discard away the concept of measuring, accounting, and charging for IT services within an organization. “Why would you want to do that?“, “what good does that do?” or “there is no value in charging users for IT services“.
Businesses in today’s environment is very different from the past. The markets which businesses operates in are shrinking as they become more competitive, barriers to entry are often getting lower, and in order to grow, many businesses need to go beyond their current market to reach outside their current borders or geography. Selling a product or service to a customer in Singapore will be no more different than selling to a customer in Russia. Whatever it takes, businesses can never confine themselves into a small boundary within a geography or region or market segment. Likewise, consumers and buyers of products and services are no longer confined to a single vendor or supplier. They have ample choices. Advancement of sourcing avenues globally, proliferation of technology and Internet allows consumers and buyers to easily seek, source, compare and purchase from alternative suppliers within several mouse-clicks.
Therefore, the traditional IT function within an organization is no longer just the bunch of backend soldiers managing your email and accounting system. The IT function is slowly transforming and morphing into a business enabling function, providing critical platforms to put the business online, enabling marketing and direct selling of products online, closely coupling the use of IT to complement traditional products (such as IP-enabling products to provide remote monitoring services, data backups, control and management services, analytics services, etc.) and all this means that the traditional IT budget, which used to be a small part of the overall corporate budget, is going up. In the past decade or so, most businesses’ IT expenditures have gone up significantly, but many are still without adequate tools, processes and policies in place to address the accounting and allocating of IT costs.
Ammonia – a more efficient energy source?
December 3rd, 2009I read with interest the developments around using Ammonia as an alternative, cleaner, easier to transport and easier to store energy source. This reminds me of the movie Mad Max, where ammonia from pig’s urine was used as their fuel source.
Since 2004, the Iowa Energy Center has brought together researchers, investors and government officials to set the course for ammonia energy to provide relief from the U.S. reliance on imported petroleum.
Ammonia is molecular compound made up of Nitrogen and Hydrogen, and exists in a trigonal pyramidal shape (as shown in picture). Its chemical formula is NH3. Combined with Carbon Dioxide, it is what we know as urea (the main component in urine). Although Ammonia is found in trace quantities in the atmosphere and ammonium salts are also found in small quantities in rainwater, it is one of the most highly produced inorganic chemicals in the world. There are dozens of chemical plants worldwide which produces ammonia and in 2004, 109 million metric tonnes were produced (28.4% of these were from China alone, 8.2% from the U.S.). However, majority of these ammonia produced is used for fertilizing agricultural crops.
Product Management 101
November 30th, 2009Generally, a Product Manager’s primary responsibility is to analyze the market, competitors, customers, external environment, lead and plan activities related to a specific product or product line. Product, is usually referring to any form of products or services.
There are too many textbooks available in the market that touches on marketing management, strategy or even business management. But most of what we learned from books as well as from business schools are general introductions to marketing management or high-level strategic concepts, but not the how to perform day-to-day responsibilities of owning and managing a product or product line.
Verizon Business launching new APAC data centre
November 24th, 2009Verizon Business will launch an Asia-Pacific data centre for its computing as a service (CaaS) customers in the region and to address issues of latency, security and compliance.
Ray McQuillan, principal consultant at Verizon Business Global Services, could not name the location for the data centre, but said that it would launch in Q1 of the next calendar year.
“We know that the global coverage – and moving nodes over into the Asia-Pacific – is something on the calendar currently for 2010,” he said. “Right now the CaaS offer is available across the globe, but in terms of having a local presence in Asia-Pacific we have one Europe, one in the US, and another in APAC. That is something the market has been asking for and we have it on our roadmap.”
Data Centre Asset Planning
November 22nd, 2009A recent Quocirca Insight report which was derived from 301 interviews with senior IT influencers and decision makers shows what we have already experiencing in most data centres: Crisis point as data centres runs into space and power constraints through years of uncontrolled growth, expansion and contraction.
Some salient points from the report:
- While the server sprawl continues, as much as 87% of IT budgets aren’t growing in real terms to alleviate the pressure.
- 28% of respondents does not know the exact number of servers they have, 22% said it could take up to a day to find a server that had gone down, another 20% will take longer than a day, and 11% of data centres will run out of space within a year, while 14% have already hit a power supply limit.
