AT&T plans to introduce its own eco-rating system for mobile devices

Later this year AT&T is launching an eco-rating system to inform consumers of the environmental features of the mobile handset devices that the company offers.

The system, which was developed in collaboration with sustainability consultancy BSR, will cover attributes such as environmentally preferable materials, energy efficiency, responsible end-of-life treatment and environmentally-responsible manufacturing. Device manufacturers will submit an assessment of each device to determine how many of 15 key criteria are met. The criteria cover everything from the percentage of recycled metals used to the restriction on hazardous compounds employed.

The overall rating represents the composite score of these environmental attributes. Consumers will find the eco-ratings labels on AT&T-branded mobile devices or will be able to go online for more details about the ratings, the overall sustainability scale for mobile devices and available products.

According to the company, the system is a direct response to customer wants and needs. In a Deloitte study on consumer trends in the purchase of sustainable products, 54% of shoppers consider sustainability to be one of their decision making factors.

 

AT&T’s action is commendable, but it seems to me that industry-wide environmental rating systems are far more useful. EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) from the Green Electronics Council in the US assesses products on a wide range of environmental factors, but so far has focussed primarily on computers and peripherals. Energy star tackles power aspects such as battery rechargers, but not broader environmental product issues.

It would have been more useful in the long run if AT&T had put the effort into trying to promote some industry-wide rating system, particularly since the company’s scheme seems to involve self-assessment. Any ratings system needs to be closely policed to make sure criteria are being met and that’s best achieved by an independent, industry-supported body.

Joulex responds to enterprise IT energy management demands

Enterprise Energy management systems company Joulex has launched version 3 of the Joulex Energy Manager (JEM) suite. The main enhancements that the company has made are a more scalable, centralised reporting and management layer, a better dashboard and new reports, and threshold alerting and auto response. The software is available for the Joulex PC, distributed office, Cisco EnergyWise and data centre product lines.

According to the company, the enhancements are in response to demand from large multi-national and multi-language enterprises. Tom Noonan, president and CEO, said, “This 3.0 release of the Joulex Energy Manager platform delivers on the requirements of our global customers who have implemented our solutions across their enterprises and want enterprise-level reporting for hundreds of thousands of devices across their highly distributed offices and data centres worldwide.”

Among the features of the new release are:

• Implementation on single devices or distributed deployments across multiple locations. The platform now scales to support one million devices;

• New embeddable widgets, such as heat maps, data centre Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), centralised server statistics and health status, and server resource charts. These can be exported to share real time progress against corporate sustainability initiatives;

• Improved screen layouts. Reports available in six languages and can be scheduled to be sent automatically;

• New reports for Sustainable procurement, data centre metrics and distributed office usage analysis;

• Threshold alerting, based on power, utilisation, temperature, etc, and auto notification or response;

 

Joulex seems to be on a roll at the moment, at least in terms of product development. It was only in September that the last version of the JEM suite was released, with a focus more on expanding the power management capabilities themselves. This one seems to be more about usability.

As I mentioned at the time of the last release, the rapid development is helped by the $17m the company raised last June. In this highly competitive market Joulex seems to be going full out to cover all bases, particularly for the enterprise market. These large companies have more complex needs, but are also a huge market.

JEM’s claim to fame is that it is the first network-based, agentless energy management system that measures the energy consumption and utilisation of all network-connected devices and systems. I don’t know if that’s actually true – most aspects are also available from other vendors - but they seem to have a very good PR operation pushing the fact.

Capgemini launches SaaS smart water meter deployment service

IT services company Capgemini has launched an off-the-shelf software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that will allow utilities to deploy radio water meters and the associated networking equipment. The Smart Water Services Platform is based on the company’s Smart Energy Services (SES) platform, which leverages Capgemini’s 10 years of smart metering experience.

The company maintains that the Smart Water Services Platform is the only one that can demonstrate an end-to-end, integrated workflow for radio water metering. It includes program planning, meter rollout and operations through to maintenance and analysis of water consumption. Being an SaaS solution, pricing is based on usage and utilities will have low initial costs and quick implementation.

 

Capgemini is another company putting a lot of effort into trying to win smart meter implementation business, although most of the activity to date is aimed at electricity meters. The company says that its Smart Energy Services solutions have helped over 43 million utilities customers worldwide with 30 smart meter and smart grid programs, and it has more than 8,000 people involved in delivering these services. On the other hand it also faces a lot of competition around the world – Capgemini’s experience to date is mostly in Scandinavia.

