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RackSpace’s customers ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 1, 2008
in Uncategorized and datacenter
. 1 Comment

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Photo Credit ignescent_infidel

Jon Brodkin wrote a piece in ComputerWorld UK about a survey of RackSpace’s customers which seems to suggest that they ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products. John goes on to extrapolate that they:

found some results suggesting businesses are losing interest in green technology.

There are a number of problems with this assumption. First off you have to realise that Rackspace don’t do co-lo. Rackspace only do managed hosting. So, if I am an IT manager I can’t put my equipment, no matter how energy-efficient, in a RackSpace Data Center, I have to use their equipment. What is not clear from the piece John wrote is what was the ‘premium’ the RackSpace customers were being asked to pay.

Again, if I am an IT manager, I can choose to buy, for example Dell’s PowerEdge™ Energy Smart 2950 III (SV22952), which is cheaper but slightly less powerful than their standard PowerEdge™ 2950 (SV22951). Realistically, the only reason I am going to do this is if it is going to save me money.

As James said previously - the wrong people are paying the electricity bill in companies currently (no pun):

IT doesn’t pay for its electricity. No, seriously, go to your FM manager or IT manager and ask who pays to power your IT properties. The vast majority of IT systems get a free ride on electricity bills, which is one reason its taken so long to fully consider IT carbon costs.

When that changes (and it will) watch IT managers suddenly become extremely interested in the energy ratings of their servers.

Going back to the RackSpace survey, fundamentally I think Rackspace are taking the wrong approach. What they should be doing is increasing prices to their customers across the board to reflect their own increased energy bill - except for those customers who chose to be hosted on energy efficient servers. If RackSpace took that route, suddenly you’d see a an about-face in the number of their customers who are apparently losing interest in green technology!!!

[Disclosure: I am co-founder a director of Cork Internet eXchange (CIX) an energy efficient data center based in Cork, Ireland. CIX charges all customers separately for their electricity usage.]

IBM reckons Green is where economic and ecological concerns converge

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 27, 2008
in Uncategorized and datacenter
. 0 Comments

I love this ad. It demonstrates that not only has IBM a sense of humour but also that they have the right story - today, with soaring energy prices, Green is where economic and ecological concerns converge.

Last year IBM announced Project Big Green. This was a commitment by IBM to re-direct $1 billion USD per annum across its businesses to increase energy efficiency! Serious money by anyone’s standards.

This isn’t just some philanthropic gesture on IBM’s part. By making this investment the company expects to save more than five billion kilowatt hours per year. IBM anticipates it will double the computing capacity in the eight million square feet of data center space which IBM operates within the next three years without increasing power consumption or its carbon footprint. In other words they expect to double their compute power, without adding data centers, nor increasing their carbon footprint!

This year, IBM have gone even further! As an extension of their project Big Green they have announced ‘modular data centers’ similar to Sun’s S20 product. They come in three sizes and IBM claims they are

designed to achieve the world’s highest ratings for energy leadership, as determined by the Green Grid, an industry group focused on advancing energy efficiency for data centers and business compute ecosystems.

I’d love to see comparable metrics between the S20 and IBMs modular data centers.

However, the take home message today is that IBM is committing serious resources to its Green project. Not because they care deeply for the planet (I’m sure they do) but because they care deeply about the bottom line and with increasing energy costs, there is now a sweet convergence between doing the right thing for the planet and for the shareholder!

Games consoles really are gas guzzlers and the PS3 is an SUV!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 11, 2008
in Uncategorized and hardware
. 4 Comments

PS3 Controller
Creative Commons License photo credit: DeclanTM

James had a post here a couple of weeks back asking “Are Games Consoles Really Gas Guzzlers?“. This was in response to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald where Greenpeace accused games console vendors of ignoring environmental concerns.

James correctly pointed out that the story was light on specifics - there was no data to support the assertion that the games consoles were power hungry.

Yesterday I spotted a Tweet from April Dunford where she said:

Sony Playstation 3 consumes five times more energy than a medium sized refrigerator – 10 times as much as the Wii. http://tinyurl.com/6ft8l5

Intrigued, I followed the link and sure enough the story seems to back GreenPeace’s assertion:

They found out that a medium sized refrigerator of about 12 cu. ft. volume (60 inches in height) will cost $50 a year while Sony Playstation 3 will cost $250 a year even if it is not in use and only turned on. Microsoft XBox came second behind Playstation 3.

