GreenMonk: the blog - Page 22 of 100 - Green from the roots up, Sustainable from the top down

Open source, open data, climate, energy and collaboration

February 23, 2011 by Tom Raftery

James pointed me to a post yesterday about Transparency in energy usage – it made for interesting reading.

The article talks about the benefits of having open data in the energy arena. In this case, the post is specifically talking about the US Energy Information Administration‘s publishing of historical annual energy statistics for the entire US – included are data on total energy production, consumption, and trade; overviews of petroleum, natural gas, coal, electricity, nuclear energy, renewable energy, international energy, as well as financial and environmental indicators; and data unit conversion tables.

The data is downloadable in PDF, XLS and CSV formats, sliced and diced in any number of ways, or you can download it in its entirety. Amazing stuff.

By the way, if you don’t think open data can be made fascinating, you haven’t seen what Hans Rosling can do with the visualisation of statistics.

The article correctly points out though that the data, by itself, is not easily digestible. It is the combination of open data, along with the collaborative efforts of GOOD with hyperakt which makes this data far easier to digest.

And that’s key – we have seen the massive savings open source software has brought us (saving $60bn per annum, in direct costs). The other real benefits of open source though come from its crowd-sourced nature (rapid bug-fixing, security, mitigation of vendor collapse/product discontinuation, community, etc.).

Given the two recent controversies around climate science – a bit more crowd-sourcing of the data and methodologies in climate science should be welcomed by anyone seeking to add to climate science’s credibility.

With that in mind, it is great to see the Climate Code Foundation set up. The Climate Code Foundation say their goals are to promote public understanding of climate science:

by increasing the visibility and clarity of the software used in climate science, and by encouraging climate scientists to do the same
by encouraging good software development and management practices among climate scientists and
by encouraging the publication of climate science software as open source

The more openness and transparency there is in climate science (and every other science but especially climate science), the better for everyone (except perhaps the Lord Moncktons of the world).

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SAP’s new NetWeaver 7.3 has a nice energy efficiency story

February 21, 2011 by Tom Raftery

If, like me, you have been using technology for a while now, you will be used to the constant release-by-release bloating of software. The first time I installed Excel it was version 2.2 and at the time it fit comfortable on a 1.4mb 3.5″ floppy disk – remember floppy disks?

In a pleasant bucking of that trend, SAP’s Holger Faulhaber told me in a recent call, that the latest version of their NetWeaver platform (v. 7.3) is a much leaner beast! While it is unlikely to fit on a floppy disk, it does have some significant performance wins, along with the simplified architecture and the functionality improvements you’d expect from an upgrade.

One of the main reasons for the improvements are SAP’s dropping of its two-stack approach in favour of a single Java stack for NetWeaver 7.3. This significantly reduces the amount of hardware which needs to be deployed and also because messages only need to be stored once, compared to 3-7 times previously, you get even more energy savings.

To demonstrate this, SAP carried out testing of their new NetWeaver Platform using the SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS).

SAP defined a medium-sized landscape as being 37,500 SAPS for a NetWeaver Process Integration (PI) customer. Based on that they found that the savings potential for PI is in the region of:
– 60% less energy consumption or around 18,000 kWh/yr
– 16 tons of CO2 savings per landscape/year and
– ?6.5k saving potential per landscape/year

The numbers for NetWeaver Portal 7.3 are for an SAP defined medium sized landscape of 30,000 SAPS. In that case, you see a savings potential of:
– 30% less energy consumption, 13,000 kWh/yr
– 6.5 tons od CO2 savings per landscape/yr and
– ?2.6k saving potential/yr

While for NetWeaver Business Process Management 7.3 the potential savings for a 30,000 SAPS medium sized customer are:
– 57% less energy consumption, 24,000kWh/yr
– 12 tons of CO2 savings per landscape/yr and
– ?6k saving potential per landscape/yr

The new software was tested on identical hardware to the previous version to rule out any efficiency gains from improved hardware according to Holger. He went on to mention that SAPs Quick Sizer [PDF] tool to help customers design their SAP landscape – has been updated for 7.3 so you don’t overspec your SAP installation.