What struck me is that, for this water meter service, delivery is through a Software-as-a-Service delivery model, an aspect of what is also known as utility computing. Seems quite apt.

IBM to monitor offshore industry emissions

IBM has won a place on a global research project to develop an integrated environmental monitoring system to help oil and gas companies minimise the environmental impact of their operations. 

IBM developers and a team from its Oil and Gas Centre of Excellence in Norway are collaborating with Statoil, Kongsberg Group and Det Norske Veritas (DNV) on developing the solution. The system will apply streaming analytics to measure, process and analyse live physical, biological and chemical data generated by sensors and cameras attached around an offshore installation. The system will be able to predict and prevent issues before they occur. 

Oil and gas companies use different environmental monitoring methods, but there are currently no integrated solutions that enable physical, biological and chemical data to be measured during actual operations. The idea is that by integrating environmental monitoring into day-to-day operations it will be possible for oil and gas companies to more rapidly respond to anticipated conditions, such as shutting down production at an installation, or ceasing construction activity during environmentally sensitive periods.

According to Statoil, environmental monitoring is essential for the company to achieve its target of zero harmful discharges.  The three-year research project will demonstrate whether Statoil succeeds in taking environmental monitoring from being a separate task to become an integrated part of daily production – ‘a quantum leap for offshore environmental monitoring’.

 

Well, it’s obviously a good thing to try to minimise the environmental damage from offshore drilling. Much better if we didn’t drill offshore at all, though. 

I’m a little bemused by Statoil’s target of ‘zero harmful discharges’. How does that work for an oil company?

GE and Carbon Trust launch clean technology investment fund

GE and Carbon Trust have come together to offer a low carbon incubation fund aimed at accelerating European clean technology business growth.

It’s been launched at a time when there is evidence that Europe is struggling to keep up with other parts of the globe in this sector. The companies point out that:

• Europe has seen a 40% decrease in it’s share of clean energy investment since 2007

• GE’S Innovation Barometer indicates half of all businesses see the UK as a challenging environment for innovation

The fund is an extension of GE’s ecomagination Challenge, a $200m global programme launched in 2010 to find and fund the best ideas in clean tech technology. GE and partners have committed $134m globally for investment and commercial partnerships with start-up companies.

The initial phase of the Carbon Trust partnership includes a $5m incubation fund targeted at low carbon technologies in the area of infrastructure applications. The Carbon Trust will work with GE to identify and evaluate early stage companies, then incubate and invest in those with the most potential.

GE’s recent Innovation Barometer found that UK companies see collaboration as a key to future growth. In all, 84% of UK businesses believe that developing partnerships and collaboration with a combination of players - including government, big business, SMEs and individuals - is the key to success in innovation. Almost 90% of UK businesses also claim that SMEs and individual entrepreneurs can be as innovative as bigger companies, hence the need for early stage funding.

 

A good idea, particularly since the UK government in general seems to be backing away from supporting cleantech industries. At least the Carbon Trust is prepared to make some investment (even though its government grant was cut by 40% this financial year). Getting larger companies, such as GE, involved, gives it all added weight - hopefully the Carbon Trust can get interest from other companies. Maybe they could persuade Sony to expand on its Open Planet Ideas to support start-up UK cleantech businesses, for example.

IT Power management company launches £3m fund

UK-based IT power management company Gill IT has launched a £3m fund to help organisations reduce the cost of PC power management. The Gill IT PCPM fund is designed to help reduce the cost of central power management implementation, which can be costly if you have a lot of PCs.  The fund is only available for Gill IT’s Utopia Power Manager, the company’s enterprise power management product.

All organisations are eligible for help in funding their implementation, but UK companies have preference. The amount of support given will depend on criteria such as, type of organisation (profit/non-profit making/academic) and number of PCs onsite.

Most of the money has come from Gill IT itself, helped by private investors. The expectation is that after the first year clients will renew as paid licenses for Gill IT’s Utopia Power Manager, hence the company’s investment.

If you want to apply for funding there is more information here.

 

Well, firstly the plug for PC power management in general, pretty much a no-brainer if you want to save carbon emissions and money. Gill IT says that their product can save on average £30/$48 per PC per year – a total of £30,000/$48,000 if you have 1,000 PCs. Pay-back time on initial investment varies between 3-12 months. Most PC power management products make similar claims.

The strange thing is, as I found when I researched this market in depth a year or so ago, even with a fast return on investment, companies are reluctant to spend the money in the current economic climate. That’s the problem that Gill IT is addressing with this fund. (In the US and Canada power companies have, in the past, provided rebates for the purchase of power management products, significantly boosting take-up).

