Thoughts from the raised floor. Lewis Curtis Blog site

The Job Market for IT Architects

2009 has been a crazy year for most of us in the industry.     Many are looking or found new jobs as annual reviews became survivalist experiences as working in fear became the new norm.

Of course,  if you have a job, you want work to keep it in 2010. (and network like crazy to help you get the next one)

But as these experiences have  been incredibly difficult,  they have also awakened many in the IT community.

I have seen multiple architectural leaders redefining their career experience for better lifestyle and often more money.

• more IT architects starting their own businesses
• more IT architects having multi-client contracts
• more IT architects working from home, limiting travel to only when necessary

Of course, contracting had a difficult time as well in 2009.

Yet,  with the downturn, many companies over-corrected staffing adjustments and will need architectural professionals quickly for 2010.  

I predict that many of these companies will use program mgrs to contract out the architectural work.     While there are many of us in the community that think this is a bad idea and it is good to have IT architectural leaders have a financial stake in the business,  the reality is businesses are striping full time employee liabilities as much as humanly possible (from attorneys, finance professionals, BI Analysts and IT architects).

The good side.   With good negotiation,  IT Architects could make more money if he or she manages their business well.      

What does that mean?    it means that IT Architects should expand their value and capabilities beyond being a technical brain on stick for hire.    You have to market, advertise,  manage your money well. track forward customer satisfaction progress with precision,   and work to have multiple projects and clients.     This is by no means easy.    But IT architects who have made the switch successfully  enjoy some of the highest satisfaction rates.

But let me reiterate:  if you already have a job, please work to keep it in 2010 (unless it  is awful).

Chasing the Cloud in 2010

There was an interesting article by  called Microsoft Must Sell the Cloud to IT Pros in 2010 by John Fontana, Network World.

While John exposed a good theme,  I believe we need to be a bit more explicit about ITPro expectations and challenges for the cloud.

I remember how much of struggle it was 6 years ago to convince a businesses to trust secure communication over https(443) for internal business activity.   Most application service providers had to demonstrate robust VPN capabilities.    As everyone now knows,  things changed.  Organizations are now trusting more mission critical activity over https through internal or external cloud providers.

I always like to promote leaders forecasting the impact of technology decisions.  So lets look at the typical enterprise cloud situation.

There was an earlier article in Computerworld promoting the differences between private, public and hybrid clouds.       For the enterprise,  I predict in 2010,  that many cloud solutions will be complex array of Hybrid models.

What does the Cloud hold out for Infrastructure architects for 2010 in the enterprise?    

Losing more control of the infrastructure

More business groups will make infrastructure cloud deals at different times, with different vendors with little or no SLAs/OLAs without you.

More liability to manage the increased complexity

with more agreements, come more complexity and interdependencies.      If you thought you had complex interdependencies in the datacenters from all the past acquisitions and leadership changes,  then get ready for the new tidal wave of complex cloud interdependences and complexity.   

if you look at cloud providers, they often have

• different patch schedules
• different deployment models
• different root cause analysis and monitoring technologies
• different integration technologies
• different back-up technologies

Welcome to the real cloud infrastructure jungle.

This is why there needs to be a resurgence of infrastructure professionals for enterprise architect teams.     Of course I’m biasd, but instead of hiring many with backgrounds in solution architecture and having them fight with app team after app team,  organizations need more with strong  infrastructure backgrounds that can help the enterprise bring cloud capabilities without turning the datacenter into quagmire.

In short,  I predict that as cloud service providers make it easy for developers in 2010,  infrastructure leaders will eventually loose their minds.

The changing face of Green IT

As many of you know, I started the first Green IT evangelism for Microsoft to focus on listening to customers  and promote best practices for IT architecture to reduce carbon impact and energy consumption.   Of course,  things change, (teams get impacted) and I’m doing something very different.

2009 was a year of green washing.   I believe more money was spent on marketing and advertising green than actually promoting new technologies, best practices and capabilities to improve it.     My past prediction about virtualization becoming mainstream (easy one) was true.   But also, the trend of virtual server sprawl and the cry for managing virtual server sprawl and tracking down rouge virtual images.   

I thought there would be a lot more guidance for the developer to reduce energy consumption on the server or client.   Unfortunately, I was wrong.    There was a couple of small articles and presentations,  but no real substantial developer guidance.  

In most places around the world,  dramatic energy price increases are tapering down.    Energy cost is still has a substantial impact on IT budgets,   But at least the velocity of price increases are reducing.       

