You are currently browsing the daily archive for November 3rd, 2008.
By: Computerworld UK Staff (SS) – Computerworld U.K. (SS) (24 Sep 2008)
Without a well defined environmental baseline, IT leaders will not be able to respond effectively to demands to “go green” and will not be able to invest effectively
IT departments must establish a “green baseline” for their operations, according to new advice from Forrester Research.
IT departments must establish a “green baseline” for their operations, according to new advice from Forrester Research.
Without a well defined environmental baseline, IT leaders will not be able to respond effectively to demands to “go green” and will not be able to invest effectively.
The fact that many IT departments still do not pay for their own energy should not deter technology leaders from taking the initiative on the carbon footprint of their organization.
“If you don’t pay for the energy-related costs of IT, but believe green IT can positively impact the bottom line, talk to the business,” advises Forrester analyst Doug Washburn, in a report, Is Green IT Your Emperor with No Clothes?
“Even if the financial benefits of your greening effort accrue to the facilities group, the company overall is profiting and aligning IT operations with the business.”
Washburn also suggests IT leaders can use green as a way of developing staff skills.
“Inspire and develop staff by forming a green team,” he urges. “Green IT is a complex topic requiring holistic thinking and creative solutions, exactly the skills the IT organization of the future needs to embrace.
Forming a green team will foster these skills within IT and help senior management identify staff members looking to go beyond their regular call of duty. Given that the second most popular driver (measured in an earlier Forrester analysis of IT departments) for pursuing green IT is to “do the right thing for the environment,” the effort is likely to be well received by your staff.
The team should include facilities management staff and strategic allies such as VPs from your lines of business, marketing, and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) office — who can drive buy-in, promotion, and even funding, Forrester suggests.
Get this right and IT can lead the business on environmental issues, claims Washburn.
“While the rampant growth in IT’s energy use needs to be addressed, it pales in significance when compared with that consumed by office buildings and industrial facilities.
“As improved energy measurement and management technologies proliferate, IT can play a major role to reduce companywide energy consumption as the energy czar — a term coined by the Uptime Institute and McKinsey & Company.
Since reduced energy use offers tangible environmental and financial savings — unlike more discrete IT projects — the energy czar is a role that IT ops executives will proactively begin to take ownership of.”
Source: http://www.itworldcanada.com//Pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=idgml-3ae002ed-f577-442e-948b-c38bda2ae25f
By: Jim Duffy – Network World (US) (24 Sep 2008)
Seventy-six per cent of executives queried do not have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 per cent believe that greening their data centres will be crucial to meeting their companies’ business objectives in 2009
CIOs and senior IT executives lack the “green” to go green even though they overwhelmingly believe that a more energy efficient data center will become mission-critical, according to a recent survey.
Seventy-six per cent of executives queried do not have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 per cent believe that greening their data centres will be crucial to meeting their companies’ business objectives in 2009, according to the survey conducted by Voltaire, a maker of server and storage switching and software products for grid computing.
In addition, 57 per cent said they believe going green will give their company a competitive advantage, the Voltaire study found.
Voltaire queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Voltaire says a Fortune 500 company with five data centres worldwide and 3,000 servers per data centre can save approximately $7.4 million per year.
The study also found that 43 per cent of respondents will implement a green data centre in the next two years, and that reducing power and cooling costs/requirements was ranked by 52 per cent of the respondents as the most important benefit gained by going green in the data centre. The next most important benefit was helping the environment (37 per cent), followed by increased utilization (32 per cent), reducing real estate/space requirements (28 per cent), and reducing/consolidating equipment needed (27 per cent). Among the respondents who said that going green gives their companies a competitive advantage, 72 per cent said it provides a more efficient and cost-effective infrastructure so they can invest more in new technologies.
In response to the survey findings, Voltaire says it developed a “50-50-300 Pledge,” which states that IT executives, working with the company to deploy a Voltaire InfiniBand-based unified fabric, can save 50 per cent on power/cooling related to server interconnections and 50 per cent on hardware allocation/usage, while delivering up to a 300 per cent increase in application performance.
Voltaire has also developed an efficiency calculator to help IT executives estimate their network energy and cost savings and justify the investment.
Unified fabrics provide networking services between InfiniBand, Fibre Channel storage-area networks and Ethernet LANs over a single fabric with multiple virtual interfaces replacing actual physical adapters. By merging all three traffic types within a single switching chassis, IT executives can reduce power consumption by consolidating and virtualizing their data centre interconnects, Voltaire says.
source: http://www.itworldcanada.com//Pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=idgml-46f99b61-c6a4-4ed0-b0a8-665536614369
31/10/2008 12:44:00 PM
SASKATOON – A new computer chip is expected to help scientists at the University of Saskatchewan crack tough environmental issues, like building coal-fired electricity plants that emit less carbon dioxide.
Some calculations that now take researchers 10 days to complete will instead take one day, thanks to the new high-speed chip manufactured by IBM.
The computer chip, which is used in Sony PlayStation 3 technology, works up to 20 times faster than an ordinary one.
Researchers will also use the technology to determine if coal-fired plants can harness carbon dioxide and turn it into environmentally-friendly fuel, such as methanol.
The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that burning coal for electricity accounts for 80 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions in that country.
The University of Saskatchewan will be one of the first such institutions in North America to have this technology.
Source: http://technology.sympatico.msn.ca/News/ContentPosting?newsitemid=38439026&feedname=CP-TECHNOLOGY&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True
Toronto native Marcelo da Luz has set a new world distance record by zig-zagging across Canada in his solar-powered car.
03/11/2008 12:55:29 PM
CBC News
Da Luz arrived in Victoria on Thursday, completing a 15,150-kilometre trek that took 140 days to complete. His journey beat out the previous Guiness record of 15,070 kilometres set in 2004 by a team from the University of Waterloo, who themselves beat a mark set by Australians in January 2002 in their native country.
His record has not yet been recognized by Guiness, but da Luz also says he’s not done. He is planning to travel down to Seattle and then California and will keep going for as long as he can afford to. Da Luz is funding his journey independently, without any corporate backing.
“I can only go for as long as I have support,” he says. “It’s a mix between Forrest Gump and Field of Dreams – if you build it they will come and life is like a box chocolates.”
The trip started in Toronto and took da Luz to 44 cities and across Canada twice. His car, called the “Power of One” or Xof1, is a single-seat vehicle that looks more like a UFO on the road. The vehicle cost about half a million dollars to build, can travel 200 kilometres on a single charge and has a top speed of about 120 kilometres an hour.
Da Luz started his project in 1999 as an effort to compete in the annual World Solar Challenge across the Australian Outback. He decided instead in 2002 to beat the Australian team’s long-distance record.
His trip ran into some difficulties, including a stop in Edmonton on his way to Inuvik this summer when cloudy skies prevented da Luz from charging his car’s batteries.
Da Luz said he built his vehicle independently, without corporate sponsorship, in order to demonstrate how one person can make a difference in helping the environment.
“This project presents an opportunity for individuals from various backgrounds to come together to promote the use of clean and sustainable energy and inspire others to do the same,” da Luz wrote on his website.
Source: http://technology.sympatico.msn.cbc.ca/News/ContentPosting?newsitemid=tech-solarcar&feedname=CBC-TECH-SCIENCE-V3&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True
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