It’s also worth mentioning that these products are now very sophisticated (although I can’t specifically comment on Gill IT’s offering). Safe to say that most of the traditional objections about user flexibility, the ability to wake machine for maintenance tasks, etc. no longer apply.

Here endeth the lesson. So if you really can’t afford to pay for it all yourself, talk to Gill IT.

Atos, EMC and VMware form cloud alliance

Atos, EMC Corporation and VMware have announced a strategic alliance for open cloud computing.

Atos plans to create a new company called Canopy designed to be a one-stop shop for cloud services while speeding up the delivery of solutions. Based on technology from EMC and VMware, the company will offer an open cloud platform that enables customers to access and deploy cloud-based services. EMC and VMware are also investing in Canopy.

The new cloud offerings will be targeted at selected vertical markets, including:

• An Enterprise Application Store, giving clients access to the applications they need under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

• An Enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) will provide a Java development environment.

• A Private Cloud will provide pre-configured, standardised ‘cloud stacks’ to enable clients to speed up  cloud implementation.

• Cloud strategy and transformation consulting services.

Canopy will have its headquartered in Europe and its CEO will be appointed by Atos, its main shareholder.

 

Well the logic’s clear. Atos says that cloud computing currently accounts for 10% of the IT market and is set to quadruple by 2020. Canopy aims to cash in through offering cost reduction through flexible pricing models, access to the latest technology and rapid implementation. Atos gets more direct access to cloud technology and VMware and EMC get another route to the services market where they can get close to customers.

It all sounds ideal, if it wasn’t for those pesky global IT services company competitors ….

© The Green IT Review (www.thegreenitreport.com)

IT services companies accelerate their investment in sustainability services

According to a report from Verdantix, the 17 largest global IT services providers accelerated their investments in energy, environment and sustainability service lines in 2011. The market leaders are now Accenture, Deloitte, IBM And Logica.

The Verdantix report is based on analysis of 17 global IT services firms across 52 criteria. The study also assessed customer perceptions through interviews with a panel of buyers representing 10 industries with a collective spend of $331 billion.

The report found that what separates the leading firms from the rest is that they have better sustainability strategies and more expertise in consultancy as well as systems implementation capabilities across a raft of solutions areas. The main solution areas are renewable energy, facilities energy management, sustainable data centres, environmental compliance, sustainability performance management, low carbon transport, smart grid, smart meters and climate change IT services. A lot of these services have been launched by IT firms in the last year to keep up with customers’ energy and environment strategies.

The four market leaders each have a broad portfolio of offerings, strong sustainability consulting skills and active marketing of corporate sustainability performance. Other companies, such as Capgemini, CSC, Fujitsu, Steria and TCS, have success based on one or two market segments, but are expanding their offerings. HP, IBM, Wipro and Orange score highly on corporate sustainability.

Customers’ spending priorities for the next two years reflect a strong bias to energy management - 100% of the panel cited facility energy management and enterprise energy and carbon management as investment areas. A total of 87% listed smart meters and energy efficient sustainable data centres as budgeted initiatives in 2012 and 2013.

 

The first point that strike me is that there is increasingly a broad range of solutions being delivered, which seems to be a successful strategy for the market leaders even though priorities for most customers are still quite narrow. The broader demands support what I’ve been saying in recent months, though, that green/sustainable IT is now becoming included, if not integrated, in corporate sustainability strategies, rather than the result of discrete initiatives from one or more separate departments.

But it’s also clear that the market is still in its early stages. No IT services firm is going to make big bucks soon from this market and there will be a lot of hand holding of customers along the way. Good consultancy expertise is a must-have, which could be good news for small sustainability consultancies looking to sell out. It will also mean sustained investment from the technology companies. David Metcalfe, Verdantix CEO, makes the point: “For IT services firms, success in this market will require unrelenting commitment, entrepreneurial flexibility and a friendly CFO with a bag of cash to keep funding innovation.”

O2 launches its blueprint for sustainability

O₂ has set out a three year sustainability plan which, among other things, aims to save four million tonnes of carbon emissions. There are three key goals to the Think Big Blueprint, with 40 individual commitments, aimed at building a more sustainable future for the company’s customers, employees and suppliers.

The plan has three core objectives:

• For the planet - a plan to deliver carbon reductions for customers that are ten times greater than the impact of O₂’s network. The specifics include a promises to halve the emissions of its network, to tackle the environmental impact of phone charging (by no longer providing chargers as standard with new phones) and also a plan to ensure that all the company’s major suppliers take measures to reduce their impact on the environment.

