Green from the roots up, Sustainable from the top down
Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP Energy and Environment.
I first met Rich at the Pulse 09 event in Las Vegas earlier this year where he gave a great talk on Sustainability & the role of IT.
Rich has agreed to come on the GreenMonk show monthly to give us a state of the ‘sustainosphere’ from an IBM perspective!
This is month one and we are talking Water – among the many interesting water-related items, watch out near the end for Rich’s alluding to using Demand Response for water flow management!
One of the people I met at the IBM Pulse 09 event was Rich Lechner. Rich is IBM’s VP Energy & Environment. Rich gave a tremendous presentation on Sustainability and the role of IT – I posted many quotes from the presentation on Twitter and they received a lot of attention.
I asked Rich if he’d be willing to do a video with us about Energy, Sustainability and IBM’s Smart Planet vision and he very graciously agreed to.
I hope you enjoy it.
I attended Pulse 2009, the IBM service management conference, in Las Vegas during the week. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t know much about service management software before going to the event so my expectations of what to expect from the conference were low! However, IBM hit the Green ball out of the park at this conference. Almost every speaker who stood up to speak mentioned smart grids, energy or efficiency and Al Zollar, GM of Tivoli Software above, even had a slide on demand response!
The turnout for the event was around 5-6000 I’m told and I have no reason to doubt it as the general sessions were thronged.
It really is tremendous to see Oracle, SAP and IBM all heavily touting their Smart Grid software solutions – it looks like the dream of the intelligent energy network and the massive efficiencies which will accrue, is not far off.
I met a ton of interesting people there and video’d a couple of them so I’ll be posting more in upcoming posts.
[Disclosure: IBM paid my travel and expenses for this trip]
Speaking of data centers, I was delighted to read this morning of a partnership between IBM and Indian bank Kotak.
According to the release, IBM is helping the bank consolidate its server rooms into one data center and Kotak will save:
over US$1.2 million in operational efficiency and reduced energy costs over the next five years
I’d like to see some of the calcs behind those data – $1.2m over five years sounds low to me unless it is a modest data center.
Intriguingly, the release refers to:
a chilled water-based cooling and an automatic floor pressurization system
If that is water cooled servers (as opposed to water cooled air handling units) then this is nice. I’d love to know what an ” automatic floor pressurization system” system is. Anyone know? My guess is that it is something for maintaining underfloor airflow integrity but if it is that, then it sounds like traditional air cooled servers, not water cooled 🙁
Hello? Anyone from IBM have any more info on this?
My guest on this podcast is Stan Litow. Stan is IBM’s VP for Corporate Affairs and Corporate Citizenship.
IBM recently issued their 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report. It is an extremely interesting, very comprehensive overview of IBM’s work in this space. You can download the entire report here (PDF warning!).
Having gone through the report, I was interested to discuss it with Stan and he graciously agreed to come on the show and gave a fascinating look at some of the thinking behind IBM’s initiatives in this space.
Download the entire interview here
(20.3mb mp3)
The IBM Green Data Center in Second Life
Episode 2 of the GreenMonk Podcasts – 27 mins 27 secs
My guest on this podcast is IBM’s Vik Chandra. According to IBM Vik
is currently responsible for Market Management and Strategy for IBM software offerings that enable organizations to reduce their energy consumption and environmental impact. IBM’s software group offers middleware from its Tivoli, Rational, WebSphere, Lotus and Information Management brands.
I was interested to know how Vik felt software could help companies reduce their carbon footprint so I invited him to come on the show to discuss this and also to answer questions I solicited from readers of this site.