Yet, that doesn’t mean energy is no longer growing in importance.   Quite the opposite is true.     As prices are stabilizing,  energy and carbon regulations and integrated partnerships between IT and energy will dramatically increase over the next 2 years.   This means large enterprises will need to develop keen energy strategies for their IT objectives and monitor energy prices & regulations as well as environmental regulations and participate to impact policy makers around the world.    

Lewis

I've been exposed recently to some incredible developments in the silicon world.   Some that I cannot mention.    However, I do want to share with you an opinion about how this world will impact our world.

Over the years, servers, storage and network systems have become faster and been repackaged into more interesting components.   Yet, for the most part it hasn't changed various n-tier architectural patterns.     However, that's about to change.

Comprehensive multicore systems on a chip with extreme ultra low power capabilities with pervasive virtualization technologies are reinforcing the view that datacenters do not need a lot of the complexity they thought they did.  

 Essentially, a lot of the copper and expensive chassis frames will not be needed in the future datacenter.  

And these silicon architectures are more than ultra low power and multicore.   We will see more contextual aware silicon architectures for server functionality which redirects the right computing to the right area at the right time for the right users and sub-systems.

Naturally, it's easy to think that the automation of these capabilities will lead to an easier life for the datacenter leader.   Sorry, but while these new systems will be impressive, the work load will be just as tough (if not more challenging) in years to come.

The infrastructure leader will need to have a strong architecture that enforces security, compliance and strong systemic quality capabilities to the right solutions at the right times.      Our strategy will not just be designing a automated capacity models with the new silicon architecture for one solution, but it will be for the entire datacenter.     The infrastructure architect will impact the enterprise in more profound ways.

 have fun,

Lewis

It is that time of the year when we forecast environmental issues for the New Year. There have been some important new developments that happened in 2008.

• · A new U.S. Presidential Administration was elected that is passionate about the Environment
• · Environmental regulations are increasing from many countries
• · The economic health of the world is in significant crisis

2009 and 2010 will see the start of IT organizations investigating Environmental Regulation strategies and increase environmental impact skill sets

Even if IT leaders don’t care about environmental stewardship, they care about government regulations that impact IT operations. In the last couple of years, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has impacted most IT organizations with stringent reporting standards. With the new presidential administration committing the United States to a environmental cap and trade model, the European Union promoting a Datacenter code of conduct and various government bodies promoting more oversight and environmental and energy ceilings, IT leaders will need to quickly become more cognizant with environmental regulations and work to form productive environmentally sustainable strategies for their organizations.

In 2009, the Economic Downturn will greatly impact Green IT investments.

There is no doubt that organizations are reducing IT investments in light of the economic downturn. Many have argued that the reduced price of oil and economic pressures will kill the Green movement. The death of the green movement in organizations and society has been greatly exaggerated. However, there will be some changes in green IT investment activity.

• · Environmental Sustainability projects that positively impact the bottom line in the short run will be moved to the front of the line. Examples include virtualization and consolidation projects.
• · Environmental Sustainability projects that increase costs of organizations or do not impact immediate regulatory needs will be delayed. For example, some recycling efforts (paper, e-waste projects) will probably not expand as much as originally anticipated in 2009

In 2009, Embodied Environmental Impact will start becoming a more important issue for environmentalists in the mainstream public.

Surprised recently, I saw a report that 60-80% of the energy and environmental impact of a laptop happens before the customer even buys the computer. It is much lower for servers (average around 25%). This is commonly called embodied environmental cost. As we become more sophisticated on good Life Cycle Assessments (LCA: commonly used for Carbon footprint measurement models), many will insist on measuring embodied costs.

2009 will be the year of the Green Developer

Besides all of the “green is good for IT” articles, there have been a good deal of writing about building green physical datacenters as well as adopting virtualization. However, when analyzing different professionals in the IT market, developers were usually the most passionate about environmental impact. Yet, developers have the least amount of guidance on environmentally sustainable development best practices.

What are best practices to reduce energy and computational resource consumption for application design?

Sloppy code is wasteful. Not only is it slow, error prone and often not extensible, it usually wastes energy and utilize unnecessary computational resources. This has a significantly negative impact on the environment. However, most architects are given the “virtualize the problem away” answer for environmental sustainability.

While virtualization is very positive for reducing environmental impact and improving resource efficiency, continuously leaning on virtualization to fix wasteful application designs is like sweeping dirt under a rug. Pretty soon, the pileup of application design dirt prevents anyone from walking on the rug. That’s called Virtual Server Sprawl.