• For customers - an undertaking to help ten million people live in easier and more sustainable ways through O₂’s products and services. The pledge includes a promise to save the NHS over one million hours of health-care staff time, a commitment to save UK households over 300,000 tonnes of carbon, and enabling flexible working solutions which will save UK businesses 160,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

• For people – commitments including a promise to help over 600,000 young people develop skills, funding to support 5,000 young people to lead community projects and the creation of 4,000 high quality work experience opportunities.

O₂’s Chief Executive, Ronan Dunne, said: “As a leading provider of digital services with in excess of 22 million customers, we are uniquely positioned to use the scale of our business and our understanding of technology, to make sustainable living a reality. This blueprint is not simply a ‘nice to have’. In an era of heightened economic and social concern, it’s an essential part of our long term business strategy that will enable us to unlock sustainable growth and encourage positive environmental change.”

 

My natural state is one of cynicism, so my first reaction was to question how much of this was real action by O₂ and how much was just the indirect impact of its existing business. But it seems that the Think Big Blueprint is the result of a year long consultation process overseen by Jonathon Porritt’s Forum for the Future. Discussions also involved employees, consumers, suppliers and charities and NGOs. Forum for the Future will  monitor, evaluate and report back on progress against each of the 40 commitments contained in the plan.

Jonathon Porritt said: “We have been struck by the integrity of their approach that has led to significant progress in a number of areas, for example O₂ Recycle becoming the third biggest recycling scheme in UK.”

Also, the fact that the company has stopped dishing out chargers as standard with new phones does it for me. The company has a history in this area. O₂ launched its own energy efficient charger with inter-changeable leads, making it compatible with most leading brands of mobile phones, back in 2008.

Not only that, a year ago I reported comments from Steve Alder, General Manager Devices at O₂, criticising the different, and incompatible, standards for a universal charger that emerged from the EU and the ITU-T. To quote from Alder: “At both Telefónica and O₂ in the UK our vision is simple. We want to take chargers out of boxes, full stop. This will reduce packaging, transport costs and ultimately waste being sent to landfill. To achieve this we need the industry to get to one single standard and we strongly believe that standard should be capable of charging all types of mobile phone.”

It’s good to hear an ICT company putting across its sustainability views loudly and clearly in this way, as well as taking matters into its own hands.

More power management in Windows 8

According to a Microsoft blog last week, power management is getting a lot of focus in the next version of Windows, described as ‘an area of significant innovation for Windows 8 PCs’. Current levels of power management will continue to be available on x86-based PCs and there has also been work done on improving the power consumption of existing desktop apps. But there will also be new apps written to WinRT (Windows RunTime – Microsoft’s new programming model) that run on a new generation of hardware that supports new power management capabilities.

WinRT is behind the new Metro-style apps - full screen apps tailored to users', devices, touch interaction and the Windows user interface. Windows 8 is aimed at crossing both the mobile and desktop worlds through the Metro interface, with apps optimised for the environment.

As the blog points out, one new aspect of power management is to reduce the power usage of running apps. Applications inevitably impact power consumption through their use of CPU, memory and disk, so Windows 8 has adopted the rule, applicable to the large majority of Metro style apps, that if an application is not on screen then it should not impact the battery life. It doesn’t preclude multi-tasking, but does take into account modern hardware capabilities, networking demands, form factors and so on. So there will be exceptions, but in general an application will do most of its work while you actively interact with it.

When an app is not in the foreground it will either be suspended completely, or use limited resources based on a set of common background capabilities (like copying files), which the app can access. For example, it won’t get suspended if you start a copy job and then do something else while it completes in the background.

Suspension of inactive apps only applies to Metro style apps, and even then the most common tasks needed to be done in the background are enabled, including:

• Playing music
• Downloading a file from or uploading it to a website
• Keeping live tiles alive with fresh content
• Printing
• Receiving a VoIP call
• Receiving an instant message
• Receiving an email
• Sharing content (like uploading photos to Facebook)
• Synchronizing content with a tethered device (like syncing photos)

Otherwise, after you launch an app and then switch away from it the operating system suspends it. It means that the app is not using the CPU, so it’s possible for the CPU to drop into a lower power state, an essential part of power saving. The app can be instantly resumed from the suspended state, taking you back to where you left off. It means that switching between apps is faster than was previously possible in Windows, and also that it doesn’t matter how many apps are running.