Here are the questions I asked Vik and the approx. times I asked them:
It is easy to see how more efficient hardware can help drop a company’s energy use but how is software helping companies reduce their carbon footprint? – 00:20
Demand response – the ability to have devices adjust their settings dynamically in response to pricing signals from utilities etc is recently gaining a lot of attention. Is this something IBM are looking into? 03:23
Questions from readers:
Chris Dalby
Are there any plans to expand the current cost craze that has hit Hursley? With rising energy and utility costs in general, are there plans to help companies intelligently manage and automate their energy infrastructure using mqtt? – 05:57
Alan in Belfast
As CPU/core speeds increase, software has become more and more processor hungry, driving up heat, fan, power etc. Energy efficient machines – even Eee PC 1000s! – start to alter the processor speed to keep power demands down. Are IBM serious about de-bloating their software to make it more light-weight? And do they have any feel for whether that could make a 1% difference or a 20% difference to desktop/laptop/server power usage? – 08:14Is it more efficient to build features into hardware or software? A lot of the enterprise monitoring software that gets installed to instrument PCs/servers runs continuously. Better to make lighter hardware modules to do the same? Is there a day when a Linux-on-a-chip (etc) will be embedded in PCs/servers as a more energy-efficient method of performing these tasks? (Bring back the PIC chip!) – 10:28
Jim Spath
We’re moving toward more virtualization, currently running IBM AIX on Power5 LPARs, starting to run virtual CPUs, memory, storage and I/O. What are the limiting factors for software licensing in such a landscape? It seems we save money on hardware but pay more for software that could run in different frames.
I think Linux is a partial answer, but there are corporate concerns with having multiple OS images, not to mention uneasiness about GNU and BSD license models. – 14:23Jim Hughes
I see plenty of power management software going into desktop and laptop PCs (clock slowing, fans that run only when necessary etc.), but precious little into servers.As many enterprises appear to be shuffling ever more equipment into noisy, over heating server rooms, surely power (and noise) management should be a big issue here.
Are IBM ignoring servers because they’re hidden away from all but the long suffering sys admins? – 17:01
Ed Gemmell
Of the $1 billion IBM said they would invest in Green IT. How much has already been invested (can we see it in the financials?) and how much has been in Software. What do you have to show for the $1billion so far? – 21:31Uldis Boj?rs
It would be interesting to learn more about what is IBM’s experience and lessons learned in enterprise use of new social media and collaboration tools such as microblogging and virtual 3D worlds. – 25:58
Download the entire interview here
(25.1mb mp3)
The observant amongst you may have noticed that we have talked quite a bit about smart grids here on GreenMonk. That is because we believe fundamentally in what it is they are trying to achieve and how they are going about it.
And we are not alone in that!
SAP’s AMI Lighthouse Council is all about Smart Grids and hence SAP are holding their SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio Texas in October where there will be a major focus on Smart Grids.
As well as SAP, not surprisingly the utilities are all over this space because Smart Grids will give them the ability to far better manage their energy supply and the demand, thereby reducing the number of outages. It seems that every day brings news of a new Smart Grid trial by some utility.
ComEd are looking at Smart Grids in Chicago, Manitoba Hydro is testing about 4,500 smart meters in Winnipeg, Xcel Energy has announced plans to make Boulder the first SmartGridCityTM, PEPCO has rolled out a Smart Grid trial in 1,000 homes in Washington DC, Austin Energy plans to have all its meters converted to Smart Meters by December 2008, etc. In fact, here is a Google Map of all the Smart Grid projects currently underway globally!
As well as the utilities, because this is a whole new area, there are literally hundreds of startups in this space from the likes of SynergyModule in Ireland to more established names like Echelon and Itron in the US.
Because of the involvement of these myriad players, IBM has also come on board to try to bring some standards to the table. According to this recent article in CNet,
The idea is to create a common set of communication protocols and data formats that utilities and smart-grid start-ups can adhere to.
With these technical blueprints, based on standards like TCP/IP, new technologies can be plugged into the grid on a large scale…. What’s happening now is a patchwork of smart-grid trials using differing products, an approach that prevents fast technology change.
