Algorithmic efficiency is key in green IT

Today's world of IT relies on software as the key aspect which makes it powerful, adaptable and interesting. All of this software is programmed by engineers who have developed a way to make sure that whatever you do on the computer gets translated into electrical signals and put into action. The more the efficient software is, the less electricity we use and the more green our IT becomes.

One of the aspects of software efficiency is algorithmic efficiency. It sounds more difficult than it is. Lets break this down with a metaphor. Say you take a Taxi to the airport. If you have an experienced and good driver, he will take the shortest and quickest route. If you have a bad driver, he will take a longer route. In the same way, software can be programmed with algorithms that work fast and efficiently or algorithms which are slow and inefficient. Good software is algorithmic efficient.

Lets take Google: two searches produce about the same amount of emissions as boiling a kettle of water. Although Google is probably very efficient in its algorithms, it could reduce the emissions by trying even harder.

One technology that is noteworthy in light of algorithmic efficiency is Hadoop. Hadoop is a highly efficient software project aimed at big data. Big data is obviously a great trend at the moment and the more efficiently we can use it, the greener and better. Without getting into the details of Hadoop, the concept is to be more efficient with algorithms. This video of IBM provides an overview:

Especially for companies in the data business (such as social networks or data storage) this is a very lucrative business proposition. It provides greater efficiency in retrieving and using data and thereby yields two benefits that interest managers: cost-saving and efficient resource allocation.

The difficulty here is that Hadoop is fundamentally very different from other software structures and would require businesses to completely change their IT systems (at least on a software level). A risk is also that if companies were to switch, they might be unfamiliar with the new system or have difficulty to maintain it. This is why cloud providers, like IBM, have specialized in providing Hadoop solutions.

Hadoop is a classic example of algorithmic efficiency and, or similar solutions, should be considered by all software businesses. It will not only make your software more green, but it also makes it more resource efficient (therefore requiring less servers) and quicker (increased consumer satisfaction). Algorithmic efficiency is therefore key in green IT and one of the most interesting technological trends out there.

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The top 3 greenest and top 3 dirtiest cloud vendors

There is currently an intertwining trend between cloud computing and big data. More and more companies take a big data business model approach that focus on high-value customer relationships. This requires ever more storage space for data and a local server is barely enough. This is why demand for cloud computing, as the last resort for infinite data storage, has grown by almost 30% in 2013 alone.

The classic options for a cloud solution are Amazon, Google and Apple. In regards to green IT, Apple for example states that all its data centers are running with renewable energy. Amazon though, does not even report carbon emission numbers. This can be taken as a sign that they are not using green energy for their energy supply.

So to shed some light on who's green and who's not, here is a list of the top 3 green cloud vendors:

1. Google: As mentioned in one of our previous articles, Google's focus on green energy is high and they do try to use as minimal unclean energy for their services.
2. Rackspace: High focus on green energy as well. It is the leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the second year in a row. 
3.  HP: One of their business propositions is to provide green energy.

On the contrary, we have the bad boys in the industry:

1. Salesforce: They show no focus on green IT at all.
2. Oracle: "Green is not in Oracle's vocabulary" as experts have said.
3. Amazon: Amazon is actively using coal as one of its main energy sources.

The ratings are based on a scorecard system developed by Greenpeace to measure their "greeness" in cloud services.

While companies have great economic benefit in this fast growing sector, they have a unique opportunity and great responsibility to become more green. Managers have the decision power to influence this by always picking the provider which is more green. It is not about having to pay more, it is just about making the right decision.

Stay tuned! Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.

Microsoft’s Trial with Fuel Cell Energy

Microsoft experiments with methane-powered fuel cells are extremely fascinating. Without further a a due, lets get into the topic:

So what is Fuel Cell?

Fuel cell is a device that generate electricity through chemical reaction. Fuel cell has gained intrigue and popularity through its environmentally healthy benefits. Unlike fossil fuels the by products of fuel cells are just simply heat and water. The beauty of a fuel cell is the fact that the flow of chemicals is constant, this means that it never goes dead - as long as there is a flow of chemicals into the cell, the electricity flows out of the cell.

With a growing trend and consumer expectations for large companies to take more proactive steps for green efficiency, Microsoft has take the initiative and is building a data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming that will be powered by methane generated at a waste water treatment plant. Microsoft has also released a research paper indicating its plans to construct smaller methane fuel cells right in their server racks - essentially putting tiny power plants inside of the data centers. The Cheyenne data center will be powered by 300-kilowatt fuel cell located near the waste water plant, the new concept would use thousands of 10 to 20 kilowatt fuel cells.


Microsoft have claimed that this initiative could save about 20 percent of the cost of the data centre, but also argue that they win out because of reliability. The set-up would be based around multiple fuel cells, so there would be no single point of failure.

“Why this hasn’t been done before is that the fuel cell technology has evolved to the point that the power efficiency that would normally need a large turbine can now fit in a rack,” Sean James, a senior research program manager for Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services, told the magazine.

So with this exciting trial underway, it’s success or failure will undoubtedly pave the way for further improvements in green technology.