“One of the main learning for SAP from this exercise is that I/O is expensive. For current tasks, it is nearly 3 times more expensive than utilising the CPU”, according to Holger. “Because of this we are now telling developers not write to locks, don’t write to the db – dropping locks increases performance” he continued. It will be interesting to see if SAP can move developers towards writing more energy efficient code.

This is a big potential win for SAP customers. Now they can gain significant performance and energy gains with a simple software upgrade, as opposed to having to buy any new hardware.It’d be great to see more companies adopting this type of approach to software development.

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Friday Green Numbers round-up for Feb 18th 2011

February 18, 2011 by Tom Raftery

And here is a round-up of this week’s Green numbers…

How La Poste Saves $7 Million a Year In IT Energy Costs

France’s La Poste manages 180,000 PCs that sat mostly idle, yet still used as much electricity as if they were fully engaged in a difficult computing problem.

“The AVOB solution does what other solutions do by automatically putting the PC into low energy mode when inactive after a specified amount of time,” Charpentier explained. “That saved La Poste 50 percent on average. What AVOB does differently is to also automatically adapt power consumption of the PC depending on the task to save an additional 10 to 20 percent on the …
Joule on Pace to Produce Solar Fuels at Productivities Far Exceeding Those of All Known Biofuel Processes

Joule Unlimited, pioneer of Liquid Fuel from the Sun?, today supported the high-productivity potential of its production process with the publication of a detailed analysis and model of its breakthrough solar-to-fuels platform.

Published by Photosynthesis Research, the peer-reviewed article examines Joule?s critical advances in solar capture and conversion, direct product synthesis and continuous product secretion, which collectively form a platform for renewable fuel and chemical production with yields up to 50X greater than the maximum potential of any process requiring biomass. In addition, the analysis counters prior assumptions about …
Waste Management Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2010 Earnings

Waste Management, announced financial results for its fourth quarter and for the year ended December 31, 2010. Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2010 were $3.19 billion compared with $3.01 billion for the same 2009 period. Net income for the quarter was $281 million, or $0.59 per diluted share, compared with $315 million, or $0.64 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2009. The Company noted several items that impacted results in the 2010 and 2009 fourth quarters. Excluding these items, net income would have been $287 million, or $0.60 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2010 compared with $257 million, or $0.52 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2009, an increase in earnings per diluted share of over 15%.

For the full year 2010, the Company reported revenues of $12.52 billion compared with $11.79 billion for 2009. Earnings per diluted share were $1.98 for the full year 2010 compared with …
Exxon, Shell Both Essentially Admit Peak Oil Is Upon Us – Or Will Be Soon

Two today on peak oil and how the big oil companies are finally publicly (if quietly) coming around to what peak oil researchers have been saying for a while: It’s here, or will be shortly.

First, Wall Street Journal highlights how ExxonMobil is having a hard time finding new oil and has had a hard time for a while now. For the past 10 years for every 100 barrels it’s extracted it’s only been able to find 95 more. Natural gas exploration on the other hand has been very successful–enter, fracking.

Second, Raw Story sums up a report by Shell that at best …
Climate change doubled likelihood of devastating UK floods of 2000

Researchers have for the first time quantified the part climate change played in increasing the risk of a severe flood

Global warming made the floods that devastated England and Wales in the autumn of 2000, costing ?3.5bn, between two and three times more likely to happen, new research has found. This is the first time scientists have quantified the role of human-induced climate change in increasing the risk of a serious flood and represents a major development in climate science.

“It shows climate change is acting here and now to load the dice towards more extreme weather,” said Myles Allen of Oxford University, who led the work, which he started after his own home was…
Florida governor slams brakes on high-speed rail – rejects $2.4 billion in government funds

Florida’s Tea Party-backed Governor Rick Scott on Wednesday rejected $2.4 billion in government funds to build a high-speed passenger rail line, prompting a sharp rebuke from Washington as political tensions grew over the federal budget deficit.

At a news conference in the state capital, Scott strongly criticized President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2012 unveiled on Monday and said federal grants earmarked for Florida to begin work on a high-speed rail link between Tampa and Orlando would be turned down.
Soaking Up the Sun to Squeeze Bills to Zero – Zero-Net Energy office building in Colorado

The west-facing windows by Jim Duffield?s desk started automatically tinting blue at 2:50 p.m. on a recent Friday as the midwinter sun settled low over the Rocky Mountain foothills.