This is great news for the rollout of Smart Grids globally. If we have a universally agreed set of standards that everyone adheres to then the creation and integration of smart grids and smart grid devices suddenly becomes far less complex.
It will still take some time before there are the devices in place, and the regulators and utilities sign-up to convert completely to Smart Grids but a heavy weight like IBM’s coming on board can only help move things along.
[Full disclosure: SAP have invited me to attend the SAP for Utilities conference, I am a sometime unpaid advisor to SynergyModule and IBM are a RedMonk client, though not a GreenMonk client!]
Photo Credit MumbleyJoe
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!
I am at an event at IBM South Bank looking at some data center futures. The current session is with Christopher O’Connor, vice-president strategy and market management, Tivoli, who just raised an issue that I have been thinking about a lot lately. Just what will it mean to develop greener software? What would a green API look like? As usual- better performance is one answer to the problem. Lean is Green.
Chris said that Rational, IBM’s software development tools and process organisation, is now looking at “green aware programming”. Good job. Chris mentioned one immediate area of concern – “the fetch”. That is – code that keeps calling a database tends to be performance intensive, and indentifying fetch bottlenecks could be a great step towards writing code that consumes less power. We’re talking about heat maps for code.
It will be interesting to see more about the Rational approach, and I will make an effort to do just that. But for now, its just good to report that IBM is thinking deeply about the problem and developing tools to support its findings.
On that note I am beginning to wonder if beautiful code is green code. Code generation tends to generate pretty ugly code – but is it less efficient? Developers that write beautiful code may end up in great demand for their green coding: but this is pure conjecture at this point…
When I logged into my monkchips WordPress console today I noticed an inbound ping from a new blog called The Raised Floor, which got my legacy boy senses tingling. Sure enough when I got over there it was clear that we’re talking about data centers, from the people that invented the concept (and yes I do mean Big Blue). I particularly like the picture they have used for their banner, with a classic black and white shot of a mainframe room, with the floor raised… and green grass underneath. Like so:
The content is pretty solid right out of the gate – although there are some gaps. Asking whether tape vendors are pitching green, for example? You’d have to be underneath that raised floor not to have come across a tape vendor wrapping itself in the green flag. LTO, one of the sponsors of the ComputerWorld UK Green Zone, is a good example.
But its the quality of people involved that caught my eye: notably one John Patrick. Who is John? Only the guy that Louis Gerstner gives much of the credit for encouraging the company’s long march to open standards. John can probably claim as much credit as anyone for helping to change the basis of the IT economy from raising barriers to entry, to one that succeeds on the basis of lowering barriers to participation. He is a good pal of Irving Wladawsky-Berger, another one of IBM’s most important change agents of the last century. I am not a fan of John’s politics, particularly, but if he sees the importance of greener technology then I certainly have his back. As Hero Nakumura would say – This Is How We Roll.
The blog is going on my blogroll. I look forward to some great content. I leave you with an excerpt.
IBM is leading by example. One of their “green” projects is consolidating 3,900 servers onto 30 new top of the line mainframe servers. The result is not only more compute power but dramatically less use of electrical power and space. One of IBM’s customers went from 300 servers to six. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center consolidated 1,000 servers onto 300 and saved $20m in costs while freeing up datacenter space for more hospital beds.
Datacenters have been popping up everywhere — most of them built before 2001. The datacenters are very large rooms full of many different kinds of equipment — designed in the same way they were decades ago — like a kitchen where the stove puts out more heat so you turn on the air conditioning to cool down the entire room. The chef is comfortable and others in the room are freezing. IBM is designing datacenters for customers where cooling “zones” are specific to the type of equipment in each zone. Green datacenters not only save space and energy but also benefits the environment overall. In the past the electric bill has been allocated as overhead to all parts of the company. Redesigns are saving many millions of dollars. With the huge growth of energy for the IT infrastructure the CFO is reallocating energy expenditures from general overhead to the CIO so they can see what IT is really costing.