Ref:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/microsoft-fuel-cells/

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell1.htm

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/microsoft-fuel-cell-data-centre-131728

Top tips for how to make your iPhone battery last longer!

 
Now we will get practical from a consumer point: lets fix the problem of bad battery life on your iPhone (or even Samsung Galaxy). Getting your iPhone battery to last longer is actually quite easy and only requires a few simple steps and changes in your iOS 7.

The new iPhone 5S for example offers a mere 10 h talktime and internet. The problem in essence here is that your phone will not even last one day.

So lets start with the basics of battery saving:

• Update to the latest iOS. Usually this always includes optimizations in regards to battery life.
• Reduce brightness. Slightly reducing your brightness already helps a lot. Make sure you are at around 40% brightness on iOS 7 and have auto-brightness activated. 
• Use more Wifi instead of 3G/LTE.  Cellular takes a lot of energy and Wifi is much more friendly in that regard. Always join your local office network and possibly even turn data usage off while at the office. You do not need it if you have Wifi!
• Turn off Bluetooth if you do not need it. That's not just more secure, Bluetooth sucks your battery dry. 

 Now some more tips if your still craving for more battery life:

• Turn off a few iOS 7 features you do not need:
• Turn off Airdrop (unless you are sharing contacts daily)
• Do not use animated backgrounds
• Turn off Raise-iPhone-To-Talk for Siri
• Do not enable the auto-update feature. Especially if you are more on-the-go and never in a Wifi network.
• Limit push notifications. Do you really need Shazam and your favorite games to send you push notifications? No! Let Facebook, Whatsapp and mail apps keep pushing you notifications but the rest is just wasting your battery life.
• Do not keep heavy apps open all the time. If you have heavy apps like Skype, Spotify or Pandora installed, just close them if you do not use them. Especially apps which stream things or do VoIP, try to limit their usage and certainly avoid using them over 3G/LTE.
• Recalibrate your iPhone at least once a month. Use your iPhone and let it completely go dry. Then completely charge it in one go without interruptions. This will recalibrate the calculation for the battery life and hence become more accurate.

As a last resort: go into Airplane mode!

Stay tuned! Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.

The challenges of implementing green IT

Green IT is become one of the top priorities of CIOs and managers at companies. There are however several challenges that they face in implementing green IT. The challenges vary from difficulty in incorporating a green culture to the ever-growing demand of IT. What are these challenges?

According to Catherine Doran at Network Rail, one of the most important challenges is to incorporate a green culture that motivates the staff to play their part. Also, to consider environmental issues when designing and developing new systems. While this is arguably not easy, there are solutions that do not require a lot of effort. A notable example is the green printing solutions Yashilife looked at a few days ago.

For Steve Lamey at HMRC, it is crucial to influence hardware and infrastructure suppliers of IT equipment to reduce the costs across the entire supply chain. He argues that IT is estimated to contribute 2% of the world's CO2 emissions and its growing exponentially.

A recent study from Microsoft, shows that companies that run their applications in the cloud can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30% or more rather than running those applications on their own infrastructure.

Steve Wexler addresses the main challenge of Green IT when he explains that the most difficult issue is to establish a measurement and reporting format that accurately and fairly represents data center efficiency which can be easily compared to other data centers. This is currently presenting another challenge to cloud computing as the industry needs to establish agreements on what should be measured and how often.

It is expected that sooner or later every organization will go green, and cloud computing will play a major role in this.

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Why Green IT should be blogged about?

Following a year with record heats, multiple deadly hurricanes and typhoons, the environment is showing more and more its true colors and the effect of global warming. It is time that the environmental focus that has captured most of our industries, notably the car industry, shifts to the information technology world as well. This is why we have decided to create this blog, Yashil, to inform the world about the latest advancements in green IT and where there are still areas of great improvement.

It is worthy to start mentioning why green IT is actually important. In many ways, greener IT is linked to cleaner energy production. This however is another topic of heated discussion (see a very interesting short documentary by DeutscheWelle) and we would not like to focus on that. The focus is to make sure that the IT in itself becomes considerably more green. After all, our inefficient and high usage of IT just aggregate the demand for primary energy sources such as oil and electricity. This is why, greener IT is very important.

A study by McKinsey showed that big data centers, the massive backbone of our new economies like Facebook or Google, will produce more greenhouse gases by 2020 than the entire airline industry. Considering around 20 000 airplanes in the air at any given point in time and a per-airplane fuel consumption of 4 liters per second, we see the sheer size of the problem. IT, which is not green, will completely out-dwarf any industry we currently have. The inevitable conclusion is that our IT systems have to become a lot cleaner!

It is about finding high impact, cheap and novel solutions that keep our world comfortable but make IT much greener. All this has to play in tandem between being economical, environmental and social.

On the one hand, consumers have to become more conservative in their energy consumption. On the other hand, businesses and management also need to adopt an environment of greener IT. This goes from anything like saving costs to optimizing output. It is about managing power wisely, storing data securely and environmentally, efficiently managing processes and data and keeping up the great rate of technology advancements.

Green IT has to move to the business world and with Yashlife we will be exploring the advancements and concepts of that topic.

We are looking forward to keeping you informed about this interesting topic and let us engage you in the world of green IT as well. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well.