Around his plant-strewn work cubicle, low whirring air sounds emanated from speakers in the floor, meant to mimic the whoosh of conventional heating and air-conditioning systems, neither of which his 222,000-square-foot office building has, or needs, even here at 5,300 feet elevation. The generic white noise of pretend ductwork is purely for background and workplace psychology ? managers found that workers needed something more than silence.

Meanwhile, the photovoltaic roof array was…
Soladigm Closes $40M for Its First Smart Window Factory

Windows that can be tinted on demand could be a promising way to cut energy costs, but technology to control the amount of light and heat that pass through windows isn?t common. Soladigm hopes to change that and has just lined up an additional $10 million in equity financing to bring a Series C round to a total of $40 million, the company said Tuesday.

Soladigm plans to use some of the money for its first factory, which will cost about $130 million, be located in Mississippi, and be set to start shipping its electrochromic windows in the first quarter of …
Would you buy a $40 light bulb?

Maybe you should.

This week, Philips Lighting said that its AmbientLED 12.5 watt bulb ? which, just to confuse you, is also sold under the Philips EnduraLED brand ? has qualified for a EPA?s Energy Star rating. That means that it?s an efficient and, quite possibly cost-effective alternative to the 60-watt bulb, even with a $39.97 list price at Home Depot.

Here?s how the math works, at least according to Philips …

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Green bits and bytes for Feb 17th 2011

February 17, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

Greenstone Carbon Management, a UK based carbon solutions company, has announced that it will be exhibiting at the GreenPort Logistics and Energy for Green Ports conferences, held in Venice during the 23rd and 24th February 2011. Greenstone will be showcasing their Acco2unt carbon management software can help organisations in the marine sector.
Martifer Solar has been chosen by The Hertz Corporation to install 2.48MW of solar PV at 14 locations across the US. The 2.48 MW system will supply enough energy to power approximately 300 homes per year and will offset the CO2 emissions of 271,009 gallons of consumed gasoline annually.
The Global Biofuels Center recently ranked the top 25 countries in terms of capacity for both biodiesel and ethanol. The US and Brazil account for the majority of biofuels operating capacity in the world.
In what must be ironic timing given Vodafone’s shutting down of the mobile phone network during the uprising in Egypt, the Vodafone Foundation has announced that it is deepening its partnership with disaster relief agency T?l?coms sans Fronti?res (TSF) to help bring emergency mobile communications to disaster zones.
Under the three-year partnership, the Vodafone Foundation will give the agency financial support of ?1 million towards its core costs. Vodafone will also be on-hand to provide TSF with innovative mobile equipment for use in emergency situations alongside technical expertise from its employees.

Vodafone has sealed the partnership by designing and trialling a portable mobile network that could help relief workers to reach victims more quickly.
RSB Funds and Martifer Solar have come together to offer public entities such as municipalities and special districts in the US the opportunity to obtain solar through a third party ownership model. This has been made possible by the Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 and in this case the benefits provided by the Act will be shared with the Host in the form of lower power costs.
Social impact gaming indie developer Red Redemption announces that the global English language edition of their PC game Fate of the World is now scheduled for release on Monday February 28, 2011. Fate of the World is a global strategy game covering the next two centuries, from 2020 to 2200, in which the player must find a way to protect Earth’s ever-depleting resources and climate whilst reconciling the needs of a growing world population who demand more food, power, and living space.
There will be a special US presentation with the NOAA in Ashville North Carolina, February 24 before a panel of distinguished Climate Change scientists including Dr. Otis Brown – Director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center who states “The use of real data and models provides an excellent introduction to the complexities of balancing global energy needs with available resources.”

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Sentilla thinks of data centers, as data factories!

February 17, 2011 by Tom Raftery

If you have been following this blog, you’ll know I have been profiling Data Center efficiency companies over the last few weeks. This week I take a look at Sentilla.

I talked to Sentilla’s CTO and co-founder, Joe Polastre, the other day and Joe told me that Sentilla came out of Berkeley where they had been looking at data analytics problems around large, potentially incomplete or inaccurate, streaming datasets. The challenge was how to turn that into a complete picture of what’s going on so people could make business decisions.