2009 will be the year of Pervasive Virtualization (as well as Virtual Server Sprawl)

As more vendors introduce more inexpensive and powerful server virtualization capabilities, virtualization will become much more pervasive in 2009. We will see more consolidation stories promoting how organizations are saving money and reducing environmental impact.

However, while this problem started to come up years ago, 2009 will see Virtual Server Sprawl becoming common and the market will soon see poor virtualization management and hiding wasteful applications as environmentally inefficient. Customers and the industry will want more sophisticated answers in 2009.

Note: last year, I predicted that 2008 would see the start of physical server sprawl as a result of virtual server sprawl. Some large customers are already reporting physical server acquisition velocity issues as a result of years of virtualization sprawl (note: the virtualization vendor wasn’t Microsoft’s, however, the issues are the same)

In 2009, many companies will start moving out non-competitive IT functionality

It’s true that cloud services for the enterprise are really at their infancy. However, with the economic downturn, companies are being forced to ramp up early adoption in light of the high cost of data center operations as well as the increased environmental and energy regulations for IT operations. However, in light of embodied metrics as well as upcoming environmental regulations, companies will want real green metric agreements from new cloud service providers.

In 2009, competition will increase for the Green Cloud

Who is the greenest cloud provider for your applications and solutions?   Which cloud providers will report environmental metrics and provide concrete green operational level agreements for enterprises which you can use for verification in your own environmental reporting?    Currently, we don’t know how cloud providers will compete with green services.   However, by the end of 2009, I predict we’ll start finding out some answers.

In 2009, many IT leaders will start to regret carbon offset expenses.

With market commitments to the cap and trade system and more environmental regulation, there will be temptation for IT leaders to expand their carbon offset strategy for their organization. Because of the limited standards and enforcement between various markets, it will be a breeding ground for fraud and waste. While carbon offsets offer some short term answers for IT professionals and should eventually promote positive activity, some IT leaders will start to regret some of their carbon offset investments.

In 2009, the whole “Green” vs. other marketing label debate will be viewed as a silly waste of time.

Many green leaders have spent countless hours debating the accuracy of various environmental labels. Because of the popularity of the movement, there have been many debating good and bad labels to use. In 2009, thought leaders will realize it is an absolute waste of time to debate marketing labels and instead focus more energy on more pressing questions and answers that impact this important movement. (I really hope so.)

In 2009, countries will start investigating how to leverage green regulations to increase their influence on multi-national corporations.  

There will be competition to out green each other to have greater influence on multi-national corporations than other countries. Ever since multi-national corporations have existed, countries have competed for influential power over multi-nationals. Most assume environmental treaties are promoting real regulatory standards in the environmental arena. The truth is the far from this. There are no real enforceable implementation standards of various environmental global standards. In 2009, some countries will take advantage of this confusion gap to manipulate multi-nationals for their own interests. While ensuring environmental compliance and stewardship is always important, it will be important for organizations to be prepared for opportunistic manipulation tactics by various political entities.

In 2009, green social web groups will evolve into more organized and focused environmental reporting forces.

The social web is becoming a transformative experience for various galvanizing themes in the world. As official bodies lobby for environmental standards and the press invest in environmental reporting, in 2009, the environmentally passionate will leverage more of the social web for greater oversight into new levels not experienced before. Want to know the real embodied cost of a service or a product in the market and the company isn’t giving any answers? Various intelligence and insights from the masses will start to give some answers. In 2009, we will see more semantic and social structures finding their way into political issues, like environmental accountability. And this is just starting. You think the social web had a profound impact on the last presidential election, the social and semantic structures that will be utilized in the next presidential election will truly blow your mind.

In 2010, there will be debate about environmental impact privacy for private citizens.

With semantic and social structures reporting environmental accountability of organizations greatly expanding, it will become easier and easier to publicly know the environmental impact of regular people. That knowledge will lead to an interesting debate about environmental privacy. Should environmental privacy exist? Should it be protected? What could governments or organizations do with this information?

Lewis

At the last TechEd in Orlando.  I interviewed Michael Manos about Datacenter Leadership and energy issues for IT.

