Green

Cloud Computing and Data Centers are killing our planet.  Drive to the hardware store, buy a hammer, chisel and piece of stone and begin writing about it. Put away your computer, turn off your internet connection, un-plug the video game console, iPod and the TV. We must do everything we can to get rid of these giant, energy sucking, pollution generating, and planet killing warehouses of death immediately.  

All kidding aside, it is true that many of our older data centers are in serious need of improvements in their power efficiency.  However, it's also true that data centers contain much of our work effort and play environments. If this work and play was to be distributed in small chunks throughout the business or our households instead of concentrated in data centers they would be considerably more wasteful of our planets resources.

In my 20 plus year career in IT I've always been proud of my ability to bring efficiency to IT, and the business. When Data Center Pulse was founded the driving motivation was to push for the development of power sipping IT equipment designs, combined with more efficient data centers. In parallel we're actively working to persuade owners to implement those new solutions more quickly. We strongly believed that the IT/Data Center industry had a need to focus more attention on effective use of energy. The DCP Leadership team was made up of like minded individuals that each have work history examples of a focus on reducing energy consumption.  So why would I be writing an article about data centers getting a bad rap? It seems like I should be agreeing with those articles, as it seems like I'm contradicting myself.  Well, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to talk with Andrew S. Winston, the author of Green to Gold.  I met Andrew when he presented at Dave Douglas's 2008 Eco Summit in Santa Clara, CA and we had stayed in contact. Andrew was undertaking a new project and wanted input about Data Centers for one of the sections. 

Green Recovery focuses on how companies can use environmental thinking to survive hard economic times and position themselves for growth and advantage when the downturn ends.  One core focus is on getting lean -- taking action in five key areas of the business that can yield quick payback and high ROI.  Andrew recently put out a free report, Green Cost Cutting, that includes the introduction from the new book and the chapter "Get Lean".  The purpose of releasing the content early is to put out some of the tactical, short-term ideas as soon as possible so companies can employ them quickly. 

Andrew was gracious enough to include quotes from myself and Subodh Bapat. You can pre-order a copy through Amazon. You can download the free excerpt (introduction and the chapter "Get Lean") here. 

I'm the Director of Global Lab & Datacenter Design Servers (GDS), an internal group in Sun. We're responsible for standardizing the global technical infrastructure portfolio for Sun. That's currently 1.3 million square feet in 1588 rooms world-wide. It's quite a fun job.