d o w n s t r e a m

Green Grid - Data Center Pulse Collaboration: A Model for Industry

The Green Grid Technical Committee heard a compelling proposal from Data Center Pulse Founder and Chairman Dean Nelson today. His recommendation addresses a weakness in the otherwise formidable Green Grid value to the IT industry, which today is dominated by vendor interests.

Data Center Pulse is driving an agenda built around addressing data center operators' primary pain points and opportunities for improved efficiency. Dean's proposal to The Green Grid (TGG) was to establish formal collaboration between the Data Center Pulse membership - individuals who run data centers - and TGG's consortium of companies. Their list of Top 10 Challenges provides the roadmap for collaboration.

The collaborative approach between these two influential groups is a pragmatic one. Data center operators and IT vendors are both confronting the possibility of regulators stepping in to dictate metrics and compliance criteria. In the highly complex business of data centers, it will be very hard for bureaucrats to get it right. Standards and metrics forged directly by not only the companies producing data center products, but also by the people using them, will result in more appropriate and achievable compliance goals. Regulator, vendor, end user, and public interests are highly aligned around the top level goal of improved efficiency, so this collaborative model presented by Data Center Pulse should bolster the IT industry's defense of self regulation.

Taxpayers and industry interests alike should welcome this kind of opportunity to avoid greater bureaucracy. I'd go even further to say this model should be the preferred approach in all industry regulation scenarios. Bureaucrats can contribute by examining the balance and effectiveness of collaboration between end users and vendors, between the producers and consumers, rather than forming expensive, often misguided, and inevitably insufficient regulatory bodies to inspect individual operations. Of course, the TGG - Data Center Pulse collaborative model is the exception much more that the rule when you look across industries. Little is being done to connect end users of USDA beef, with feedlot operators and meat packers, for example. A lot of work and cultural shift will need to occur before consumers of car wax will have any say in the design and production of Turtle Wax. Still, I think this is a worthy goal, and one I believe can be achieved by following the many lessons of the IT industry's ability to regulate itself, like this collaboration between TGG and Data Center Pulse. Thank you Dean for a successful proposal.

Building Change

As blame for the 2005 Katrina disaster continues to be doled out, residents of the devastated region are taking steps to protect themselves against future storms and to not fall victim to "gross negligence" on the part of federal agencies.

A recent example of this self reliance is the Biloxi, MS Model Home "Porchdog". This residence, recently completed and now occupied, is the product of a design process that took the local conditions and occupants needs into consideration and was facilitated by Architecture for Humanity.

Eco Responsibility is Fiduciary Responsibility

My employer, Sun Microsystems, is running mandatory employee training on Safeguarding Sun's Reputation. A comment posted in the training's internal discussion forum gave me another glimpse into the lack of awareness workers have regarding the connection between good business and green business. Here's an excerpt from the discussion forum:

"... In the question concerning which employees or groups help Sun comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, I'm sure ... Sun's Eco Responsibility team is very vital to Sun but I fail to see how it relates to Sarbanes-Oxley."

Eco Responsibility is a core platform for innovation within Sun. The test question being challenged was designed to assess how well employees understood the depth and importance of this platform. This frustrated employee's repsonse represents a common misunderstanding of the relevance of environmental responsibility to fiduciary responsibility. I tried to clear the air with a reply in the forum...

"While there are no explicit guidelines in SOX for establishing carbon inventories or demonstrating protection and responsible use of natural resources, it is the intent of SOX to establish a basis for evaluating the company's performance of its fiduciary responsibilities. The inclusion of Eco Responsibility in Sun's compliance reporting is a proactive step toward addressing the increasing concern that *irresponsible* use of natural resources and neglect of environmental concerns is detrimental to the future earnings potential of the company. Shareholders of many companies are increasingly associating eco responsibility with fiduciary responsibility."
Indeed, "green" behavior by companies is increasingly expected by shareholders, not to mention customers and employees. Gil Friend brilliantly addressed this topic in a recent appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California. He related lessons he has learned over 37 years of advising companies on how to improve business performance and be ready for an unpredictable future by being environmentally responsible. In his handy new book, The Truth About Green Business, Gil makes the connection in a section called "Future Proofing" (Truth #52):

"When your company is not in tune with the laws of nature (for example, if it depends on toxic materials, uses lots of nonrenewable resources, or still creates "waste"), you're at risk with regualtors, competitors, customers, and simply the resources you need to operate. Operate in tune with the laws of nature, and the risks diminish. You'll be well ahead of changing regulatory expectations, while your competitors are stuck playing catch-up.