Michael is leading Microsoft’s transformation into massive scale data center environments for Web 2.0 and online services. See the interview below:

ARCast.TV - Michael Manos on Datacenter Leadership

Server Virtualization for commodity systems has become a pervasive answer in the enterprise datacenter for good reason: it is an opportunity to consolidate systems thereby reducing the number of servers in the datacenter, increase efficiency on each physical server, reduce energy consumption in the datacenter and hopefully, reduce operational deployment time for new systems.

There is no doubt that the initial virtualization effort can lead to all of these promises and many more. However, there is an assumption that savings promise will continue in the future with the simple adoption of virtualization. That assumption would be wrong.

A customer has to ask: Why would IT vendors promote virtualization if it would mean less licenses or fewer servers to sell?

The real answer: For many companies, Virtualization can promote larger server growth in a company, not less…

The logic is this:

You just consolidated and reduced the number of servers you currently have. Congratulations. You just proved you can reduce servers, increase efficiency while reducing GHG (green house gases) in the datacenter.

However, a virtualized datacenter often starts another dynamic in an IT organization: Virtual Server Sprawl. It’s easy to do. The friction of buying and configuring another server is significantly reduced. Therefore, business units (to be on the safe side) will ask for more virtual servers than they need. Also, it encourages an increase in functional decomposition in the architecture. This can lead to an increase in servers and increase unnecessary system utilization. Overall system utilization goes up, but real architectural efficiency for energy resources decreases.  

Important law of Virtual Server Sprawl:

Virtual Server Sprawl eventually leads to faster Physical Server Sprawl

This is not to say virtualization is bad.

Far from it. Virtualization is an essential element for a environmentally sustainable strategy for consolidation modeling. However, What I promote is that server virtualization alone can lead to some dramatic problems. And if the velocity of virtual server deployments increases too much, it eventually increases physical server deployment velocity to unacceptable levels.

What is needed to stop Virtual Server Sprawl: (all three are needed)

· Virtualization Systems Management,

· IT Process Leadership Strategy

· Preemptive Infrastructure Architectural Guidance

Systems Management

Part One: Visibility

Understand what your Virtual Guests are part of the solution and what internal and external dependencies are needed on a day to day basis. Furthermore, like all systemic quality models, understand the peaks and valley forecasts for the solution over time. Also, What is the value of the solution being managed compared to other solutions in the datacenter? We need to know this in order to make good discriminating decisions with resources.

Part Two: Control

If you cannot act on the knowledge efficiently, then the management environment is pretty much useless. It’s important to power up virtual guests as need and then spin them down as demand fluctuates. However, the application architect must be able to design loosely coupled systems that are able to be horizontally scaled up and down without disrupting service.

Part Three: Measurement

What was the impact of virtualization management decisions on the ecosystem? What have we learned and how do we improve the decision making process for moving resource allocations to specific solution components?

Process Leadership Strategy

Virtual Server Sprawl is very real problem for many enterprises. Executives must actively adapt the change and configuration management processes of IT management to take into account the significantly lower friction for service deployment demand. Most configuration and change management processes are not prepared for this change. Also, IT Executives should review quarterly the velocity of virtual server growth and review management standards for encouraging an acceptable growth model.

Preemptive Infrastructure Architectural Guidance

Can we supply architects with guidance models to limit virtual server spawl the datacenter? I believe we can. It’s natural to functionally decompose to the nth degree when server allocation is cheap. Academics usually promote these kind of models without concern to the impact of the rest of the IT ecosystem (example: energy constraints in the datacenter). Having the architects be accountable for the energy allocation demands and be able to answer question based patterns of IT impact is a start.

Also, the big question is how do we advise architects in refactoring their solution to optimize resource consumption in a productive way without impact TTM (time to market) or Functional Expectations?

This year, I know many will be diving into these questions in more detail. Improperly managed, virtualization can be a Trojan horse. But it doesn’t have to be this way. A little planning and leadership will go a long way to make this pervasive capability successful in the datacenter.

Lewis

Working in an IT organization can be challenging.   There are exhausting late night emergencies and deadlines, unpredictable technical complexities as well as executive management commonly suffering from extreme ADD.

As this leads to countless hours away from family, friends and your own precious solitude, you find those few who stand out willing to sacrifice everything to accomplish success.    "We're saved" you utter to yourself as disaster is averted once again or that cool project suddenly comes together. 

Periodically,   you parade the special person (or few) in front of staff for recognition and give them financial and psychological rewards.   Maybe, you even promote those few into leadership positions.    

As you sit in your office reflecting on the organization's accomplishment,   you joke; wishing just to have a few more of them.

As you are filled with confidence for the next year, you have no idea:  Your IT organization is doomed. 