 

There’s clearly a lot of thought going into Windows power management (and the above is a summary of one part) – Microsoft describes it as an area of Windows that has been ‘reimagined for new scenarios’. Those new scenarios include the variety of devices that the operating system will run on, including more mobile, battery-dependent devices, hence the need to save power.

In fact the increasing use of mobile devices and their need to minimise battery use is a driver for greater PC power management in general. Different chips, alternative architectures and software that makes effective use of multi-core processing are all crossing over from mobile devices to mainstream computing. Making the applications more power-aware is going to be an essential part of PC desktop power management in the future.

Google heads the Greenpeace Cool IT Leaderboard

Greenpeace has released the latest in its occasional series of Cool IT Leaderboard rankings, based on an evaluation of IT vendors’ green performance. Of the 21 companies included in the list, Google comes out on top, with a score of 53 (out of a possible 100) mainly as a result of its support of stronger US clean energy policy and the strengthening of the EU’s current 20% greenhouse gas target of 30% by 2020. Cisco is in second place, with a score of 49, with Ericsson and Fujitsu close behind with 48.

The scoring is based on three criteria:

• Efforts to offer economy-wide technological climate solutions that contribute to global greenhouse gas reductions. (40 points out of 100)

• Initiatives to reduce their own energy impact/global warming emissions. (25/100)

• Active engagement in political advocacy and support for science-based climate and energy policies. (35/100)

Fujitsu, Ericsson and Cisco scored highly for driving ICT solutions and providing comprehensive case studies. Global telecommunications operators such as Vodafone and NTT also scored relatively well in solutions leadership.

IBM led the energy impact rankings, followed by Alcatel-Lucent, with a chasing group of Cisco Google, Dell and Wipro.

Softbank was way out in the lead for advocacy, scoring 33 points out of a possible 35, followed by Google, 10 points behind and Vodafone 10 points behind that. Most of the companies scored less than 10 in this area. Bottom of this list was Oracle (0), IBM (-4), NTT (-5) and NEC (-10). The negative scores are the result of penalty points for ‘negative lobbying’. In the case of IBM, for example, Greenpeace cites the company for ‘failing to distinguish itself from the views and positions of the trade association BusinessEurope. IBM is a member of this trade association, which has been leading efforts to block the EU’s proposed greenhouse gas reduction target of 30% by 2020.’

It’s difficult to track changes over time for specific companies, because the scoring can vary (or, as some would say, Greenpeace moves the goalposts) and the companies included also change. (Even the publication is a bit erratic – the last two lists published were in December 2010 and April 2010).

This time round six telecommunications companies were added: AT&T, Telefónica, Vodafone, Softbank, Alcatel-Lucent, and NTT. Apple and Facebook have not been included this time. Greenpeace said that Apple was excluded because its efforts do not meet the Leaderboard criteria. ‘It has  not demonstrated leadership or elected to pursue market opportunities to drive IT energy solutions that many of its competitors have, despite record profits and large cash reserves.’  Facebook has previously been omitted for similar reasons, but will be included in next Leaderboard.

For the record, the average score dropped by 8 points since the last Leaderboard, from 39 out of a hundred down to 31. Cisco saw the biggest drop in score, down 21 points, although Dell, HP and IBM also saw double-digit points drops. Intel, Nokia, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba were in the rankings last time but not there this time round – not sure why.

 

These rankings are mainly interesting because of the insight they give into what the companies are doing (or not doing) now. It’s about recent actions rather than accumulated achievements, which is why companies come and go and scores fluctuate. Add to that the reassessments of the ranking criteria and Greenpeace is clearly trying hard to keep the industry on its toes, and that’s as it should be.

What I like about the Leaderboard is its outward-looking approach. It puts a lot of store in advocacy and offering solutions for a greener economy. That’s the important role of the IT sector, which stands to gain from the increased opportunities anyway.

Environmentally-friendly external hard drive solution - BytePac

Using delivery packaging as part of equipment casing is not entirely new. At the CeBIT 2011 trade show in Hannover Asus showed a box used for delivering a motherboard which could be turned into a PC case. It was designed to (temporarily) hold the board plus the other hardware for a working PC, with punch-out holes for ventilation and connectors.

German company Convar has extended the idea with BytePac, which it describes as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to external hard drives. The company supplies a cardboard box and connectors so that a hard drive, either 2.5” or 3.5”, can be housed and used in the box. The BytePac box is made of corrugated cardboard to protect the drive, but they can also be used as an archiving system, so that each hard drive can be extracted and used when needed.

