Its time to step up my blog game and start shooting videos! Hope you like this one – it is green screen video, post production by Final Cut/LiveType, shot using a Canon A1S HD camera and about 5k wattage of pro lighting. Sorry – it’s hard to be energy efficient using 5k of light – but that’s what it takes to produce this stuff!

It’s a generic wireless video – in that I hope to get the minds of IT and Facilities folks thinking about WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) technology and how the application of such technology can help green their enterprise data center. Remember – for technology to have value – it must solve a problem. The current problem, as I see it today in older data centers, is the clear lack of power and thermal visibility – which just plainly drives major inefficiencies and cooling over-kills.  Solve this problem – and you can save major money and tighten your green belt a notch.

Rather than write a long blog post – just watch the video please!

Making a video like this has been fun. I’ve still yet to develop my camera personality – at times I am looking a little too serious perhaps. But, over time I hope to loosen up and have some fun and expression to help flow the timeline out a bit more and make it more natural. It’s ain’t easy – but I’ll be working on it!

Just came across the graphic which I thought was a great visual to show the cost break down in the dc. Cooling costs are approximately 40% for this customer – Nvidia. This is real. 40% is a big number – Maybe time to check out ASHRAE and start saving money?

You would think this is easy to figure out right?

But, how come I only see major enterprises promoting their PUE? I mean we always see PUE (and it’s inverse cousin DCiE) being compared to MPG in green presentations – and every car manufacturer and individual seems to have an appreciation and understanding of MPG – so where are all the enterprise when it comes to understanding their PUE?

Check Grid Grid for the definition and we’ve got the cool chart on the left and it looks pretty simple. Just get your numbers and do the math!!! I mean the math is simple right?

Oh… Now I see where the problem lies… getting the numbers?

From the Metrics and Measurements page you can get a quick definition or rather purpose of PUE:

The Green Grid proposed the use of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal, Data Center Efficiency (DCE) metrics, which enable data center operators to quickly estimate the energy efficiency of their data centers, compare the results against other data centers, and determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made.

If I dust off my old Electrical Engineering books:

Power = Voltage x Current

Wow – this simple right? Nope. For a lot of data centers – there still remains a lot of mystery surrounding power visibility and consumption. How do you measure and how do you aggregate across all the different data center assets (and across different vendors, console, meters etc) so you can get a picture of what the heck is going on. Don’t get me wrong – if you have a state of the art, one vendor solution – you might some luxuries that most enterprise data centers don’t – but for the average data center environment – it’s probably a big challenge. What’s happening at the rack or circuit level still remains a buried treasure. If you’re reading this and you agree – drop me a comment. Validation is a good thing!

Confession. I use Twitter. How shocking in this day of social media! My user name is PUE_DCiE. You can check me out at http://twitter.com/PUE_DCiE. I though it would be good to share just what that user name was geared towards. Thanks Green Grid for creating this definition! Now I have a cool user name.

Time to go back to school and get up to speed on the current state of Green IT. I’m very curious about the current state of mind of  “Green Data Center Professionals”. After Goggling around a bit, I came across John Lamb’s book titled “The Greening of IT” and though this would be a good topic for my second blog post. Just so you know – this blog is NOT going to be a book review site – but this book does serves well as a soft introduction to helping both myself and IT folks get started.

Why do I like this book? I haven’t even read it yet – but I liked the quick on-line description. If you read “Greening Your IT, for newbies and Experts” it provides a nice intro to the book and it was this walk through that got me thinking. Thanks to Matthew Wheeland for that post. I have picked up the book and it is currently queued for my reading.

Getting started on anything is always easier if you have a plan or map right? Greening the data center shouldn’t be any different. But it’s new, maybe not everyone is on board and the first few steps might take someone who we refer to as ‘an early adopter” to get things rolling. Reminds me of the early software infrastructure days. I lived through those times  as IT moved to J2EE app servers, service oriented architects promoted the value of re-usable web services and those early adopters became the early transformers (sorry, nothing to do with the movie!) of the organizations. They took small departmental steps to help realize the value of their efforts which would scale and have an overall corporate impact. Sounds like the same could apply to realizing data center efficiencies as we test out a single cold aisle containment, or a fine grained measurement of a single rack for power and thermal usage. Those single tests and benefits could scale out and have a tremendous corporate impact on the bottom line. Ask anyone looking to sign off on any project today – and it has to impact the bottom line!

Simple steps are key today in any complex process. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) proved that real quickly. Maybe we can learn from that process as we investigate Green IT.

As mentioned by John Lamb in the above post – the process of “Greening IT” should be broken up into some simple and measurable steps:

• Get educated – Goggle “Green IT”
• Communicate internally – Get executive sponsorship
• Baseline – Know where you are today
• Plan – Map out server consolidation/chiller analysis/temp increase tasks

I get this plan. It is simple. You can measure it and gain support for it internally. But how many folks are actively doing this today?

This is the magic question I hope to answer over time!

Welcome to my first blog post. CSR is a key topic topic these days. According to wikipedia – CSR is defined as

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), also known as corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business, sustainable responsible business (SRB), or corporate social performance,^[1] is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. Ideally, CSR policy would function as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business would monitor and ensure their adherence to law, ethical standards, and international norms. Business would embrace responsibility for the impact of their activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere. Furthermore, business would proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality. Essentially, CSR is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making, and the honoring of a triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit.

CSR applies to the data center as helping green the data center definitely affects the bottom line. Power and HVAC requirements for any enterprise data center need to be visualized and analyzed as part of the overall corp sustainability initiatives. More to follow shortly…