First, (and most obvious): You have created an organization dependent on these heroes.

It is more difficult for heroes to take vacation

It is often more difficult for heroes to grow their career into other roles.

Heroes are more likely to have strained family relationships

Non-heroes often rely on heroes to save the day.

Second, if Heroes burn out and/or leave, the IT organization is significantly crippled.

Third, promoted heroes often make poor managers (options)

Some have unreasonable expectations of their staff (they want them to be heroes too)  or

They do all the work themselves

The end result: staff doesn't grow or become successful for the IT organization.

Fourth:  Eventually, heroic expectations eventually lead to catastrophic mistakes.   This is not only terrible for the organization, but breaks moral and the spirit of the hard working employee you prize.

And you only have yourself to blame.   You created this culture, promoted these dependencies and burned out very good employees.     From every staff member (as well as their families) who has experienced the bad end of this strategic non-plan, they hope you choke on the bonus you received this year.   (Just kidding. :) no - really, I’m serious)

Simply: Heroes ruin IT organizations.

It's a fact and IT leaders who promote this culture are to blame.

But there is a cure. 

Good Consultants will promote focusing on good operational processes and lifecycle management.   Establish a predictable, consistent system organized to handle complex IT solutions.   And they are right.   These are commonly called Operational Processes.  And they are one of the most important fields for an IT leader to understand.

However, there is a more simple way to understand this.    Look at your successes.  If it required a hero or heroic activity to become successful, you screwed up.   It's your job as an IT leader to find these events and ensure processes and support for teams and empower them without breaking their backs.   

Also, operational processes make a much bigger impact on systemic qualities than the actual technologies utilized in the solution.  Security, Scalability, Availability, Manageability, Reliability are usually more impacted by the quality of an organization's operational processes than the technical choices made. 

For example:  at Microsoft, we are building many of the world's largest datacenters.  Just at one datacenter, we deploy tens of thousands of servers a month.    Very few websites face the security threats and intensity that Microsoft manages every day.   All while running some of the most energy efficient datacenter environments in the world.   And what is the secret ingredient: focused operational discipline.    Without it, there would be no massive cloud capabilities today.  

I interviewed many teams at GFS (Global Foundations Services) under Michael Manos.    This is the group that owns all the datacenters in the world for Microsoft.  They have some of the highest retention rates in the company.    no-joke:  professionals at Microsoft continuously beg (no exaggeration)  to work for them.  Secret ingredient: good leadership that promotes world class operational discipline.  

Good IT Operational Processes:  the cure for Hero addiction...

Lewis

At TechEd Orlando,  I had an opportunity to interview Michael Manos (who is in charge of all the datacenters for Microsoft) about Leadership in the modern datacenter today.

Datacenter Leadership Interview.

Forrester recently published a report:

Infrastructure Architects Link Technology Strategy With Long-Term EA and Business Goals

It’s a decent article. 

For far too long many enterprise teams have viewed infrastructure architects as too low level not impacting or as close to the business.   That couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’ve always promoted that many times, infrastructure architects can make a  more substantial business impact on an organization than traditional  “enterprise” architects by a large margin (reducing cost and complexity in the organization,  reducing time to market, implementing significant technology and process reuse and standards).     of course I’m very biased…

In the past, most  Enterprise architect teams have only members with application and developer oriented skills supplementing with the traditional enterprise frameworks.       I find many leading Infrastructure architects today are traditionally older than their counterparts, many have a advanced degrees (even some with advanced business degrees) and demonstrates a deep enterprise impact perspective on the IT ecosystem.  

This article is signaling the start of a change in the enterprise architecture world.

I hope dialogue like this motivates more enterprise teams to adopt infrastructure leadership into their ranks in the future and see the value they have always brought.   

Lewis

I organized and participated on a Environmentally Sustainable Architecture panel last month.    There was some very interesting participants on the panel:

moderator: George Cerbone

Panelist: Michael Manos, Beth Humphreys, Kathy Malone, David Platt and myself.

This was the first panel to start including developers in the discussion with developers.   I invited David Platt to come in discuss.  He had some very interesting ideas and concerns to contribute.

Also, Kathy Malone is organizing the 1st ineta green users groups in Florida.   She has over 30 years experience on Environmental health and safety.     It was fascinating to hear her perspective.   I haven't followed the environmental health and safety perspective in this space as much.  I look forward to her future contributions into the ever expanding Green IT dialogue.