 

BytePac is easy to use, with a modular design, flexible cabling and no fixed electronic components. All it requires is to put a hard drive into the box and connect it up with the cables supplied. It just needs the one connector kit, which can be used with whichever hard drive is in use. When the drive is not being used the connectors can be removed and the drive stored on a bookshelf.

The advantage is that the product generates no additional packaging material or electronic waste, both of which you would get with alternative external hard disk solutions. A conventional external hard drive casing is usually made of plastic, with all the manufacturing and disposal impact that has. BytePacs are made from renewable primary products in Europe, keeping the environmental impact to a minimum. And when the product’s life cycle is over it can be disposed of by composting, or preferably by being recycled again as waste paper.

BytePac is available across Europe via the company’s website and from Amazon. There are various permutations of what is supplied and it can include the hard drive itself. Without the drive the basic BytePac kit, with three boxes and the drive connector kit, costs just under £30 from Amazon.

 

The company describes BytePac as simple, practical, environmentally-friendly and affordable. It’s certainly that. But it is very basic. You may need to get your own hard disk, plus any software for automatic back-up or similar sophistication.

For me the fly in the ointment is whether there is a broad market for the product. If you need multiple drives for storage then I suspect you might look for a better solution – although anything that relies on one large hard disk constantly spinning is less of a green alternative. And does the home user need multiple drives? My guess is that this is primarily a small business product, particularly suitable for its home market in Germany.

Having said that, given the problems I’ve had with off-the-shelf back-up storage solutions, the idea of simply plugging a drive into an environmentally-sound casing is very attractive. The trouble is I only need one box.

Intel leads the US green power purchasers - again

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released its latest ranking of the top green power purchasers in the US. The list is once again led by Intel, with over 2.5 billion kWh of green electricity purchased, the same as a year ago, accounting for 88% of the company’s total electricity use.

Other ICT companies seem to be slipping down the rankings, though. In the top 50, Cisco was down from 11th to 15th place with 268m kWh purchased – slightly down on last year, Sprint was up to 26th place, (176m kWh – 5% of power used), Dell down to 43rd (114m kWh – 28%) and Google 47th (103m kWh, 5%). Google is a new entrant to the top 50, whilst Motorola has dropped out.

The green power rankings are based on on-site generation, purchasing green power from utilities, and buying renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). I’m not a fan of RECs. Although they encourage the development of renewable energy, they tend to distort the market – companies pay for the extra cost of renewable generation, rather than for the power itself. But then again, with green power in short supply there wouldn’t be enough to go round anyway.

But the use of RECs explains why Dell used to purchase 129% of its power from green sources, according to these EPA rankings. In fact the EPA has produced a long list of companies that have 100% (or more) green power.

Perhaps more interesting, and a better reflection of the efforts to be green, is the EPA’s ranking of the top 20 companies in terms of the power they generate on-site. The highest-placed IT company is Adobe Systems, which generates 11.6m kWh of electricity on site from biogas. That’s 17% of its total power needs. Google purchases almost as much – 10.7m kWh, from biogas and solar, although it accounts for less than 1% of the power the company uses.

Power Assure and Raritan offer integrated data centre power monitoring

US companies Power Assure and Raritan have come together to offer an integrated data centre power monitoring and analytics solution. The solution combines Power Assure’s cloud-based EM/4 Energy Management software and Raritan's intelligent power monitoring products. It’s apparently the only cloud-based Data Centre Energy Management solution allowing management across multiple data centres.

It works by Power Assure’s EM/4 software collecting power usage and temperature data from Raritan’s branch circuit monitoring product and intelligent rack power distribution units. Power Assure’s energy management solution turns it into useful information that data centre managers can analyse for better decision making.  According to the companies, it means that data centre managers can use power resources more efficiently, improve uptime and reliability, reduce capital expenditures and save on operating expenses, and provide accurate PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) metrics and drive green data centre initiatives.

The overall aim is to help users manage their data centres more efficiently and reduce costs, compared with ‘alternative approaches that are more expensive and less reliable’.

 

It’s another coming together in the fragmented data centre energy management market. This is a green ICT sector awash with various technologies and solutions, from long-established vendors and new start-ups, so consolidation through partnerships and acquisitions is inevitable.

It looks like consolidation may be gathering pace, though. Just last month I reported that Schneider Electric had acquired Viridity. In fact it was ‘a strategic technology acquisition of the Viridity EnergyCenter 2.0 platform’ – primarily the software assets and staff. Despite my comments at the time, rumour has it that although Viridity has an innovative product - the software identifies equipment in use, records utilisation and uses reference tables to assess energy use – company sales had not matched expectations.