Sentilla takes an industrial manufacturing approach to Data Centers – in manufacturing you have power going in one side, and products and (often) waste heat coming out the other. In the same way in data centers you have power going in one side and coming out the other side you have the product (compute cycles) and waste heat. To optimise your data center you need to get the maximum data/compute (product) output with the minimum power in and the least waste heat generated. Sentilla thinks of data centers, as data factories!

Unlike most of the data center people I have talked to, Sentilla don’t talk so much about energy savings. Instead they emphasise maximising performance – getting the most out of your existing data centers, your existing storage, your existing servers, your existing power supply. By far the greatest saving from deploying Sentilla, Joe claimed, is not from the energy savings. That pales in comparison to the capital deferment savings gained from being able to delay the building of extra data center facilities by however many years, he said.

So how does Sentilla help?

Well Sentilla analyses the energy profile of every asset in the data center, whether metered or not, and makes recommendations to improve the planning and management of data center operations. I highlighted the “whether metered or not” bit because this is an important differentiator for Sentilla – they have developed and patented what they call “virtual meters”. These are algorithms which look at the work that a device is doing, and based on models which Sentilla have built up, and measurements they have done, as well as some benchmarks which are out there, Sentilla computes how much power is being used by that equipment.

The reason this is so important is because the most inefficient equipment in the data center is not the new stuff (which is likely to already be metered) but the legacy devices. These are the ones which need to be most carefully managed, and the ones where the greatest performance gains for the data center can be made. And because Sentilla can pull usage information from management databases like Tivoli, it means the Sentilla doesn’t need to poll every piece of equipment in the data center (with the increased network traffic and data that would generate).

Also, because Sentilla has its virtual meters, it is a software-only product and can therefore be rolled out very quickly.

The other nice feature Sentilla has is that it can identify the energy utilisation of virtualised servers. This is important because with the increasing ease of deployment of virtual servers, under-utilised VM’s and VM clutter are starting to become issues for data centers. VM clutter isn’t just an issue for energy reasons – there are also implications for software licensing, maintenance and SLA requirements.

I asked Joe about whether Sentilla is a SaaS product and he said that while they have a SaaS version of the product, so far most of Sentilla’s clients prefer to keep their data in-house and they haven’t gone for the SaaS option.

Finally I asked about pricing and Joe said that Sentilla is priced on a subscription basis and, apparently, it is priced such that for any modest sized data center, for every $1 you put into Sentilla, you get $2 back. Or put another way, Joe said, deploying Sentilla will generally mean that you reclaim around 18-20% of your power capacity.

Disclosure: Sentilla are a client (but this post is not part of their client engagement)

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The secret to following lots of people on Twitter

February 16, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Continuing my series social media savvy for sustainability, I wrote a post on how to follow large numbers of people on Twitter – this is important to ensure you you get the most up-to-date information on your areas of interest, as quickly as possible:

Twitter is a fantastic tool for disseminating information, and the obvious corollary of that is that Twitter is a superb app for consuming information as well – depending on how you use it.

What is the best way to make sure you get the most information out of Twitter? Follow lots of relevant, interesting people!

It sounds obvious (if you aren’t following people, you won’t see their posts) but I see lots of people on Twitter who are following 100 people or less. Many of those 100 will be friends and family, others will be infrequent posters so out of 100 accounts, you are lucky if 20 are regular sources of good information.

Now, what if you increase the number of people you follow to 200? Or 2,000 (I’m currently following 2778)? Well then, the number of friends/family type accounts you’re following is unlikely to increase proportionally, so as long as you chose the people to follow wisely, you will vastly increase the amount of interesting news you will be receiving from Twitter.

Now, I often hear people say they have difficulty keeping up with the number of people they are following and asking me how I follow over 2,000. The simple answer is I don’t try to keep up with all the people I follow! I dip in and out of Twitter and if the people I follow happen to post, I will likely see the post. If they post when I am not looking at Twitter, I probably won’t see their post.

And that’s fine.

The major limiting factor in trying to follow more people on Twitter is obsessively attempting to catch every tweet. Let go. Learn to live in the now and more than likely if you do miss an important tweet, it will be re-tweeted anyway.

Of course, a flipside to this is that you shouldn’t follow people simply to increase the number of people you are following. Only follow people who will bring you useful/interesting information – otherwise you are reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and similarly if you realise that someone you followed is not bringing you any value, don’t hesitate to unfollow them.