Beth Patton has been promoting environmentally sustainable datacenter best practices in the Chicago area for Microsoft.   This is where Microsoft is building one of their largest and most radically designed datacenters.

David Platt, author of the book "Why Software Sucks" was a great addition to the panel.   I knew he would be an excellent antagonist to really discuss why would this matter to developers.

of course Michael Manos is in charge of all the datacenters for Microsoft.   leading the way towards rebuilding Microsoft into a sustainable design.

video

watch and comment...

I spent a week vacation in Venice in April.   It was a beautiful place.   It was also the first time I went on vacation without my laptop (my wife's request).

Loosing the connection with the Web Collective...

This is more difficult than I thought.  I started going through withdrawal trying to enable my email to work on my GSM Windows Mobile phone via international roaming (it worked easily, although my wife was not pleased about it).   I just find it hard to disconnect.

Having passion about the projects I'm working on,  they don't stop for anyone who goes on vacation (and your responsibilities don't go away - work doesn't assign replacements for you when you are away).   I find it difficult to clear my mind of the things I'm working on or future endeavors.   My wife says I need to learn to meditate.    It took me half the week to start to clear my mind as we were enjoying our vacation.   after we returned, it took me a week to ramp back up (catching up on all the emails).

It hit me that maybe (because I think I'm not unique to this industry), maybe we need to rethink how we enjoy vacation with our families.   Since most of us can be engaged in our careers anytime, 24/7, we might have to create a personal program for ourselves to gear down and gear up so we can be in the moment of the vacation.   hmm. something to think about for next time.  Maybe the idea of week long vacation isn't reasonable anymore?  no, I don't want to believe this.  hmm

Venice.  the antipathy of creative destruction

It was interesting walking through Venice.   No Streets or Cars.    I thought the entire city was an giant museum that had decided not to develop past the 1500s.  Walk or Boat.  Thankfully, I didn't see any horses. :)

Creative Destruction promotes the concept of progress out of the destruction of the past (past thinking, design, architecture, etc...).  A great example is the beautiful city of Singapore (with strong laws making space for new architecture and new products).

Venice has survived and thrived on a theme that rejects creative destruction by embracing architectural concepts planted around the 1500s and earlier (there are a few exceptions of course).    They managed to utilize technical innovation (modern plumbing, electricity, telephones, Internet, cell phones, etc...) much as a very light condiment for a sandwich (and not be the sandwich itself).

I can't remember the number of churches we saw.   Venice is a city on the water with a lot of places to pray - if you are Catholic.   There was a historic church every 100 to 200 meters.  And my wife wanted to go into everyone of them.  Even my hotel, there was an historic church used as a storage area for the hotel that would be a national landmark in my country. 

We took every tour could get (often exhausting, reminding me how out of shape I am -which motivated me to join a gym).  A common theme of the tours- power, money and religion of course.  

We were surprised by the Jewish tour of seeing the first Jewish ghetto (the first use of the term as well) and the historic large population of Jews in Venice.  They were purposely quarantined into one area of the city (establishing the first ghetto).    Also, the tour discussed how the Germans took 200 to camps in WWII and only 8 returned.

On a lighter side, we ate well.   Some of the best food was inexpensive non-tourist pasta and pizza deep in the city well away from San Marco Square (main area of Venice where the tourists concentrate).

There was one place in San Marco which had excellent food.   the famous: Harry's Bar.   However, be warned.  The meal is very expensive.   But we had to go (my wife is a personal chef).   Harry's is famous for the invention of the Bellini and Carpaccio.

it was a nice vacation. :-)

I hope you had a good weekend. 

http://www.microsoft.com/environment/

As you know,  I've been heavily involved promoting architecture best practices for sustainability.   Microsoft has established a new environmental site which has a lot of promise.

Some highlights from the site for me:

• Windows Server 2008 Power Savings
• Datacenter best practices

However, this good site is only as good as the those passionate about the subject continues  to contribute best practices and insights.   Right now, most of these are from a little town in Redmond, Washington (I know for a fact that there are many very bright insightful people there).  

But it is my hope that many from around the world will begin contributing their experiences and perspectives to this site as this galvanizing theme continues to grow in this industry.

have fun,

Lewis

The demand for environmental impact information from organizations have increased significantly this last year.   and for good reason.   Customers, regulators, investors and partners are very concerned about carbon footprint, overall pollution and ecological impact.   This has put more companies under the microscope for their impact to environmental sustainability.

