Peter's Technology Trumpet : Energy and Environment

Dan Costello talks containers

SmallCountry — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:05:53 GMT

Dan Costello and Christian Belady of Microsoft Global Foundation Services discuss the Chicago datacenter in a CNET video interview.

Microsoft opened the facility in September, and are now using Container-based deployment simply plugged in to power and water spines. This reduces the resources required – in terms of plant and packaging – and means Microsoft can meet capacity requirements at >4000 servers per day. Dan claims 50% improvements in PUE compared to conventional co-located racked servers.

Inside one of the world's largest data centers | Beyond Binary - CNET News

Saving the World 1 Watt at a time?

SmallCountry — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:49:31 GMT

“Every little helps” according to Tesco’s and the nice lady rattling her Sally Army collection box.

Unfortunately, in terms of our Ecology and Environment, that’s just not true. To change the post-industrial trends in fossil fuel dependency and carbon emissions, massive shifts in technology and society are required.

Militant Eco-warriors view that our efforts so far smack of tokenism: consumers assuage their guilt by switching to hessian shopping bags and eco washing up liquid; Government’s energy policy, foiled by the planning process, approve only tiny wind farms which make negligible impact on our energy generation mix; Business’ carbon offsetting measures smack of cynical “greenwashing”.

But Its easy to understand why people are unsure how to act. Generally the public have a poor understanding of the science behind “carbon emissions” and their contribution to global warming. Though scientists finally reached consensus that human actions were contributing to climate change in the IPCC 2007 report, there is still much contradictory and confusing information on our impact on global warming – and whilst we are bombarded with Green Marketing messages it is difficult for us to truly understand the links between our lifestyles and their environmental effect.

The Technology Trumpet would suggest that the key to understanding our environmental impact is for everyone to understand their personal energy use. Since James Watt perfected the steam engine, the energy consumed by all our activity, travel and consumption has steadily increased. Whilst this started in the burning of coal to steam engines, our ever-increasing lifestyle energy demands for energy for travel, heat, manufacture and electricity still come from fossil sources.

Today in the UK our daily energy consumption is around 200 kiloWatt hours – the equivalent of 200 40Watt bulbs switched on all day, every day, for every person in the country.

Unfortunately the hangover from all this energy consumption is a warmer planet – the accumulated “greenhouse gases” from burning hydrocarbons mean that infra-red “heat energy” from the surface of the Earth is absorbed and warms the atmosphere rather than harmlessly passing into space.

Back with the Eco-warriors, most popular initiatives to restore kilter to the complex systems which threaten to warm the Earth’s atmosphere by a few degrees by 2100 are tiny compared to growing “light bulb” count. Every little helps, but not at a scale to check the rate at which global energy use is increasing. Taking steps which drastically reduce the consumption of individuals, businesses and society in general is required to check the process which by general agreement of the scientific community, now seems to be underway.

Unfortunately for our comfortable Western lifestyles, bigger initiatives, which eliminate a significant fraction of our “personal light bulbs” are required. Here in the UK the lions share of our light bulbs are from Travel, Heat, and consumer “stuff” that takes a lot of energy to make or use. We stand the best chance of switching off our personal light bulbs by addressing these three areas.

Broadly speaking we can address this in several ways – use energy from renewable sources which don’t emit carbon, reduce energy requirements through technological innovation (like better insulating our houses), or mandate changes in our energy intensive lifestyles.

The problem is scale and timing – the changes required in any of the above must be drastic throughout the first half of this century to make a substantive difference before the century ends.

The Scottish Government had a go at this recently when it proposed that 95% of passenger cars should be electrically powered by 2020 in Scotland. This proposal, aimed at achieving an audacious 42% reduction in Scotland’s carbon emissions over the same period, were rubbished as hopelessly unrealistic by pressure groups from the business and consumer community. But this is the scale of change required to make a real difference.

Whilst democracy remains a popular system of government, our politicians, understanding of human nature, prefer to soften the hard lifestyle change messages to maximise their chances of election.It can be tricky to convince the population to support implementation of changes at the scale required as shown by last years rejection of the large Lewis Wind farm.

Prof David MacKay’s “Sustainable energy without the hot air” is a seminal work which quantifies the changes needed in the way the UK generates and uses energy. His conclusions are sobering, showing that onshore wind farms the size of Wales and massive offshore tidal barrages in Pentland and Solway would be required for the reality to meet the rhetoric.

So in summary, we may all fry unless we drastically change our ways – and soon.

Meanwhile, despite the bunkum of the industries’ Green marketing, it could yet be we Information Technologists who end up saving the planet!