"As industry moves toward sustainability in a carbon-constrained world, you need to be ready to adapt to changes in carbon regulation and natural resources. To do that, you need strategies that work in multiple scenarios (See Truth 51, "Scenario Planning"), because you'll never know which future will uinfold - and you need to be ready to continually rethink and adapt those strategies further."

It is clear that the frustrated employee's understanding of this connection is the norm, not the exception. But when employer's expect employees to recognize the connection, as Sun does, the awareness that Eco Responsibility is fiduciary responsibility will cease to be an exception.

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In 2007, it appeared that Financial Services would lead the transformation. Does it still look that way in 2009? It seems to me that the whole movement has taken on a more grass roots character, wherein social networks, and watchdog groups, armed with sophisticated tools on the Internet, are really the source of most awareness building. Fodder for a future post.

The Sustainability Challenge: Can the Internet Help?

Today's Green:Net event in San Francisco's Presidio District brought together some of the most informed and influential people working at the intersection of sustainable business and high tech. It was good to see this cross section so enthusiastically pursuing opportunities for improving the environment and their bottom lines while most of the rest of the economy is struggling to stay afloat. I was proud to represent Sun, which was one of the three event sponsors.

No Consensus Here

Kudos to the Green:Net organizers for hosting a wide spectrum of perspectives in the keynotes and panels of this one day conference. The poles of the spectrum were aptly represented by Saul Griffith and Bob Metcalfe. Both of these engaging speakers are big heros of mine.

Both have expansive knowledge relevant to dealing with society's energy dependence. But they differ on the approach to meeting the challenge. I think Griffith would agree with Metcalfe when he said, "Our goal is not to darken the Earth," but he would differ with the Internet tycoon on priorities. Metcalfe, true to his venture capitalist roots, believes the real challenge is to feed the every increasing demand for energy, and he cites the evolution of the Internet as a great reference case for meeting that challenge. Griffith's perspective, on the other hand, places the priority squarely on conservation. I have to side with Griffith, with all due deference to the man behind the Law of network effects, if for no other reason that it represents a bigger shift for society and implicitly acknowledges that there is much that is broken in our current consumption orientation. In an era where some mainstream scientists are projecting the decimation of human populations, knocking our species down from six billion to one billion by the end of the century due the effects of climate change, it's time to consider an emergency exit strategy. Griffith gave his emergency exit strategy in a condensed version of the one hour talk he gave to the Long Now in January, and still managed, in 20 minutes, to convince many of the 200+ attendees that the situation is dire and, crucially, that we (that's the royal We,) have a shot (about a 1 in 3 shot,) of keeping CO2 below the 450ppm threshold where scientist agree we might still avoid irreversible feedback effects. Griffith and Metcalfe effectively sanctioned the rules for the Green:Net conversation: consensus is not required to participate; differing opinions are valued.

Open_Source is a Verb

One of the highlights of the event was the Sun Workshop titled, Open Sourcing The Sustainability Challenge: Technology for Social Good. The panel discussion was Moderated by Josie Garthwaite with Sun's own Lori Duval, Natural Logic's Gil Friend, EQ2's Steve Burt, and AMEE's Gavin Starks providing the subject matter expertise. Data was the focal point of this discussion with lots of emphasis on accuracy and integrity being critical success factors for measuring GHG inventories and environmental effects. It was clear that these leaders appreciate the magnitude of the challenge, yet they do not shrink from it. It was also clear from this workshop that the companies and NGO's and governments building these data collection and analysis systems are going to need a lot of computing infrastructure and specialized information systems knowledge to manage the Big Data sets required for accurate and meaningful analysis. Openeco.org was cited in the discussion as a good example of an open model for collecting, protecting and comparing data. However, Openeco.org, and the range of the carbon calculators and GHG inventory tools on the web do not fill the need for a comprehensive analytics system needed by decision makers who deal with GHG emissions policy and standards. Bigger, more sophisticated and integrated systems are needed here.

Can the Internet Help?