The original research was carried out by Australian consumer group Choice. Choice is the largest consumer organization in Australia with over 200,000 subscribers.

Ouch! The PS3 consumes five times more power than a fridge even if not in use? Interestingly the Nintendo Wii only consumes one tenth the power of a PS3. Yet another reason to love the Wii!!!

The target demographic for games consoles are typically the younger generation who are idealistic and really clued into Green. If the console manufacturers really want to differentiate themselves they should get Energy Star certified. The first one who does will reap the rewards.

Carbon account, meet lifestreaming. Lifestreaming, meet carbon accounting!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 9, 2008
in Uncategorized, carbon accounting and social software
. 15 Comments

Some of the places I publish

I come from a Social Media background. I use blogs, Social Networks, Microblogs, Photo Sharing sites, Video Sharing sites, Livecasting apps, Social bookmarking sites etc. everyday. I generate a constant stream of updates about things happening in my life which can be followed via RSS or on my Friendfeed page (a feed aggregator) or on the individual sites.

Cool. Interesting enough I hear you say. So what? Well, lets just park that for a second.

Carbon accounting is rapidly coming down the line. Already we are seeing companies like BT and Verizon requiring lower carbon footprints from their suppliers. This is because carbon accounting will take supply chains into account.

Carbon accounting will be incredibly granular and will attempt to take everything into account in the life-cycle of goods and services. This will include electrical power usage, road mileage and air miles alongside expenses and financial returns.

To get buy-in from staff, reporting total power and energy usage will have to be made as simple as possible so that it doesn’t interfere with the natural flow of people’s work.

This is where lifestreaming applications come in. Encourage the people in your organisation to use applications like blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, et al. Then you can capture that output and route it through the carbon accounting software and ta da! carbon usage information accounted for.

Obviously it won’t be as easy as that, but if your employees are using Twitter, say, set up your company’s carbon account software with a Twitter account. Then instruct staff on how to message the software with what you are doing at any point in time i.e. “@bt-carbon-accounts - putting on the kettle for a cup of coffee” or “@ibm-carbon-accounts - hot today, setting the aircon to 19C”. This would also be especially useful for capturing the carbon footprint of people working from home.

IBM’s master inventor Andy Stanford-Clark has already done some work in this area. His house has a Twitter account and regularly sends updates like:

the phone is ringing (mobile)
electricity meter reading: 32100 KWH
outside lights turned off
outside lights turned on

etc. to Twitter automatically!

Will carbon accounting software and its requirement for constant inputs from all levels of business bring lifestreaming applications into the Enterprise 2.0 fold?

UPS Business Monitor shows business concerned for the environment

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 9, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

UPS Business Monitor on Environmental Issues

I was glancing through UPS’ Europe Business Monitor today - UPS have been publishing this annually since 1992.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is an Environment section in the Monitor where business leaders were asked Environment related questions. The questions, though softball, did demonstrate an acute awareness of environmental concerns and climate change issues. In fact, three quarters of those surveyed did not believe that environmental concerns are over-hyped or just a passing fad.

This is very hopeful and ties in well with what we have been saying here for a while. The biggest changes on the environmental front are coming from business, not government or the EU.

You can download PDFs of previous year’s Monitors here.

Don’t Read That, Read This. Hey Grumpy.

Published
by
monkchips
on May 12, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

grumpyOne of my favourite environmentally minded blogs is From The Grumpy Old Man. There is some great stuff in there, but Eddy is worried his readership is not picking up quickly enough. All I can say is, keep it up Eddy. The community will come.

Sample:

“I’ve seen somebody drinking O2 water the other day. Not only it had artificial kiwi and apple flavour but also extra oxygen added. According the ‘manufacturer’, it uses patented technology from Life Technologies, Inc. to put extra oxygen into ordinary water. The resulting beverage has 10 times more oxygen (72mg) as ordinary water and provides an extra boost of energy by increasing the amount of oxygen in your blood. What a load of crap!”

Grumpy by name…