That’s because the World needs us to help them effectively measure energy use. Because few individuals and businesses effectively measure, they fail to understand and effectively address energy use and costs.

Though we all mump and moan about the rising cost of our energy bills, few actually have any idea of their breakdown. Like the careful driver who feathers the throttle when driving a car with a trip computer measuring instantaneous fuel consumption, we need instant feedback to modify our behaviour. Whilst the gas and ‘leccy meter stay in the cupboard under the stairs, we miss the feedback.

The Utility industry is addressing this only slowly - In Germany Yello Strom are undergoing widespread deployment of Smart Electricity Meters, and closer to home Scottish Hydro have tentatively rolled out these devices which instantly feed back the cost of our actions, so that we don’t fill the kettle quite so full, hang up the washing versus switching on the tumble dryer and understand the value of better insulating our homes.

Whilst the utilities dawdle, a new class of software which address personal energy management has appeared – Google with PowerMeter are aggressively targeting smart meter infrastructure, whilst Microsoft, with their Hohm tool announced in late June, uses expert systems based on location, utility company, home size, etc. to predict energy use in advance of smart meter rollout.

The holy grail for these applications is to integrate with energy measurement and demand mitigation devices (thermostats, electric vehicle charging systems, etc) around the home and industry, to manage and mitigate overall energy use. It is early days, but this could become one of the great IT industry innovation battlefields like the desktop OS, the Browser, or the Search Engine.

Another area where the IT industry can make a huge impact on personal energy use is in travel avoidance. Air and surface travel account for over 40% of our personal energy use (80 of those 40Watt bulbs). The financial and environmental impact of technologies for teleworking and virtual meetings are well documented at the micro level. At the global scale, an ambitious study recently published by the WWF t concluded that the impact of Telework aggressively implemented would have a dramatic effect on World carbon emissions. It claims that by 2050 overall global transportation emissions could drop to between a quarter and a third of their current levels.

This is perhaps an optimistic view – again it is difficult to compel people and businesses to adopt the changes required. Ironically it may be the first global flu pandemic for 40 years which tips the balance. If 100,000 new daily cases of H1N1 swine flu are appearing by late August as predicted by the UK government then Teleworking technologies could help stem the spread of the virus, as well as saving the world one watt at a time.

Lucky White Heather?

SmallCountry — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:46:44 GMT

Happy New Year. Its getting harder to stay cheery these days.

We've all tried to stay positive as the sub-prime crisis spawned the credit crunch which smothered the global economy. But its easy to lose heart as pensions and house prices tumble and mighty institutions such as HBOS, RBOS are humbled.

As the gloom of the New Millenium Depression sinks in, we find ourselves working harder, with scarce opportunity, and evaporating job security.

As the good Rev. I. M. Jolly once said, "You know, its been a hell of a year".

With this in mind just before Christmas we invited renowned economist Jeremy Peat to speak at Microsoft Edinburgh HQ.

Jeremy's views on the Scottish economic outlook for the next 18 months were riveting, but there were few rays of sunshine. Luckily the windows are sealed at Waverley Gate, preventing the assembled Scottish IT Industry leaders from throwing themselves on the railway tracks below.

Looking for cheerier news, I checked some of my favourite RSS feeds.

Although Barry Beelzebub politically incorrect rant on the state of the nation and The Daily Mash can't fail to amuse, everywhere else it's doom and gloom as the World faces a doubly whammy of financial and environmental catastrophe.

The Guardian's respected environmental blogger George Monbiot tells us that the International Energy Agency is warning of "Peak Oil" in 2020, some 10 years earlier than previously projected. Earlier posts explain that global warming proceeding faster than anticipated faster than expected with melting of arctic ice and permafrost warming the atmosphere by around 5 degrees to 2050 - rendering human civilisation impossible across much of the planet.

George's views, backed up by solid research it must be said, is that we must change our ways or the planet will burn. I imagine he doesn't get invited to many parties these days.

Meanwhile in the Technology Industries perhaps there are some positives... The Global Financial Crisis may be a perfect storm for technology and IT professionals with Business willing to try out new ideas.

In economies like the UK and US where GDP is likely to shrink by a few points in 2009 and faced with growing commitment to climate change legislation and regulation, it seems clear that business and consumers must find new ways of "doing stuff" which are less wasteful of resources, can reduce operating costs and make less demands on capital investment. Its common sense that a recession changes habits - Consumers put off the expensive holiday in favour of paying the mortgage. Organisations will take every opportunity to make changes which cut operating costs before taking the step of making redundancies.