Another highlight for me was the Panel titled The Green Web Effect, which dealt with the use of web technologies to create a successful call to action in the green business movement. Much of the highly evolved thinking about the network effects of the Internet that is typified by Clay Shirky's work was abundant in this panel consisting of Moderator Alexis Madrigal, Erin Carlson, Director of Yahoo! for Good, Ron Dembo, Founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, Jason Karas, Founder and President of Carbonrally.com, Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google, and Dara O’Rourke, CEO of GoodGuide. Alexis opened the discussion by saying, "We didn't necessarily start the fire, but we're trying to help put it out." Framed in that context, he then asked the panelists, "What do you want to have happen out in the world?" I liked O'Rourke's answer the best, because it aligns with a vision I've had for many years. He said, "We want to help people to make better decisions by providing the right information at the right moment." He was speaking of the GoodGuide service, which helps consumers understand the environmental, social, and health impacts of their purchases at the decision point in a retail environment. I've just started using their new iPhone app and am pretty impressed with what they've accomplished in less than a year as a business. I am very excited about the potential for this service when they add barcode scanning capability. I'd also really like to see them add some reputation enabled crowdsourcing capabilities. I'd also really like to help them build that.

At the end of the day, I think it was pretty clear to everyone at the event that open networked systems for dealing with global warming, and energy efficiency are not only possible, but imperative if we are going to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic consequences of climate change. The event was another reminder of why I'm proud to work at Sun.

Mega Data Center: Seeing is Believing

Over the past few months I had heard exclamations of amazement regarding a storied new data center in the Nevada desert called SuperNAP. I was a bit skeptical of the superlatives about scale and efficiency that embellished these stories. My skepticism turned to exuberance last week when I joined a group of architects from Sun for a tour.  The goal of our tour of this Mega Data Center was to see first hand the state of the art as implemented by Switch Communications, where Sun operates it's cloud computing business.

Switch, and it's customers, which include several operating units within Sun, are beneficiaries of the collapse of Enron. The former utility giant had designs on trading network bandwidth using models similar to their energy trading systems. When Enron's flimsy financial structure gave way, their financial backers and the U.S. government stepped in to auction these assets. Switch CEO Rob Roy was the only one that showed up at the auction block.  In an uncanny twist of fate, he managed to side step what could have been a formidable bidding war to control this hub of communication that is unparalleled in North America.

Here are the vital stats that only begin to describe the phenomenal facility that Switch has managed to assemble:

• 407K square feet of data center floor space
• 100 Mw of power provisioned from two separate power grids
• Fully redundant power to every rack, backed by N+2 power distribution across the facility
• Enough cooling and power density to run at 1,500 watts per square foot (that's 10x the industry average 150 watts).
• 27 National network carries

This describes the capacity of the SuperNAP, which is just one of the eight facilities operated by Switch within a 6-7 mile radius in a no-fly zone south of Las Vegas.

Sun to Reveal Cloud Plans Tomorrow

Some details of Sun's Cloud Computing business will be revealed tomorrow (March 18) in New York at the CommunityOne East event.

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 Additional Resources

• The Register article on Sun's cloud in the SuperNAP
• Another article in The Reg with pictures of the SuperNAP
• CommunityOne site
• Cloud Computing at sun.com
  

The Rise of Collaborative Culture

No sooner had we put the wrap on an April 9 Commonwealth Club panel interview on Collaborating for Change, than PBS announced a really cool collaborative project on Nova to design the "Car of the Future".   Both of these recent productions focus on the application of open source design to social and economic needs beyond software.  The promise of open source economics is popping up everywhere.  It must be something in the water, (or the atmosphere).   Network based open source design efforts have been written about before, and there's more than a few established non-software open source design projects, but they were hardly regarded as mainstream.  And open source as a business model has been a fringe enterprise.  But all that is changing.

The upcoming Nova special, and the Commonwealth Club interview (with Amy Novogratz, Kate Stohr, Maria Giudice, and myself (video courtesy fora.tv)) serve as proof points that this phenomena has exceeded meme status and is spilling over into the broader socioeconomic graph.   But we knew this was inevitable, right?  We just needed the right conditions for humanity's collaborative tendency to come out of the proprietary deep freeze.