So, how do you find interesting people to follow on Twitter? That’s a topic for another blog post – stay tuned!

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Friday Green Numbers round-up for Feb 11th 2011

February 11, 2011 by Tom Raftery

And here is a round-up of this week’s Green numbers…

Vice President Biden Announces Six Year Plan to Build National High-Speed Rail Network

Vice President Joe Biden today announced a comprehensive plan that will help the nation reach President Obama?s goal of giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years, as outlined in his State of the Union address. The proposal will place high-speed rail on equal footing with other surface transportation programs and revitalize America?s domestic rail manufacturing industry by dedicating $53 billion over six years to continue construction of a national high-speed and intercity passenger rail network.

As a part of President Obama?s commitment to winning the future by rebuilding America?s roadways, railways and runways, the plan will lay a new foundation for the nation?s
Energy and Carbon Software Market Poised for 300% Growth; Sector Leaders Named

The market for enterprise energy and carbon accounting (EECA) software grew 400 percent during 2010 and is forecast to grow another 300 percent this year, according to research by efficiency system provider Groom Energy Solutions.

The research found that more than 200 large corporations ? including Arch Coal, Bayer, RJ Reynolds, Safeway and Wyndham Hotels ? bought EECA software in 2010.

The report names ten companies as EECA leaders for 2011. They are
US diplomat convinced by Saudi expert that reserves of world’s biggest oil exporter have been overstated by nearly 40%

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom’s crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels ? nearly 40%.

The revelation comes as the oil price has soared in recent weeks to more than $100 a barrel on global demand and
Bridgelux Raises $20M For LEDs

LED chip and array maker Bridgelux raised close to $50 million just a year ago, but is raising even more money, according to a filing. The nine-year-old venture-backed startup which is looking to do for lighting what Silicon Valley has done for communications and entertainment ? make it digital ? has raised $20.74 million of a planned $21 million round.

The company opened a factory in California and was making an effort to scale up its production last year, so
British windfarms blow Vestas towards 25% profit rise

Strong demand from British windfarms helped the world’s biggest turbine manufacturer, Vestas, raise profits by 25% over the past year and have boosted future prospects.

UK equipment deliveries totalled 530MW ? a leap from 120MW over the previous year ? helped in particular by shipments for the 300MW Thanet windfarm, which is currently the largest offshore windfarm ever built.

Shares in Vestas soared 5% as the Danish-based group reported
Vodafone [Ireland] embarks on green drive to cut paper bills by 70%

Ireland?s largest mobile operator Vodafone has asked customers to opt to switch to paperless billing as part of its drive to cut down on paper by 70%. The move, it says, will be equal to saving 5,000 trees and 500 tonnes of CO2.

The company today launched its paperless billing campaign ?Goodbye Paper Bills, Hello Trees? and calls on Vodafone customers to make the switch to paperless billing.
EMC? Cork plant cuts energy use by 20% after ?radical? retrofit

EMC?, which employs 1,650 people at its Ovens site, undertook a full retrofit project to implement energy saving technologies at the information technology and data centre site, using free cooling technology systems.

The ?2.5 million project, which was designed and managed by consulting engineering company Arup, will achieve annual electricity savings of 13 million kilowatt hours and an annual carbon emission reduction of 7,000 tonnes.
Hopes of 30% cut in greenhouse emissions dashed

The UK government’s plan to push Europe to deeper cuts on greenhouse gas emissions has been dashed by the EU’s energy chief.

G?nther Oettinger, the EU’s energy commissioner, dealt a heavy blow to the hopes of several member states that have been pressing for a target of slashing emissions by 30% by 2020, against the current 20%.

He said the tougher target would force industries to ….
China bids to ease drought with $1bn emergency water aid

China has announced a billion dollars in emergency water aid to ease its most severe drought in 60 years, as the United Nations warned of a threat to the harvest of the world’s biggest wheat producer.

Beijing has also promised to use its grain reserves to reduce the pressure on global food prices, which have surged in the past year to record highs due to the floods in Australia and a protracted dry spell in Russia.

The desperate measures were evident at
Obama Admin: 1M Electric Vehicles by 2015 Still On Course

President Obama?s plan to put 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015 was reaffirmed on Tuesday.