Lynda Gratton of the FT predicts that business travel habits will fundamentally change in her article "Recessions give space for new ideas to flourish" with fiscal necessity driving adoption of collaboration and video conferencing technologies.

This really is a no-brainer - stop flying employees to meetings and use conferencing technology. Not only will this take a serious bite out of business air travel carbon emissions (currently 6% of UK total), but it can have a significant impact on opex. Of course this doesn't work for all industries, but it is not unusual for a UK services sector enterprises to budget £10,000 per year for employee T&E. My personal experience has been that judicious use of Unified Communications tools can cut 50% off that figure.

In fact, if such tools are fully adopted in the company culture (and this takes time), Real Estate and Facilities could really start to trim some fat from the bottom line. Such tools promise to make employees productive wherever they are, reducing the capital cost of office move and consolidation, facilitating Telework and promoting more flexible sharing of expensive office space.

Such ideas are not new - but as the tech gets cheaper and the pressure to reduce operational expenditure increases, ideas thought too risky in the boom times may become standard in the bust.

Cloud-delivered subscription services such as Microsoft's Business Productivity Online, which for some companies can give an employee all the IT services they need for around a tenner a month, may become the norm for smaller customers in a protracted recession. This is more efficient for many businesses than procuring hardware and software and running the services themselves, and for those familiar with the growing electricity consumption of the IT industry worldwide, it promotes maximum efficiency of energy use.

Perhaps all this is good news for IT industry professionals: demand for skills around technologies which reduce consumption and make things more efficient in the coming years may stay solid. Companies IT spend will may shift focus, and new ideas previously thought of as too far removed from the status quo will flourish.

Information Technology based applications, ideas and initiatives can have a broad impact on energy use and operating costs. Take Shiply - a venture born just as the UK's major banks were passing round the hat in Rights Issues last year. Shiply is on online freight marketplace which benefits both the consumer and supplier of the service. Hauliers reverse-auction for jobs to fill empty lorries returning from other work, and the customer pays around 50% of traditional services. Clearly this service improves efficiency, reducing costs, more effectively utilising resources, ultimately reducing the number of freight journeys and hence carbon emmissions.

Ex-SAP Executive Shai Agassi high profile Better Place initiative aims to go even further. His ambitious business model is to replace our vehicle and oil based public transportation with an electric infrastructure of free cars where we pay by the mile, in much the same way as the free handset/Pay as you go model works in telecomms. Further positive grand vision can be found in the Global E-sustainability initiative "SMART 2020 - Enabling a low carbon economy in the Information Age" which identifies the IT industry as the hero, contributing to the Low Carbon economy by enabling new motor and logistics systems, smart energy grids and buildings.

So despite the doom, gloom and despondancy, there are still some uplifting stories to raise our spirits in 2009 - But remember in these dark and uncertain times the words of the Good Reverend - "Life is like an ashtray - full of little doubts".

YouTube - Reverend I.M.Jolly

Mike Manos on Generation 4 Datacentres

SmallCountry — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:58:07 GMT

Mike Manos of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services has released some detail of ambitious plans for Microsoft's new generation of cloud compute infrastructure on his blog.

This is the result of long painstaking multidisciplinary R&D from Dan Costello and his engineers, and Microsoft's experience of running . Mike's blog post is longer than War and Peace, but very briefly Gen 4 defines a common framework for pre-fabrication of all aspects of datacenter infrastructure, not just the server component, to

support just-in-time delivery of capacity (building datacentres is a capital intensive activity)
be flexible enough to meet the range of characteristics for support and cost required across services as diverse as Live Spaces and Business Productivity Online

Much of the architecture is being put out in the public domain in a public-spirited effort to drive the whole industry forward.

See below an animation which illustrates some of the key concepts. I note the video shows mega-datacenters in several locations as yet unnannouced....

Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers - One way of Getting it just right . . . « LooseBolts

Facing West

SmallCountry — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:01:40 GMT

In the 18th century the city of Glasgow amassed great wealth through trade with the New World. Opinions abound in the history books of why the Glasgow Tobacco Lords achieved a virtual monopoly on the weed trade, but it came down to one fundamentals- the Clyde formed a safe West-facing port best placed to take advantage of the trade winds of the arduous Atlantic crossing.

Glasgow's Merchants were undoubtedly clever chaps, but the city became the 2nd city of the Empire largely due to Geographic fluke. It wasn't superior national intellectual horsepower which created Scotland's coal reserves which fuelled its Industrial revolution and drove the British Empire. Likewise, the discovery of recoverable oil in the North Sea was not the result of an economic development masterplan.