The substrate upon which this new culture is rising pairs flexible licensing models a'la Creative Commons with accessible technology for building collaborative online communities a'la Drupal and Wordpress,  Yahoo!groups and PBWiki.  Among the catalysts for this reaction are frustration over obscene economic inequities around the world, abuses of people and planet for profit, and utter neglect by federal governments.  As was discussed here in the video interview about the Open Architecture Network, these frustrations can be overcome by collaborating for change on the net.

Need more proof of the trend toward an open source economy?  Just check with the folks at Open Everything.  They're tracking numerous open collaboratives, which are exogenous to  the software world, but infused with many of the same principles, practices and tools as open source software projects. 

One of the most prominent tools applied to these new collaboratives is Drupal, and we discuss it's role in the Open Architecture Network in the video (at :37:30, :46:30, and :51:00).

Ten years ago who would have imagined that:

• IBM would begin opening their patent portfolio?
• Major news bureaus would sponsor citizen journalism?
• Educational curriculum would be opened and shared for free?
• The Pirate party could get on a national election ballot?
• Sun Microsystems would convert its software portfolio to open source, and it would be profitable?  (Well, that one you might have imagined.)
  

Yet these, and plenty of other examples show that collaborative culture is on the rise.  Does this signal the next generation economy in which businesses profit less from market lockout and legal protection and more from direct value delivered in open markets?  Or does it lead to a more fundamental shift wherein socioeconomic prosperity derives less through commerce than through collaborations for which the primary incentive to contribute is sociocentric good? 

If we started today...

I had the pleasure to chat with Robin Chase last evening.  Earlier in the day I snuck past security at the Connected Urban Development conference to meet her following her panel discussion on Connected and Sustainable Mobility.  I felt like a KT Tunstall groupie slipping back stage after the show.  Overtly, I wanted to understand her experience as a Facebook Platform developer, and see whether and how Sun could help her company, GoLoco, prosper.  Covertly, I wanted to find out what she'd been up to with mesh networks since her TED Talk last March.  We agreed to meet at the end of the day.

One of the first things I learned about Robin when we sat down at at Cafe de la Presse in San Francisco is that she is a connector within the mesh networks community.  Despite her successes and notoriety with Zipcar and GoLoco, she has bigger fish to fry with Mesh Networks, and is working hard to build the (social) network to change personal transportation and the way we access the net.   

She is making the case that mesh networks can help solve three major socioeconomic challenges.  The first is encapsulated in one sentence from her TED Talk, "If we started today [replacing every car with a fuel efficient one,] ten years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity, those fuel efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by 4%."  Basically, she is saying that no amount of efficiency built on top of a combustion engine will reduce our carbon emissions quickly enough to avert disaster.  The second is the deterioration of our transportation infrastructure at the hands of tax cuts and neglect at the federal level.  The third is the lack of free and ubiquitous access to the Internet.

Her vision is an open source model for building decentralized, ad hoc, peer to peer networks by distributing simple  mesh network transceivers in every car.  Once these devices are sufficiently deployed they work as sensor networks to enable congestion pricing and road use pricing models, plus they will provide ubiquitous and free wireless Internet access.

Obviously, some engineering will need to be done in order for her vision to be realized, but she claims it's already well underway.  Maybe Sun can help her in a more fundamental way than just scaling up her Facebook app efficiently.  Afterall, Sun knows a little bit about Open Source models and has already delivered devices that can form sensor networks.  I hope I can help bring another degree of connection to her network.

Connected Urban Development: YACCI?

I'm excited to see the launch of Connected Urban Development happen here in San Francisco this week.  It is fitting that Cisco should jump into the fray with a community building initiative centered on ICT's role in sustainable development.  They've been among the vanguard of companies innovating in IT and in International Development since their beginning.  John Chambers, et al have a long record of prioritizing Cisco's role in bridging the digital divide and investing in our shared future.

But do we need Yet Another Climate Change Initiative?   Clearly, Cisco can do great things in fulfilling their commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative and help to reduce carbon emissions, but are they detracting from other important programs already well underway to address the same issues?   I hope not, and I certainly will watch this space to see what actually occurs after the conference closes today.  If the list of business and government leaders they've assembled for the event is any indication, CUD is already doing much to help foster the all important public-private partnerships that are so hard to sustain over the life of a long ranging initiative like this.