A new report issued by the Department of Energy outlines a strategy for achieving that goal, which Obama announced in his State of the Union address last month. David Sandalow, the Energy Department?s Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs, said the goal can be reached if the proper steps are taken.

?To succeed in meeting the President?s goal, we?ll need …
Ocean energy could create 70,000 jobs [in Ireland] ? Bord G?is

Bord G?is have claimed that the ocean energy industry could create up to 70,000 jobs and be worth ?120bn to the Irish economy.

In a speech to the Ocean Energy Industry Forum 2011 today, Bord G?is CEO John Mullins outlined his concern that ?not enough investment and planning is being put into developing Ireland?s ocean energy resources,? however.

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Green bits and bytes for Feb 10th 2011

February 10, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

Digital Lumens announced that its Intelligent Light Engines have received NOM (Normas Oficiales Mexicanas) and UL (Underwriters Laboratories Canada) marks, which are respectively Mexican and Canadian certification equivalents of UL Listing in the United States and allow the products to be sold in Mexico and Canada.
CA Technologies and Capgemini announced a partnership to establish a global Energy, Carbon and Sustainability Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) service. The idea of the partnership, is to help customers better manage complex sustainability data collection and increasingly challenging reporting demands, enabling them to focus on sustainability strategy and carbon reduction activities.
Sandbag.org.uk has reported that the EU Commission has voted to ban industrial gas offset credits from HFC and N20 destruction projects from the next phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, beginning in 2013. This, they say, is important because it shows a willingness to fix the problem on the part of the politicians and because it shows that campaigning works!
CA Technologies have announced that Cynthia Curtis has been promoted to vice president and chief sustainability officer
Career Intelligence (i.e. recruitment) site Vault.com has launched a new section of their site dedicated entirely to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The new CSR area of the site helps jobseekers discover the types of careers in this burgeoning field, and commentary on how CSR is changing traditional career fields.
Boston-Power, maker of high-end lithium-ion batteries, recently announced the installation of Keith Schmid as CEO. Schmid takes over from company founder Christina Lampe-?nnerud will become executive chairman. Schmid joins Boston-Power from Power Distribution, Inc., a provider of power distribution equipment and services, where he served as president and chief executive.

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15 Twitter tips for beginners – updated

February 10, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I wrote a post a couple of years back called 15 Twitter tips for beginners which, though two years old, still has useful information for Twitter users – especially if you make sure to read all the comments as well.

Needless to say, things have moved on considerably in the intervening period – bear in mind that post was written over a year before the launch of the iPad and seven months before version 1.0 of Android was released!

So here’s a quick updated version of the tips:

Start off easy by posting a few innocuous posts introducing yourself and your interests, “I’m Tom, a Social Media and Sustainability expert”, “I recently moved to Seville, anyone on here from Seville?”, – that kind of thing. Then be sure to mention why you’re using Twitter, e.g. “I hope to learn more about cleantech”, or whatever it is you are hoping to get from it.
Then build up your network. Start with friends who you know to be on Twitter. Start following them. But also look at the list of people they are following. You may know some of them too, if so, follow them as well.
If you precede someone’s username with the @ symbol in a post on Twitter (i.e. “@tomraftery how is it going?”) then your post appears in the @Mentions tab on their Twitter page. This works whether they are following you or not. When you @reply to someone, and they see you appear in their @Mentions tab, they are likely to check out your profile and posts and may decide to follow you. This is a very powerful way to build up your network with people who don’t necessarily know you but with whom you want to connect.
Check out the TwitterGrader page for your area, for instance, if you are based in Andalucia, in the south of Spain, like me, check the TwitterGrader page for Andalucia and you’ll find some interesting people you may want to connect to, to get into the local scene.
Follow some of the people there, check who they are following and talking to (@ replying to) and consider following them too.
Sidenote: if you precede someone’s username with “d ” (i.e. “d tomraftery how is it going?”) this sends a private message only to them – called a direct message or DM. You can only send DMs to people who have chosen to follow you.
Also, don’t be shy about asking your friends to pimp you to their followers!