Let's face it - we're just jammy. It rains a bit, but look on the bright side - Scotland always seems to be in the right place to receive a disproportionate share of Europe's natural resources.

With the growth of investment in mega-datacenters, Scotland has yet another chance to create a successful industry by capitalising on its natural resources and geography.

This time the world order of the new industry is shaped by energy availability and security, availability of plentiful electricity generated from renewable sources, geopolitical issues of where to safely place important data, and of course proximity to dark fibre which connects the data and applications to the Internet peering points and population centres of the Eurasian land mass.

Europe's economic development authorities are quietly angling for this business by pitching potential datacenter sites to the likes of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Oracle and others closer to home such as BT and Fujitsu. In this competition the prizes are significant - with successful sites seeing many-year investments of $100 millions with benefits for the local economies involved, their power/communications infrastructure and to the ecosystem of companies involved in the creation and supply chain of these 100 acre, million server monsters. Switzerland, Iceland and most other continental European nations with energy independence and/or a reasonable renewable energy capacity are already making a strong play.

Scotland of course already has a long history of Hydro generation, relevant experience in North Sea exploration, and has a large share of Europe's wind, wave and tidal generation capacity.

In larger datacenter projects in North America, the appearance of a big name such as Microsoft has triggered the creation of a cluster of similar datacenter investments, sparking economic diversity and regeneration in some rural areas. Quincy, WA, now has Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit and others on the way. Likewise datacnters from Microsoft and IBM across Ireland have led inward investment of nearly €1 Billion. But unlike Washington state, Scotland doesn't have earthquakes, and unlike Ireland it does not have problems meeting the industries demand for electricity.

Just as West-facing trading ports flourished in the Age of Empire, there are specific sites in Scotland's which are set to flourish in the Software + Services,/Cloud Computing/Datacenter age. Ecclefechan & Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway is one such location. Scotland's roundwood forestry thinnings and sustainable crops of willow find their way to the largest Biomass power station in Europe, E-On Steven Croft - visible from the M74 motorway. When Europe ultimately runs out of oil and gas, Scotland's forests will continue to provide a sustainable energy source.

As a bonus, the area has planning permission for around 200MWs of windmills, and the proposed site of the 300MW Solway tidal barrage is not far away. There are also multiple UK National Grid interconnects nearby. Put the Biomass and these interconnect assets together, and you have multiple redundant, always on (the last thing you want in the 24/7 datacenter industry is a power outage), power supplies with capacity in the 100MW region which are available today.

Coincidentally, the area is flooded with data fibre trunk routes due to the adjacency of power transmission rights of way, and the proximity of the West coast main train line.

So once again Scotland finds itself again in the enviable position of possessing all the natural and technological assets required to build a new industry. Lets hope that it can prioritise the steps required to develop this new industry in the face of swift-moving competition...

Microsoft To Mainstream Containerized Data Centers

SmallCountry — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:02:57 GMT

Trends of consolidation can be seen in the migration of servers to fewer, larger more automated datacenter locations, and also in consolidation of the units within those datacenters.

With the availability of advanced management tools and virtualisation techniques it's inefficient for engineers to be fiddling around commissioning individual servers, storage and racks. In a consolidated datacenter world, Prefabricated containers containing maintenence-free redundant units of datacenter fabric and processing power are more practical.

Rackable, SUN and others have helped drive container datacenter designs, and this commodity-based approach is now entering the mainstream. Microsoft's annoucement at the Data Center World conference last week was of a substantial 100+MW datacenter facility filled entirely with Microsoft C-Blox container datacenter.

Although this use of containerised datacenters in a Microsoft mega-facility is the first of its kind, the modular approach is also interesting for Scotland, as proposed in an earlier post on the renewable Energy Datacenter.

As James Hamilton, of Microsoft's Live Platform Services team points out when considering where to locate computing power, "multiple smaller datacenters, regionally located, could prove to be a competitive advantage". Scotland's natural advantages around cheap power potential, addressing heat density and geopolitical position should make it worthy considering as a location for Europes datacenters.

Microsoft To Mainstream Containerized Data Centers With C-Blox -- Data Center -- InformationWeek

£600m green investment for Scotland : Hi-Tech Scotland

SmallCountry — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:35:00 GMT

Internet Villages International announced that they will constructing datacentres on their 140 acre site in Lockerbie. The announcement of the creation of more datacentre space is hardly newsworthy, but there are a few unusual aspects to this project:

it will bring hi-tech employment to an area of Scotland not associated with the IT industry (500 jobs was mentioned), stimulating the local economy
it will take advantage of renewable energy sources including the local 44MW Biomass power station and various wind turbines in Dumfries and Galloway
the waste heat from the datacentres will used by local housing and horticultural businesses

Perfect.