As a result, the Environmental / Greenness critic / analyst market is a lucrative field today.   And there is no shortage of critics on websites and TV stations.   However, as more self appointed greenness police enter the market,  it's important to investigate the narrow lens through which they judge organizations.   

I've noticed that an organization's commitment to environmental sustainability can be complex and more mature organizations usually use a multi-tier model.

If i were rating organizations impact on environmental sustainability, I would use a multi-tier model to investigate their work.

What are the number of impact areas you are targeting?

• Consumer experience
• Partner experience
• Worker productivity experience
• IT operational experience
• General Public experience

Then, you have to determine the metrics and progress you are going to make in focused impact areas.

Third, what processes, innovations and strategies are you leveraging to accomplish the goal.

Finally, you report your results.

However, most critics often use a very narrow lens to look at the "greenness" of an organization.  

Today, in the New York Times, the Climate Counts group gave an impressive rating to Google 55 while rating Microsoft at a 38.   They quoted Google's commitment to go carbon neutral.  

Google is a heavy user for energy and all of their green token projects have been tiny.  I predict they have spent more money marketing their green projects than the actual projects themselves.

Also, if they have a commitment to be carbon neutral, why don't they release their real carbon footprint numbers?  in the spirit of openness and "do no evil", why don't they disclose the real progress or allow the public to tour their centers to see the real work being done to improve environmental impact?

Apple was given a very low rating of 11.   I think it's comical in the interview with the New York Times, Apple blamed much of their carbon footprint on their users. 

So let talk about Microsoft:

Microsoft is one of the only massive web solutions companies that allows customers to tour their datacenters to see the real  environmental improvements to increase efficiency and decrease environmental impact.

From presentations from Microsoft's datacenter team to the public, it's explained how we measure and how granular we measure and what specific steps Microsoft takes.   I've worked for many large tech giants and at this point, I haven't seen a more open model to the public. 

also:

Microsoft as developed the most aggressive power saving features in the world for client and server computers.  There are significant power savings capabilities for consumers and administrators to control to reduce energy consumption of their operating system experience.

Microsoft's .Net platform has capabilities for developers to write power aware applications in WPF (windows presentation foundation) to reduce power drain on client systems.

In the last couple of years,(many would be surprised) Microsoft now offers some of the most consolidation infrastructure options to reduce the number of servers and clients in an IT organization.

Microsoft invests significant amounts of money into the Microsoft Research group to design solutions for consumers and corporations reduce environmental impact. 

Microsoft offers some of the most pervasive remote worker solutions in the world.

Microsoft has invested significantly in websites, concerts and public campaigns to  help consumers learn how to reduce environmental impact (much of it not relating to our product line).

In reality, it's easy to see how critics can pick apart organizations through their narrow lens.  I predict that we will see more of these models in the future.   But, I hope the environmental sustainability market matures to a better state than this.

Lewis

From conference presentations, customers meetings, political activity and internal debates,  I would like to clarify how the "green" Environmental Sustainability movement is different from the seventies and early eighties.

In the seventies and early eighties,  the green / environmentalist movement was focused on saving the earth from humans.  Popular publications like Gaia, Earth First, Greenpeace and the Worldwatch Institute consistently communicated negatively impacting the ecological stability of a region in light of industrial human activity.   

Environmental economists at the time countered with logical measurement environmental impact models as social impact externalities (what society was willing to pay for clean air, a wildlife habitat or stable ecosystem for endangered species).    They speculated on the level of pollution tolerated by a society or region (a magical social equilibrium).

In the last decade, many scientists as well as activists have promoted that while life is fragile,  the Earth is very resilient and will eventually get along just fine without us if we make too many mistakes along the way.

Beyond the temptation for purely positive public perception issue, today's environmental sustainability movement is universally supported by many extremely diverse political, social and economic interest groups.  And the reason.   it has nothing to do with saving "the Earth"

The modern environmental movement today is uniquely focused on one primary objective:  Save human civilization.

More specifically, this movement has demonstrated a passionate interest in saving geopolitical and economic stability for

• Established governments
• Global and regional markets
• Industries

If cities drown, becomes intoxicated with polluted air or farmlands and fishing lanes vanish , market places disappear and consumer and business wealth evaporates.   In the industrialized world, significant reductions in the ability to acquire basic living expectations (example: food, water, health care, communication and energy) by a large enough portion of the population quickly leads to predictable political and economic instability.    And that's the problem.