- Lack of communications and human factors contribute to the crisis, e.g. IT and facility managers aren’t talking enough.
- Power-saving approaches such as virtualization and automation, exists in abundance but they require up-front investment before the savings can be realised. Justification is challenging where data centres aren’t charging for their costs.
- Good asset planning tools can help data centre managers to manage the complex environments in their facility, but not all have access to such tools.
Telcos turning into Cloud Service Providers
November 17th, 2009
Over the past years, Telecom carriers and service providers have suffered economic pressures, competition, churn and declining revenue. As they grapple to find ways to improve their ARPU from their core services, many in the Telco industry are attempting to diversify into broader business and consumer value-added services, moving beyond the increasingly commoditized telephone and Internet access. Many of them are planning to or are already expanding aggressively into the “Cloud” space.
Understanding Data Deduplication
November 12th, 2009As we look at the many ways to improve storage utilization, data deduplication often pops up as a potential technique. Data deduplication, or sometimes referred to as “intelligent compression” or “single-instance storage”, is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant data. Deduplication is quite similar to data compression, but it looks for repeating sequence of very large chunks of data across very large comparison windows. Long sequences are compared to the history of other such sequences, and where matched, only one unique instance of the data sequence is actually retained on storage media. Redundant data is replaced with a pointer to that first unique data sequence copy. 
For example, a typical email system might contain 300 instances of the same two megabyte (2 MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 300 instances are saved, requiring 600 MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is actually stored; each subsequent instance is just referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 600 MB storage demand could be reduced to just 2 MB. Imagine the huge economic benefits! Of course, in a storage system, this is all hidden from users and applications, so the whole file is readable after having been written.
How do you lead with all the bad news?
November 11th, 2009This has not been a good year. Numbers aren’t looking good. Weakening demand. Customer churn. Reduction in force. Those who were not affected by layoffs will have a much heavier workload. With the amount of bad news, how does one inspire their workers?
According to staffing, career and crisis communications pros, openness, honesty and empathy are absolutely essential and go a long way.
Curious case of Argleton town
November 10th, 2009Here’s a good one … A small village in the north of England, Argleton, has been causing confusion with an air of mystery. The simple reason is, is that the village simply doesn’t exist except in the world of Google.
What else can we talk about Data Center designs?
November 8th, 2009Larry Dignan wrote on his blog about Data Center design 101, but his knowledge about the data center essentially boils down to one word: Money. Larry attended two Gartner IT Symposium presentations to learn more about data center designs and shared his views about why companies are building new data centers and how the vendors are “killing each other to be the data center king“.
In his blog post, he shared what he had learned, which are: Read the rest of this entry »
IT Shared Services & Modeling Chargebacks
November 7th, 2009In most organization, the IT function is almost always a key enabler for an effective and efficient running of the business. With the recent credit crunch and economic downturn, many a times, IT departments find themselves in a dilemma. On one hand, they are faced with the need to refresh EOL technologies, expand capacity to support the business or add new assets for new application services required by the business. But on the other hand, they are often forced to cut budgets, headcount freeze, reduction in force, faced with restraint in funding and capital investment for any refresh or expansion. This dilemma pushes IT leaders to begin taking a closer look at the technology services that they are providing to their business units (i.e. internal customers) and evaluating where it makes sense to convert these as Shared Services with chargeback of the costs to the business units.
IT Shared Services refers to the provision of IT services by an IT organization where that service had previously been found in more than one part of the organization or group. Thus the funding and resourcing of the service is shared and the providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider. The key is the idea of ’sharing’ within an organization or group. Hence, the concept of IT Shared Services is similar to collaboration. IT Shared Services is different from the diametrically opposite model of Outsourcing which is where an external third party is paid to provide a service that was previously internal to the buying organization, typically leading to redundancies and re-organization. One purpose of Shared Services is the convergence and streamlining of an organization’s functions to ensure that they deliver to the organization the services required of them as effectively and efficiently as possible. This concept is applicable not just for the IT services, but can also involve the centralizing of back office functions such as HR, Finance, and middle or front offices.