Article, £600m green investment for Scotland : Hi-Tech Scotland

Land of Fire and Ice

SmallCountry — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:54:31 GMT

Iceland.

Thoughts of bargain supermarket frozen turkey twizzlers, Viking epics, alternative rock band The Sugarcubes, may all be triggered when naming this barren and volcanic North Atlantic island nation.

But soon Iceland may also be known as a world centre for International Datacenter operations. According to PWC, abundant geothermal energy, generous tax incentives for the industry, and plenty of submarine optic fibre connecting it to the USA and UK, make it the most competitive location to stick your servers.

The trend towards siting the massive centralised computing resources which support “Web 2.0” close to sources of cheap power and good Internet connectivity is well documented. So far in October George Gilder wrote of ”The Information Factories” in Wired, and in Hi-Tech Scotland mag columnist Colin Walker wrote of the power supply issue for IT datacentres in an article which reflected many of the ideas and data points in my post on Renewable Energy Datacentres.

Iceland and The Scottish Highlands and Islands have much in common - both are geographically remote with a population of about 300,000, both have abundant cheap energy potential (Scotland with 25% of Europes renewable capacity, and Iceland with Volcanoes and geothermal energy plants). Both are unable to fully capitalise on their energy generation capacity, because they can't efficiently transmit the power to major points of energy consumption. In Rekjavik , they have so much energy they even heat the pavements.

However, Iceland has a vision to drive investment in the Internet infrastructure required to capitalise on their natural resources, including investment in the dark fibre required to ensure they are not an Internet backwater like the Scottish Highlands and Islands area. In addition to the existing FARICE connection to the UK via the Faroes and Orkney, those wealthy Icelanders are making the appropriate investment in capacity to link themselves to Europe and the USA through Northern Ireland. http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com/documents/8607-IcelandPR-JSAFinal.pdf

Upgrading Scotlands more remote regions Internet connectivity would not only help the Scottish Government reach its broadband penetration objectives, but would take advantage of our natural assets to support ventures in a new growth industry. Further sighted governments such as that of Iceland understand this opportunity, and are making the appropriate investment.

Scotland has an advantage over Iceland as a datacenter location - Iceland is a dangerous place to be in geographic terms. Just over 200 years ago a volcanic eruption killed 20% of Icelands population. The ex-citizens of Pompei, South Washington state (nr Mount St. Helens), Sumatra and Java might have strong opinions on where to place datacentres to offer best business continuity.

Head in the "Cloud"

SmallCountry — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:47:41 GMT

At the age of 24 I rode my bike across the 6.5km Columbia River bridge between Oregon and Washington state. Big river, big bridge. I remember thinking it would make a damn :-) good power plant.

Upriver, past Portland and in the shadow of Mount Hood, I hear Google have constructed a 30 acre server farm near the Dalles Dam, just one of several 2 gigawatt hydroelectric schemes up the Columbia gorge.

High bandwidth reliable networks, and the migration of computing power to "web services" in the cloud, mean that one should generally put servers next to cheap power. As long as the datacentre has the appropriate connectivity, the huge capacity and speed of global optical networks mean processing is best placed close to the power, rather than close to the people.

If such dam-envy seems dangerously close to train-spotting, consider that your average punter is now an enthusiastic user of web services like search engines, Internet mail/IM, and web mapping services.

Likewise IT Professionals are increasingly drawn to the irresistible logic of consuming services like email security and management (Exchange Hosted Services) and online Meeting services (Live Meeting) from "the cloud". Its far more efficient and effective to run these generic services centrally in a massively scaled, highly automated datacentre. This tallies up with the traditional business view of outsourcing "non-core" activities like payroll, security, catering, and PC desktop support.

Based on the success of companies like Salesforce, and huge investment from Microsoft, Google and others, it seems that in the next 2 to 5 years will see significant uptake of IT services that are remotely hosted and internet delivered. With data spread across the Internet, and applications running across the browser, desktop and remote datacentres, black-shirt wearing dot-com entrepreneurs have come up with new terms to describe the social and IT phenomenon's like "Web 2.0" and "cloud computing".

Microsoft's Software + Services mantra is a reflection of these new architectures, with some people factors thrown in - users can only use applications which are simple and familiar, and IT people want choice of where they put their servers (in their offices, centrally hosted in a datacenter, or completely outsourced to the cloud).

What this means in practical terms is that we will increasingly depend on 100,000-system datacentres, where automation and economies of scale drive down the cost of these services compared to the in-house IT approach. Microsoft's has a dual role in this - firstly to provide energy and effort efficient platforms and automated management tools, and secondly to provide the tools and building block services which enable this new S+S world.