Then, using Twitter:

On the computer use either Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck for posting/reading posts. I prefer TweetDeck. Having said that, the Twitter web interface is still prob the best for checking people’s profiles and seeing who they follow.
On the iPad /iPhone I use the Twitter iPhone client; On Android, I’m told Tweetdeck is best; and on Blackberry I hear Seesmic, Tweetcaster and Socialscope are good (though Socialscope is still in private beta) and
On any phone the Twitter mobile interface and dabr – are great web-based mobile Twitter clients
Always remember, if you @reply someone looking to get their attention or hoping they will follow you, they will likely click through to check out your Twitter page. There are many bots on Twitter so to weed out real/interesting users from bots I always look at a persons most recent posts to see what they are talking about (if their posts are all links to one site, forget it!), I look at the number of people they follow vs the number of people following them. If they are following 1,000 say and have very few followers, it is a sure sign that they are a bot who just auto-followed lots of people.
I also check out what the person says about themselves in the bio (so, if you want people to follow you, be sure to fill in your own bio!) and click to view their website site, if they have one .
If you want people to follow you, then ensure your updates are not protected. Someone coming to your Twitter page and seeing Protected Updates is very unlikely to see any reason to follow you.
Purely a personal preference, but I think it is far better to use your own name on your Twitter account than a handle. It is a matter of personal branding but to my mind, a Twitter account called @JohnDoe tells me more about the user than @stargazr49!
Finally, a photo is also very important on your account, be sure to add one to your profile
BONUS EXTRA TIP!!! – Use your Twitter username everywhere – add it to your email sig, put it on your business cards, leave it in blog comments – don’t spam, just do it where appropriate.

FWIW I’ll be writing many more posts about Twitter best practices, with a special emphasis on Twitter for Sustainability obviously, in the coming weeks and months – stay tuned!

Cross posted from my TomRaftery.com blog

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Power Assure automates the reduction of data center power consumption

February 9, 2011 by Tom Raftery

If you’ve been following this blog in the last couple of weeks you’ll have noticed that I have profiled a couple of data centre energy management companies – well, today it is the turn of Power Assure.

The last time I talked to Power Assure was two years ago and they were still very early stage. At that time I talked to co-founder and CTO, Clemens Pfeiffer, this time I spoke with Power Assure’s President and CEO, Brad Wurtz.

The spin that Power Assure put on their energy management software is that, not only do they offer their Dynamic Power Management solution which provides realtime monitoring and analytics of power consumption across multiple sites, but their Dynamic Power Optimization application automatically reduces power consumption.

How does it do that?

Well, according to Brad, clients put an appliance in each of the data centres they are interested in optimising (Power Assure’s target customer base are large organisations with multiple data centres – government, financial services, healthcare, insurance, telco’s, etc.). The appliance uses the management network to gather data – data may come from devices (servers, PDU’s, UPS’s, chillers, etc.) directly, or more frequently, it gathers data directly from multiple existing databases (i.e. a Tivoli db, a BMS, an existing power monitoring system, and/or inventory system) and performs Data Centre analytics on those data.

The optimisation module links into existing system management software to measures and track energy demand on a per applications basis in realtime. It then calculates the amount of compute capacity required to meet the service level agreements of that application and adds a little bit of headroom. From the compute it knows the number of servers needed, so it communicates with the load balancer (or hypervisor, depending on the data centre’s infrastructure) and adjusts the size of the server pool to meet the required demand.

Servers removed from the pool can be either power capped or put in sleep mode. As demand increases the servers can be brought fully online and the load balancer re-balanced so the enlarged pool can meet the new level of demand. This is the opposite of the smart grid demand response concept – this is supply-side management – matching your energy consumption (supply to the demand for compute resources).

A partnership with Intel means that future versions will be able to turn off and on individual components or cores to more precisely control power usage.

The software is agentless and interestingly, given the customer profile Brad outlined (pharmas, financial institutions, governments, etc.), customers log in to view and manage their power consumption data because it is SaaS delivered.

The two case studies on their site make for interesting reading and show reductions in power consumption from 56% – 68% which are not to be sneezed at.

The one client referred to in the call is NASA and Power Assure are involved in a data centre consolidation program with them. Based on the work they have done with Power Assure, Brad informed me that NASA now expects to be able to consolidate their current 75 Data Centres significantly. That’ll make a fascinating case study!

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