It may be that business pressures in the current economic climate are adding to consolidation pressures and starting to speed up the process. We shall see.

Going modular: opportunities to improve energy efficiency in the data centre

A guest post from David Palmer-Stevens, Systems Integration Manager, EMEA at Panduit.

All the way from design to operations, 2012 will be a challenging year for the data centre industry. The main challenge stems from the ever-increasing availability of cloud computing services. With its seductive pricing model, CFOs will be asking why their internal IT resources cost more to run than renting cloud services. Interestingly, the steps that can be taken to compete with cloud services push traditional data centres into much greater energy efficiency.

Going modular is the key to efficiency. However, the first step in this game of survival is to consolidate everything possible, using virtualisation as an effective way to combine servers. Consolidation must be deployed in modules, building up and out, and using the form of containment that best fits the environment.

Once the surplus IT equipment has been shed, the next step is to review the construction model in the data centre, focusing on power and cooling systems. Using Hot Aisle or Cold Aisle can achieve up to a 23% reduction in cooling by keeping the cooling closely coupled to the IT load. This allows the cooling system to reduce its own output alongside low periods in IT use. Using variable torque motors can also save 50% of the electricity for a 20% drop in load.

Internal IT staff must furthermore design in the kind of flexibility and scalability inherent in cloud deployments within their own data centres, in order to compete with external cloud suppliers. But since spare capacity is wasteful - in the same way that over-provisioning is wasteful in traditional data centres - the answer is modular construction. Modular data centres - pre-fabricated date centre units that are easily portable and scalable - can offer flexible expansion options including variable cooling and power generation options. A modular construction keeps the use of resources to a minimum while allowing the same dynamic load response delivered by cloud services.

There are aspects of cloud services that can bring benefits to internal IT support, since they offer staff a useful way to instantly provision new services. Throw out the old provisioning process which, in some market sectors, can take up to 90 days from service request to service delivery, and replace it with services from the cloud. The instant availability means IT staff can meet business requirements while gaining time to construct additional modules. Using containment, these modules can run in parallel with the external service, before switching over to being run by the business.

To deliver cloud services and be affordable in the future low provisioning costs are essential. Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is a key tool now gaining acceptance in the market for bringing management and automation to the physical deployment and environment of IT equipment. The old adage ‘you cannot manage what you cannot see’ very much applies to the data centre’s physical connectivity, power distribution and cooling efficiency, including airflow and humidity. Traditional data centres have relied on periodic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis to gauge cooling efficiencies. The deployment of DCIM means dynamic CFD analysis can take place in real time, providing more information on how the data centre performs over time.

This ability to gauge trends and patterns across both IT demand and power consumption will provide a firmer overview of how the company is performing in terms of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and overall business benefit. The aim is to reach a PUE of close to 1.0, with higher figures indicating less energy efficiency. Traditional data centre rooms or buildings can have a PUE of 2.0 or more. HP claims their modular EcoPOD data centres, which use mostly external air for cooling, can attain a PUE of 1.2 depending on external air temperature.

Consolidation of traditional server rooms and use of modular data centre construction can significantly streamline IT infrastructure while increasing efficiency and therefore energy consumption. The move to modular data centres is not only cost effective but, fortunately, can be implemented quickly, with the modular design optimal for fast deployment and construction. And time is of the essence if traditional data centres are to keep up with the fast-paced competition offered by cloud computing services.

Smart meter implementation in the UK no longer universal?

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, the UK government is drawing up plans to allow people to reject smart meters. Previously the five-year implementation plan, due to start in 2014, did not allow for any such individual requests.

It’s not exactly clear what’s been said. Some news outlets are reporting that energy minister Charles Hendry, said “We believe people will benefit from having smart meters. But we will not make them obligatory”, but I don’t know where this comment came from. Hendry did write a letter to the Daily Mail on January 20th (it seems that that newspaper is now an official communications channel for UK government) which referred to the Public Accounts Committee’s reservations about the roll out and also said that ‘consumer protection is at the core of the programme and we’ve been consulting consumer groups over the past year’.

Anyway, in response to the coverage Mark England, CEO at smart grid and metering technology company Sentec, made the following comment:

“The news that smart meters will no longer be compulsory shows that more work is needed to educate consumers about the benefits they can deliver. Although the concept of half-hourly data may seem to threaten privacy, in reality this granularity is needed to enable smart decisions, for example time-shifting certain activities to reduce bills or to manage capacity on transmission and distribution networks. It certainly won’t be possible to effectively compare different tariffs and suppliers without this detailed data.  As prices rise, so too will the importance of smart meters and the behaviour change they can inspire. Consumers who opt out may lose the opportunity to benefit from favourable tariffs and other incentives from energy suppliers, which will become more important to households as energy bills increase.”