Which brings us back to the Columbia River. One issue with the above is the growing power consumption of datacentres globally. George Gilder in Wired magazine recently estimated that the datacentres of the 5 leading search engines consume around 5 Gigawatts of power, counting servers, storage, cooling, and the inefficiencies of the grid's power transmission. Compare that to the 60GW peak demand on the UK national grid, and global energy requirements of datacentres can only grow as the global interweb's consumption of these services increases. Power accounts for around 40% of the overall running costs of the typical datacentre, a proportion which will only increase as energy prices increase and improved technology and automation reduce staff costs.

The moral of the story is that building your datacentres next to sources of cheap, clean power, makes good fiscal sense, and gives you a nice warm feeling about doing your bit for the planet.

Scotland, and in particular Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, has extraordinary renewable energy generation potential. Scotland has an estimated potential of 36.5 GW of wind and 7.5 GW of tidal power, 25% of the estimated total capacity for the European Union and up to 14 GW of wave power potential, 10% of EU capacity. Despite this the Scottish government have set modest targets for 6GW from renewable schemes by 2020.

Sadly, the costs and planning issues of grid connection can have an impact on their financial viability and social acceptability. But to overcome these grid-connection issues, why not consume the power at source by placing computing power close to point of generation? The Highlands and Islands region is blessed with lower temperatures and freely available water supplies (to aid cooling), cheaper than average labour, and plenty of tidal, wave, hydro and wind gen capacity.

Such a scheme could use self-contained, modular and portable container-based datacenters to overcome the logistical and skills issues, and allow the Highlands and Islands area to quickly capitalise on its sources of cheap and renewable power.

Container datacentre solutions allow a fully functional datacentre to be dropped in remote locations close to inexpensive power. Rackable systems unveiled such a solution recently, and James Hamilton of Microsoft, who frequently speaks about his ideas for the commodity datacentre, reckons that this approach can help overcome the myriad of political and logistical issues that surround datacentres and their power needs.

Power is currently about 40% of the cost of running a datacentre. With rising fossil energy costs, decreasing hardware/software costs, and decreasing staff costs through automation, this proportion will only increase unless abundant cheap power is nearby.

Coupling renewable energy with the commodity datacenter makes sense to meet our renewable energy goals, create a new source of employment and income for Scotland, and help bridge the predicted 20% " UK energy gap" by 2015.

Perhaps its time for Scotland to look towards the Renewable Energy Datacentre.

Wind problems?

SmallCountry — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:22:54 GMT

In Finland its completely Baltic from about October to April. So it is that they make the best of the Scandinavian Summer and the entire workforce downs tools for July and as much of August as they can get away with.

So it is that the pages of the Trumpet have been neglected whilst I observed the Scandinavian summer holiday habit. I've divided my time between the yearly Estonian holiday with Mrs. Ferry and the cost centres, then the Microsoft Partner Conference in Denver, CO.

Throughout the summer I was struck by the increasing awareness and press comment on energy issues and global warming. Even in the USA, Mr. Bush has finally taken an interest and called a conference in Washington to discuss how carbon emissions can be capped, although in a typical Bushism it conflicts with the UN's own climate change conference up the road in New York.

Of course the President's changing mood is as much about energy security as about reducing emissions. Western society is a global patio heater burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow, and much of the global energy supplies are not under U.S. control. Mr. Putin has maneuvered Russia into a powerful position where it can hold net energy importers to ransom , and recently annexed an oil rich area half the size of Europe under the North Pole. Meanwhile Mr.Bush is exploring Mars.

The political desire for energy independence was in evidence during my trip to Estonia this year. No doubt wary of the Russian clout wielded over Georgia and Ukraine last year when Russia turned off the gas taps when it was -10 outside, Estonia is at pains to reduce the dependence on Russian gas supplies. Currently it generates 2.5% of its requirement from Wind energy, but is lucky to have oil shale reserves which meet about 75% of its energy requirements. However, an ambitious project to erect a wind farm in the Baltic sea to the NorthWest of the beautiful isle of Hiiumaa will have a capacity of 1GW from 200 big windmills, and be connected to Baltic capitals Tallinn, Stockholm and Helsinki. That's about the capacity of your average nuclear power station, and should fill the gap nicely to ensure that Estonia does not share the Ukraine's chilly fate as an energy hostage of the Kremlin.