Among the programs whose mission overlaps with CUD are ICLEI and Natural Capitalism Solutions.  Both organizations have been at this Sustainable Urban Development business long before global warming entered the business world's conscience.  ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) was founded in 1990 to help local governments connect with each other and develop cost effective means of sustainable development.  Hunter Lovins and her posse at NatCap Solutions have made available an incredibly valuable resource for urban climate change programs: The Climate Protection Manual for Cities.  Neither of these two veteran groups appear to be involved in Cisco's climate_change_initiative_come_lately.   Hopefully the connections will be made soon enough and some real efficiencies can be gained in collaborating on development of environmentally sustainable cities.  I'll see if I can run over to the conference at lunch time and help Cisco build their network.  Maybe I'll even get to meet my new business idol, Robin Chase, TEDster and CEO of GoLoco, who is on the conference agenda today.

EnergyCamp Incites Debate on Solutions

Dave Douglas kicked off the EnergyCamp "Unconference" and incited a heated debate by asking the opening session panel, "Do we need five big innovations or billions of little ones?"

Hunter Lovins responded first, saying we have the technology to get to sustainability: efficiency first, to buy time, then follow the model of nature, strive to produce products locally, at ambient temp, using waste from one production as inputs to the next.  The economics are beginning to make sense, as evidenced by the emergence, in China, of the world's first green billionaire.

Adam Werbach answered facetiously, "Kill the experts."  What he means is that the "experts'" legacy thinking is getting in the way.  Grass roots non-experts, in the shape of WalMart employees, have turned off the lights in coke machines in WalMart's employee break rooms (and Pepsi machines too).  Once Coke saw sales dip, they responded by putting up a  "My light is out but it's cold inside"sign, then saw their sales rise while Pepsi's fell.

Ted Nordhaus said our priority is to grapple with inexpensive energy, which is a root cause of climate change.  This will be a process of unleashing human power to change the political reality, he predicts.

Michael Shellenberger claimed that international policy alone is not a solution.  He cites that, since Kyoto, GHG emissions have risen in Canada and the EU faster than in U.S.

The panelists' positions having been posed, debate ensued over many topics, especially the potential role of nuclear power in solving climate change.  Nice to see some substantive disagreement - Sun did a great job picking a panel that would not mimic the too oft aligned community of experts.

More from the Unconference coverage here.

Buy More Pans: Opportunities for Creative Energy Savings Abound

The Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) at LBNL provides a system that enables electric utility customers to automate energy load shedding during peak demand periods.  It's called Demand Response Automation Server (DRAS).  Basically, it takes a feed from the utility whose payload includes data for: Event Pending, Price levels, and Price Schedule.  The system can interface with environmental management systems to turn off lights and raise set points when curtailment events and price jumps occur.  It could also be used in combination with systems management software to automate data center load shedding, but has yet to be adopted for this purpose.   With advanced virtualization and automation technologies, there is ultimately no reason that workloads could not be migrated according to a demand / cost equation.

The barrier to DRAS adoption in the data center has been a mix of scant awareness, legacy perceptions, and a shortage of creative thinking.  But all that is changing.  DRRC is on a campaign now to build awareness among all eligible facilities and IT managers about the potential for DRAS.   And the old saw that says power cycling a computer reduces it's MTBF is just that: old.  Today's systems, for the most part, are engineered to withstand daily power cycles well beyond the typical useful life of a computer.  With the benefit of this knowledge and the findings of a Harris Interactive Poll commissioned by Sun, IT and facilities managers are inducing employees to turn off their computers when not in use.  But we still need more creative thinking.

While the traditional facilities folks appear to be abundantly creative with power saving measures (in a DRAS webinar last month, Aimee McKane from LBNL, cited one example where a bakery participating in DRAS bought more bread pans to avoid running the dishwasher during peak demand periods,) creative applications of DRAS in the data center are in short supply.  

Still, the conversations are happening, as Walter Bays demonstrated on his blog today.  If a courageous (and creative) company were to combine Dynamic Infrastructure technology from Sun and DRAS from DRRC they could begin to realize the savings possible in Walter's energy utopia.  Services from Sun and others specializing in Demand Response systems like EnerNoc, can help these first mover companies develop strategies for capitalizing on these huge energy saving opportunities.