Latest Technology Trends

It’s a little disconcerting to watch myself in the video – but especially given the survey results – the message is really important. Our daily decisions really DO make a difference and Intel and others in the industry are working hard to make that impact more visible and to make energy-saving behavior much easier. In our house we monitor our energy use real-time instead of waiting for the utility bill to come way after the fact and wondering what caused it to be so high. Amazing how much a little feedback changes actions – that fan doesn’t need to be on. Turn off the television as you leave the room. It’s only October, we don’t need the central heat on yet!
And now we’re extending that feedback mechanism into the office environment, where we don’t even see the electricity bill. As we make it obvious to people how much energy they’re using – and how they compare to their co-workers we believe behavior will change. We first started focusing on office energy as part of working with industry on hyper-efficient commercial buildings that generate as much or more energy than they consume over the course of a year. In that setting, plug-loads and occupant behavior become critical.

Of course being Intel, we’re also very interested in how technology can make it easier to save energy – concepts as simple as automatically turning off everything that doesn’t need to be on when you leave your home and as complex as having buildings that understand individual environmental preferences and adjust the temperature in a meeting room for greatest comfort and productivity.
We’re just beginning to make energy personal – and would love your suggestions on other needed personal energy innovations.

^{*These are among the findings from a report S.C. Johnson released yesterday, “The Environment: Public Attitudes and Individual Behavior — A Twenty-Year Evolution.” It follows S.C. Johnson’s 1990 report, “The Environment: Public Attitudes and Individual Behavior,” the predecessor of the Green Gauge consumer survey, which S.C. Johnson called the world’s longest-running survey of consumers’ green attitudes.}

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Technology@Intel

Once again, I’ve had a long hiatus from blogging.  But I’ve got an excuse (this time!).  I’ve been heads down on finalizing a new white paper on IT energy efficiency.   I also just returned from Corporate EcoForum’s annual meeting where a number of the attendees confirmed the key assertion in the paper – that in most organizations, server utilization is embarassingly low and falling, and (as the chart above shows) improving it provides the biggest opportunity for increasing IT energy efficiency.  Move over PUE! (we still love you though).

As I posted on Microsoft’s sustainability blog, the paper explores the critical importance and substantial benefits of embracing IT energy efficiency in a world where almost every facet of business and society is dependent on IT-based services. The exponential demand for these IT services is beginning to strain the capacity and cost effectiveness of many organizations’ IT infrastructures. It shows why adopting strong IT energy efficiency principles and practices – from the top of the organization down to the IT pro – can significantly mitigate these challenges and improve the cost effectiveness, capacity and flexibility of tomorrow’s IT infrastructures.

In this paper, we:

• Highlight the financial, productivity and environmental benefits of embracing IT energy efficiency.
• Illustrate why increasing IT resource utilization from today’s low levels offers the most significant energy efficiency gains and why current efforts to improve utilization are failing.
• Provide motivation and actionable guidance for IT and business decision makers to improve IT energy efficiency and resource utilization through technologies such as cloud computing.

If you are looking to reduce costs and increase the ROI from IT (particularly within data centers), or simply contribute to reducing the environmental impact of IT, please download this onscreen-readable whitepaper and let me know what you think.

Technology Treading Lightly

The IE team recently published the results from a set of tests comparing the energy efficiency of the latest competing browsers.  Spoiler-alert – IE9 was the most efficient.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/28/browser-power-consumption-leading-the-industry-with-internet-explorer-9.aspx

Technology Treading Lightly

I analyzed some of the raw data from the tests and discovered that in addition to saving over 1/2 the power on idle (54%) as mentioned in the study, the newer server  provides almost 300% more transactions at any given CPU load than the 2006 model year server, resulting in about a 300-400% improvement across the board on performance-to-power ratios.

This is really great news.  Of course, it also implies that in order to really take advantage of these new servers, you must make sure you are really driving up utilization or that extra performance is going to be wasted.  Simply consolidating even more idle VMs to these new servers really isn’t going to cut it.  Your ops management infrastructure needs to be aware of what is going on inside those VMs so it can shut some of them down if appropriate.  This is going to require applications to take a more active role in resource utilization in the future. 

Download the study here  (2.67MB)

Technology Treading Lightly