Several small countries long ago realized that a forward-looking energy policy is vital to national security, like Denmark (75% wind) and Finland (nuclear and biomass, lots of trees in Finland). Sadly Scotland's has thus far failed to take advantage of the staggering opportunity from renewable energy capacity and the remaining North Sea reserves - the UK is a net importer of energy, relying on an extension lead from the French (80% nuclear) power stations, and foreign gas and coal supplies.

But the trouble with wind is that it doesn't always blow....

This is a shame, as if these Wind Energy plants were spinning at maximum capacity all the time, they would be ideal to meet societies base load power requirements. Base load requirements refer to the always-on power requirements, ignoring the peaks of energy usage when everyone switches on the kettle in the morning. Computing and high-tech devices left switched on are making an ever increasing contribution to these requirements. According to Colin Pykett in Physics World devices in the home on standby (such as PCs, DVD players, Freeview set top boxes, even Microsoft Home Servers) typically contribute to a household standby power usage of around 100W. Multiply by the number of households in the UK, and you need 2GW of capacity just to keep the green LED switched on your flatscreen telly. That's another 2 coal-fired power stations!

As Web 2.0 makes its dramatic effect on society and business, consider also the growing requirements of the computing power in Internet datacentres. Society expects these resources to be available 24/7, which translates to huge requirements for the energy inefficient server rooms (I blogged on this back in March). The effect of rising energy costs now drives AMD and Intel to compete based on performance-per-watt and energy efficiency rather than absolute speed. AMD recently stole the moral high ground by announcing low power quad core chips which are backwards compatible with Opteron architectures but with 25% more performance-per-watt than the nearest Intel chip. Much of the energy requirement in the server room is waste - server power supplies are typically only 80% efficient, and with current hardware/software processors don't use much less energy when not fully utilised.

Microsoft's Bill Laing, GM of the Server division and a Scottish ex-pat, recently claimed that Windows Server 2008 (the artist formerly known as Longhorn) should knock a further 20% off power requirements. Firstly through Virtualisation technologies, processors will be more fully utilised. Server core installation means that superfluous processes are trimmed away for a given physical or virtual OS image, reducing processor load and power usage. Finally by better taking advantage of the AMD and Intel processor P-state features, the OS can dynamically flick the processor into a lower power usage state during short periods of lower utilisation.

Which brings us back to Hiiumaa, Estonia and wind farms. All the above adds up to a growing base load power needs to keep the economy ticking over. Airtricity, who operate many wind farms in Scotland, Ireland, US and mainland Europe, have an idea for how Wind Energy could address this, and overcome the vagaries of the weather. They have an ambitious plan to build a European Supergrid. The basic idea is that as it is always blowing somewhere in the weather systems of continental Europe, electricity can be transported to regions of demand to support Europe's base load power needs - and ultimately create an energy trading network providing 30% of the continents power.

Before any Electrical Power Engineers cry foul, there are some technological advances which make this viable. In the past it has been inefficient to transmit power over the long distances between countries. This is because the conventional High Voltage AC power lines become less efficient over long distances, and generally start to peg out after around 200km. Instead Airtricity plan to use High Voltage DC lines, which remain over 90% efficient after 1000km. That this can now be achieved economically is all down to Thyristor Valves. I believe these were used along with the Flux Capacitor in the construction of the Back to the Future time-travelling DeLorean, and if you are interested in the science, take a look at this white paper.

Come to think of it, could it be viable to take DC straight to the billions of devices which use it (like all PCs, servers and consumer electronic devices) rather than wastefully convert 240V AC to 5 or 12V DC in billions of inefficient power supplies? Many companies, including Rackable systems the DC powered server supplier, and Moixa energy Ltd, who brought the USB battery to market, and seem to think so.

The latest hot laptop

SmallCountry — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:53:00 GMT

Increasingly people complain of hot laptops. My colleague James regularly scorches his fingers on his power supply.

Indeed, your lap is a dangerous place to put the average Pentium M 2GHZ based notebook these days, with the trend to larger memory, more powerful graphics subsystem and hotter running processors.

People and businesses like portable computers - perhaps because of the trend towards more mobile working. Business laptop shipments are increasing 30% annually and its estimated that 40% of European workforce is mobile. In the meantime consumer demand for notebooks is growing unabated, with laptops occupying half the display space last time I visted PC World.

The positive side effect of this trend is that individuals are forced to think more about power consumption..

Windows Vista lets PC hardware, especially laptops, their processors and peripherals, use less energy. Through full support for "Sleep" mode, Vista can reduce your PC into a low power vegetative state, with the processor ticking over and memory running on a pilot light. My laptop (the infamous oversized Toshiba M4 "fan heater") switches into this mode when ignored for 5 minutes, and is restored following a lift of the lid in less than 10 seconds. For desktop PCs, Vista adds a hybrid sleep mode to address memory volatility as, unlike laptops, they generally have no battery.

