CollabWorks

The Grocery Store & Green IT

What do grocery stores and data centers have in common? Or rather what should they have in common? They both have a need for to supply cooling, for the grocer, it's to the perishable food products, and for the IT manager, it's for the hot servers. On a recent visit to Net Apps remarkable data center, I saw many innovative practices they use to minimize power consumption: automatic wireless sensors to regulate cooling, flywheel technology for back-up power supply, a state-of-the art control center. All really cool stuff, but the thing that struck me most was their use of simple clear PVC strips, just like those found in a typical grocery store to keep hot aisles hot, and cool aisles cool. Deploying simple plastic strip curtains results in a big gain in cooling efficiency without hindering access to servers. This simple relatively low-tech innovation, borrowed from grocery stores, was also coupled with heat sensors so that the curtains would automatically fall to the floor, so as not to obstruct sprinklers in the event of a fire. Kudo's to Net App for pioneering this simple, inexpensive idea.

Open IT Founders Forum, From Here to Sustainability

We were lucky enough to have Joel Makower, generally regarded as the "Guru of Green", speak to us. Joel gave us a great overview of the Green movement in industry as it worked its way from a corporate "nice-to-be-a-good-citizen" stage to now, where green is about making financial sense.

Joel gave us some great stories about how Tyson, yes the chicken company, is literally turning its waste into energy, and how Ford and DuPont formed a new partnership based around the number of cars painted, rather than paint bought and often wasted as it was sprayed into the air. Now they collaborate together to find more efficient ways of painting and recovering lost paint, and DuPont is paid based on what Ford really wants, painted cars.

My favorite example was Coca-Cola's analysis of their own carbon footprint. The largest cause of emissions was not in the manufacturing process, nor even in the transportation fleet. To find out what it was, see Joel's slides on our collaboration site. If you would like a password for our collaboration site, e-mail me, and I'll be happy to get you one.

You can find more about Green by visiting Joels Site: www.makower.com.

Collaboration Event

Our next Open IT Forum is on April 3rd, in San Carlos, California

We're having the event at Piacere Ristorante  at 727 Laurel Street, San Carlos, CA 94070-3113

If you are interested in attending, please RSVP here.

I wanted to tell you a little bit more about our speakers we have lined up. We've talked a bit about what "Going Green" might mean, and we have two experts with interesting perspectives: Vladimir Mioushev of 3Tera, and Joel Makower of GreenBiz.com.

Vladimir Mioushev, President and CEO of 3Tera
www.3tera.com

Ask several IT professionals to define virtualization and you might get as many definitions as people you ask. In this case, we're asking Vlad Mioushev, who is approaching virtualization from the point of view of a grid. While traditionally grid technology has been reserved for super-computing number-crunching activities such as weather forecasting or protein-folding simulations, Vladimir has made this technology available to transactional web-applications.

Find out more what this technology means for IT organizations from a management and deployment point of view, and how other CIOs are using it.

PS. 3Tera's AppLogic was just named 2007 Category Breaker by Network World Magazine

Joel Makower, Founder of GreenBiz.com
www.makower.com

Green is red-hot! We are very fortunate to have "the guru of green business practices" as a speaker. Joel will share his perspectives on how CIOs can not only be environmentally friendly, but at the same time, put more green in a company's coffers. Joel has been speaking for 20 years about sustainable business practices. He has worked with a wide range of major companies on corporate environmental strategy and practices -- including Gap, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Procter & Gamble -- as well as with more than a dozen early-stage companies focusing on environmentally sustainable products and services. Joel will also give examples of collaboration between companies that are saving money and the planet at the same time.