 

Whilst I agree with his comments, the problem is that much of these benefits won’t really be available until we have smart grids. And whilst in the UK we have a fixed programme for meter introduction, smart grids are still a long way off. So at the moment there are limited benefits to a costly plan to introduce meters that some see as detrimental to health and privacy.

But spare a thought for the companies that have been working hard to put together plans for the ICT infrastructure to support the UK-wide implementation. They are just approaching the tender phase but now must be wondering just how many meters they will actually be supporting.

Energy management system for new Viking Line ferry

Switzerland-based power and automation technologies company ABB is to provide an energy management system for what is described as one of the world’s most environmentally-friendly cruise ferries. The ship, which is being built at the STX Yard in Turku, Finland, is due to be delivered to Viking Line in 2013. It will have the capacity to carry 2,800 passengers and will run between Turku and Stockholm in Sweden.

The new ferry will be powered by liquefied natural gas, a first for a passenger vessel of this size. The fuel will ‘have extremely low emissions and virtually zero marine emissions’.

What ABB brings is its energy management system for marine applications software – EMMA – to help manage energy-related processes, practices and decisions on the ferry. The EMMA software compares and analyses the historical and current operational data of the vessel, then calculates and advises on areas for improvement. It also includes an energy management tool that models energy consumption and calculates optimal operating conditions.

EMMA is based on ABB’s process automation software for energy management, which already has more than 60 process industry customers.

 

It’s a good example of how technology can contribute to reducing the energy use and emissions across a business. In the case of the ferry, the fuel is the main factor in reducing emissions, but the ABB technology will be able to maximise those savings.

This is where the ICT focus should really be, rather than endlessly trying to reduce emissions from data centres. That’s only really useful for internet/IT services companies who have little business outside these facilities.

Remember, ICT is responsible for 2-3% of global CO2 emissions (depending on which figures you believe). So if we reduce ICT’s emissions by 50%, it will only make a difference of 1-2% to the global figure. But the Smart 2020 report (and other similar research) has found that the effective use of ICT could help reduce global emissions by as much as 15%. That’s where the focus should be, but it’s not an area that is talked about much by the ICT companies themselves. So I don’t get to report on it much.

Google and IBM receive green data centre recognition

Both IBM and Google received recognition in January for the energy efficiency and energy management of their data centres:

IBM: At the beginning of the month the European Commission (EC) recognised 27 IBM data centres across Europe as conforming to the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency. That covers over 70% of IBM's (strategic) outsourcing data centres in 15 European countries - apparently the largest portfolio of data centres from a single company to receive the recognition (although how many companies have that many data centres across Europe? – ed).

The assessment is made against a set of best practices, including the use of energy efficient hardware, installing free cooling and cold aisle containment. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is one indicator and in May last year the Uptime Institute gave IBM data centres a rating of 1.65 for average power efficiency, compared to the industry average of 1.8.

Google: The search engine giant’s achievement has been in the US, where all the company’s owned and operated data centres have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification. The company claims to be the first major Internet services company to gain this certification for all of its US data centres. (Do other ‘major’ internet services companies limit such actions to the US? – ed)

The ISO 14000 family addresses various aspects of environmental management and the first standard, ISO 14001, deals with the requirements for an environmental management system. OHSAS 18001 is the British Standards Institution (BSI) specification for Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Management Systems. It specifies the requirements for a management system to enable an organisation to control its OH&S risks and improve its performance.

Google says that it has looked to be certified ‘because we want to be the gold standard in environmental and workforce safety, and because we care about the communities where we live and work.’

 

Commendable actions from both companies. They both come with rather vague claims to market leadership, but we shouldn’t blame them for that. If they can get good PR from it (as they clearly have) then it is an additional reward for the effort.

The problem is that these sorts of initiatives do seem to be led by the major IT services/internet companies, and there aren’t that many of them. They set a good example, and given their size their green efforts do make a real and significant difference, but I don’t see a great deal of trickle-down to smaller IT services outfits.

I’ve always said that one of the most significant things that such companies can do is to be evangelists for green/sustainable ICT, pushing the industry as a whole to do better. I know they do get involved in cross-industry initiatives, but they could do a lot more.