Whilst this saves the embarrassment of a flat battery in a laptop, the same power management policy can be set by the largest enterprises to put 100,000s of PCs into suspended animation over lunch. This has the potential to reduce power usage, and hence the organisations energy costs by a significant margin. I heard from a reliable source that a certain large retail bank based in Edinburgh expects power costs to exceed staff costs in 2007. Whilst those energy costs are made up of heating, lighting, air conditioning as well as computing equipment, reducing desktop power usage with Vista and Sleep will have a significant impact on this - according to Richard Mannion of Microsoft UK, about 760KWh per desktop with CRT monitor.

In Scotland there is evidence that the average punter is thinking more about efficiency. The supermini share of new car shipments increased by 30% last year. This is most likely driven my the increasing costs of motoring, of which energy (fuel) costs are a significant portion - perhaps this spell an end to the Yummy Mummy Blackhall tractor brigade?

The Ferry family doesn't own a motor car - these are nasty environmentally unfriendly objects which are quite unneccessary if you live choose to live close enough to work. This is a point on which Mrs. Ferry and I differ - she maintains that they are needed for those "absiolutely neccessary" journeys between home, nursery lunches, and tennis club.

However, the household is guilty of running many inefficient electronic devices, including a file/print/telephony server which is switched on all the time. But that's nothing compared to the energy consumption of a typical organisation's computer room.

These are stuffed with Intel and AMD based PC servers and storage, running 24 hours a day, with the typical processor running at less than 15% utilisation, fed by a power supply running at less than 70% efficiency.

Indeed, datacenter space is often limited not by the ability to stuff more servers in, but by the means of getting heat out. Its not unusual to see IT professionals in shorts and T-shirts sweating cobbs as they administer care and attention to these racks of inefficient servers, each with a heat output similar to a patio heater. Incidentally, if you own and use a patio heater, I can confirm that you will go to hell.

Like the american auto industry, it has taken some time for energy efficiency in the PC server industry to gather momentum. So it was refreshing to see that the Green Grid, a cross-industry group including AMD, Intel, HP, DELL and Microsoft, have got together to address this issue.

Link to Tech Giants to Unveil Power-Usage Plan - WSJ.com

Sensibly, the group will focus on a common scale for measuring energy efficiency in the datacenter. the issue must be simplified to a level that the busy average datacenter manager has time to understand. It wasn't until the EU energy efficiency labelling was implemented for some consumer electronics that the average punter had any idea of the energy usage of a TV, fridge or washing machine.

Aside from the energy cost issue, organisations are under increased pressure from their customers and shareholders to reduce their impact on the planet. Grant Management, a successful property management and investment company with offices and operations across the UK, is a classic example.

Returning from a New York lunch with Bill Clinton, Peter Grant returned to Edinburgh inspirted to make his company carbon neutral. He acheived that within a few months through energy efficiency measures and carbon offsetting. Being an entrepenurial chap, he has also set up another company to let others do the same at http://www.globaltrees.co.uk/ . If you are are a naysayer on matters of global warming then take a look at his graphs - scary.

There are numerous examples of increasing awareness of energy issues around the Western world. The government of Australia recently announced plans to subsidise replacement of incandescent lighting with low energy light bulbs (following earlier vision of Fidel Castro of Cuba). Closer to home, the Scottish parliament have made available funding for green energy schemes. Tony Blair has reaslised that if our energy usage continues to grow at the same rate, the UK will need a few more Nuclear power stations ASAP.

Deployment of computing power in the datacenter and the living room is increasing exponentially, and rising energy and environmental costs compound the probelm. Sooner or later the focus will switch to the IT industry to make its contribution.

So allow me to make a suggestion - There are around 200 million PCs capable of being upgraded to Vista in Europe right now. If the governamental and energy industry bodies who are currently directing funding to energy efficiency schemes were instead to drive Vista upgrade for all of these PCs, then maybe we could realise energy savings of the order of 200,000,000*760KWh which translates to about 17MegaWatts.

Factor in the double bubble effect of all the HVAC systems removing this waste heat and this would let us turn down the wick on a few coal fired power stations.

When Longhorn and Windows Server Virtualisation is released to the world later this year, similar technologies could knock a billion dollars or so off the $7.3B global datacenter annualised electricity costs.

In the meantime, consider installing Vista on your laptop, or making sure you power down before you go home :-)

Technorati tags: Vista, Environment, Power