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From the news: Green IT

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:41:26 +0000

It is interesting that the issue of how green IT can be viewed as is coming to the fore. I was recently sent a notification of the existence of the following site:

http://www.businessgreen.com/

Among its articles is this one about the green IT:

http://www.businessgreen.com/financial-director/comment/2214911/emerald-city

The article concentrates surveys about the state of green IT, and the lack of trust that IT purchasers have in the “Green” claims of suppliers. The rush to green wash products is leaving many, me included, sceptical that the benefits extend to the environment and purchasers bank balance – rather than the suppliers.

It is true that there are products that have the capacity to reduce IT’s carbon footprint and hence have real environmental benefits. It is these that need to be examined in the search for a coherent and effective green strategy. If implemented correctly these should also have a reasonable payback period – since the energy consumption will have to be paid for if it isn’t saved.

Without buying new technology, however, it is worth pointing out that only deploying the capacity actually needed may be a strong green IT option. A strong capacity management approach will mean that only the capacity actually needed in the short term will be operating in the data centre. Thus, only that hardware will be using space, power and cooling. If your capacity management strategy is to have sufficient capacity from day 1 to allow the system to perform in the long term then this may be inconsistent with any green agenda.

If you would like to discuss matching IT strategy to your organisation then please feel free to contact me at dh@sarquol.com, or call on +44 7887 536083.

From the news: Computing power for hire

admin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:38:11 +0000

I find it interesting that both Google and Yahoo are getting involved in super computers – and hiring or loaning out the results to others. The following article makes the point:

Yahoo! outsources! India’s! giant! supercomputer!

This is a HP/Yahoo initiative that seems to be a match for a recent IBM/Google move.

The idea of hiring out computer power is obviously not new. Sun are already in the market to hire computing power and deliver it to organisations using the Internet. It is interesting to speculate as to why Yahoo and Google want to hire out this technology to academics. I wonder if they see themselves as better placed to deliver this computing for hire to business than the traditional technology companies. If there were a realistic possibility of hiring short term processing power for small to medium businesses then I can see there may be a market for it. This is not, of course, the reason that is given in the press releases.

From the news… SOA – the next big performance problem

admin — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:20:42 +0000

It would seem that “Service Oriented Architecture” (SOA) is taking off as a technology in fashion. As usual, most of the news is generated by people wanting to sell it as the next big thing ready for the prime time. If followed as it is being sold at present, the concept is liable to lead to significant performance problems. SOA is sold on having a large number of “users” who are then often other systems. This is followed all the way back to the real users through an unknown number of tiers. The complexity of managing this sort of architecture increases significantly as the number of tiers increases. If this is then managed without due consideration for managing the system capacity and performance the result will be problems in the future. That is not to say that I don’t see a benefit in the overall technology – there is great potential. Just consider carefully how the performance of operational systems might be proven to be sufficient for the long term.