Many environmental focused scientists are predicting rapid dramatic climatic change which could significantly impact political and economic stability in the industrialized world.     And those same scientists agree that humans are the cause of this rapid acceleration.

As energy prices and environmental regulations are increasing,  organizations and governments are seeing the bottom line of of environmental damage beyond the magical social equilibrium.

Moreover, in the seventies and eighties,  the word "green" applied to environmental activism could be interpreted as a bad or good depending on one's political affliction.   Today, it's generally accepted as an important strategy for any government, industry or business.  It's not just for public perception,  but now for competitive survival.

Lewis

As the "Green" revolution is taking hold of the IT industry,  I'm noticing four core areas of execution in the market.  Most organizations focus on one (perhaps two areas) which showcases their strengths.  However, I discovered today, it takes paying attention to all four areas in your Environmentally Sustainability strategies.

Environmentally Sustainable

Optimization:

Reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint by optimizing the operating and development platform as well as the solution architecture.

example areas:

• Operating System energy consumption
• hardware (laptops, workstations, servers, mobile devices, etc..) energy consumption
• Datacenter Physical Facility energy consumption optimization
• Application Development Architectural optimization best practices to reduce resource consumption.

Consolidation:

Reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint by reducing the computing systems needed to accomplish the architecture effectively.

• Server / Client Hardware based vitalization
• Operating System vitalization
• Database consolidation
• Web Server consolidation
• Physical datacenter facility consolidation activities

Software + Services

Reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint by utilizing Software + Services capabilities for IT Systems as well as Human carbon footprint activities.

In the Datacenter world: another word: Transference: instead of designing a solution in-house, you leverage service environment to reduce your carbon footprint or energy consumption in your datacenter.

Online Presentation & Communication, Instant Messaging, Content management, Social Networks

Intelligence

Reducing energy consumption and environmental impact through Measurement, Forecasting, Communication and Management activity analyzing energy consumption and environmental impact with IT technologies

• Business Energy and Carbon Footprint metering and forecasting capabilities
• Business Energy and Carbon Footprint mgmt communication and charge back capabilities
• Environmental Business Intelligence activities (I refer it to as Sustainable Analytics)

in every project I've seen,  the focus areas usually relate to one or multiple areas from the above list.   Send me your thoughts and ideas on what you are seeing in the industry around environmentally sustainable solutions.

Lewis

From a chat with Dave O'hara today,  I thought I would blog some thoughts around datacenter energy consumption and some common confusion concerning costs.

Do organizations with dedicated datacenters save money when they install more efficient servers and reduce energy consumption? 

Short Answer:  Rarely

Why?

It all is associated with how most dedicated datacenters negotiate energy consumption with utility companies (operating cost issue).   Usually, they negotiate rates at blocks of energy consumption in fixed buckets.

Therefore rule #1:  do not run out of energy,  rule #2: do not leave energy supply stranded (pay for it and not use it).   In other words:  Overprovisioning and Underprovising

Overprovisioning:  you run out of energy in the datacenter (worst sin in the datacenter)

• TTM (time to market) is significantly impacted
• Datacenter systems become brittle  (small energy changes can down center)

Underprovisioning: you strand energy your organization already paid for: (very bad)

• company is wasting money (that's money that could be going into something useful)

There is fine balancing act to managing these issues in your datacenter.

At the end of the day,  we usually have a fixed bucket of energy consumption at a given rate which manage for our datacenter.

So why architect IT solutions which reduces the consumption of energy? 

Answer: Reducing the velocity of datacenter expansion in your organization (capital costs)

As your organization grows in scale and complexity at a given rate, the need build more and more competitive  IT solutions increases at a related velocity.  

As IT solutions expands, organizations need more datacenter capacity to accommodate the business's growth needs.   This expansion is only successful as long as the given IT solutions provide value above the capital of costs of building and operating new datacenter capacity. 

Some Challenges of building new datacenters:

• Regulations and oversight cost are increasing
• Cost of datacenter infrastructure are significantly increasing  (PDUs, Cooling solutions, etc..)
• Negotiated blocks of energy consumption are significantly increasing in price

Therefore, energy efficiency ultimately is about slowing the velocity of datacenter expansion for organization (capital costs).

If you can slow your build cycle from 1 new datacenter every 9 months to 1 datacenter to every 13 months can be a significant business value for your organization.    Slowing forecasted datacenter expansion velocity.

And ultimately, this is not only good for the environment, it's good for the bottom line. 

Lewis