Green is the new Black

Many IT departments are instigating their own green initiatives in response to concerns of global-warming, green-house gases and dependence on foreign oil. We are finding that, in IT, being eco-friendly green can lead to monetary green, too.

If you're not familiar with the concept of a data center, its a facility ranging from the size of a closet to several large buildings where servers, disks, phone systems and network components are lined up. The floors are often raised so that you can get underneath to feed cable through. There is a hum that is a combination of air conditioning, fans and spinning disks. While we think of this as something large corporation have, it's standard for medium-sized business and some small business too.

The problem is all that equipment draws a lot of electricity. It also gives off a lot of heat, hence the air conditioning. Even in our region, where outside temperatures rarely warrant inside cooling, we have air conditioning running all the time. The air conditioning draws a lot of electricity itself. It is generally accepted that the cost to power and cool a server over its life will exceed its purchase price. Outside of the data center desktops, laptops and monitors consume a reasonable amount of power considering that they sit idle most of the day. Don't forget the energy to build and deliver the equipment and the nasty, nasty stuff inside that makes it all work.

I've assembled a list of GreenIT links at my del.icio.us site http://del.icio.us/heycorey/greenit. In particular, let me highly recommend Dave Ohara's article called Build a Green Datacenter in the October 2007 Technet magazine (a podcast interview is here) and his blog Green Data Center Blog. When you're done reading Dave's article you'll wonder if you weren't reading an accounting magazine. Welcome to corporate IT - it's not about the tech, it's about helping the business. A few thoughts that occur to me as I scan the articles:

• Data centers, even small ones, are expensive to site, power and cool. The information needs of the organization, however, mean there won't be a decrease in the growth in IT equipment. Green IT can help to mitigate that cost.
  
• The greening of IT crosses a wide range of occupations (and education levels): chip and power supply designers, network administrators, electricians and HVAC specialist to name a few.
  
• There is a place in the industry for people who want to work with computers and want to do something good for the planet. In fact, there are now emerging specializations devoted specifically to greening IT.
• IT professional who can demonstrate business acumen, technology knowledge and analytical skills is going to be able to make a name for themselves in the corporation.
  

In terms of education, three opportunities strike me as valuable. The first is the exercise of developing of a Green IT business case. Without having to implement technology, a student can go through the process of estimating costs and benefits; investigating and selecting technology; and building the business case. A student can demonstrate math concepts, critical thinking and analysis, use of office productivity tools and presentation skills. Could make for a good senior project.

The second is server virtualization, a technology that allows one physical server to run multiple logical servers, called a virtual machine (VM). Virtualization allows each VM to share memory, disk and processor of the underlying physical server so each is used to its fullest extent. It's the computing equivalent of only running your clothes washer when you have a full load, except it allows you to wash whites and reds at the same time (without everything being pink). It also saves a ton of space and reduces cooling demands. At the City, for instance, about 40% of our servers are virtual. As a result we have been able to avoid costly expansion of the server room and climate control systems. Virtualization needs to be included any networking and server administration programs at the college level.

The final opportunity comes at the desktop by using the PC's power management and Wake-on-LAN capability. Think about it, the average work PC is used at best 8 to 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. However, at many organizations like mine we don't want the PCs shutdown at night because we have automated scans, downloads and updates running. It is possible to put the computer into a low-power mode, then send it a signal to wake up, run its maintenance and go back to sleep. It too should already be on the agenda for desktop management programs.

It would be great to hear stories from practicing professionals about their use of these or other green techniques in the data center and on the desktop. What Green IT skills do you think would help a student in the job marketplace? What topics and/or classes would encourage you or your staff to get back in the classroom?

Image Citation: P1000990 by Ronnie Garcia under Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

A new blog: No Sno U

I suppose it's a little late in the process, but I have just started a blog called No Sno U. As you might guess from the title, I'm not a big fan of the proposed 4-year university in Snohomish county. Anything that takes money away from education and moves it to construction is a bad deal from my perspective. Feel free to stop on by if you would like to discuss how we might improve technical education in the county for a little less than a billion dollars and a little sooner than 20 years.

Tags: Snohomish County, University of Washington, branch campus

Links and Resources: January 27th, 2008

• What not to do with PowerPoint - Electrical engineer turned stand-up comedian Don McMillian will you help your students avoid major PowerPoint errors in this short, hilarious video clip.
• AACU 2008 Business Leader Survey - Association of American Colleges and Universities surveyed business leaders and found, among other things, that projects and internships were a better way to assess learning than multiple choice tests (well, duh). The web site Inside Higher Ed offers additional commentary here.
• Is there an IT skills shortage? - The January 12th edition of InformationWeek featured a debate between believers and the skeptics. CIO Insight weighed in on the believers side. I am on the side of the believers, if only because I believe there is going to be a skills shortage in all fields as baby boomer retirements start rising.
• Computer knowledge undervalued in UK - Microsoft seems concerned that a poll of 500 UK business managers put IT skills #7 in a list of top business skills. I'm not so sure that IT skills deserves to be any higher, the first six are pretty important.
• CSTA Podcasts - The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) is an organization of K-12 computer science and computing instructors sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). They just released a collection of podcast where leaders, students and practitioners talk about their passions in IT.
  

Blogging <> Browsing

Initially I didn't care much for blogs. It struck me just one more person with an opinion. I've had a change of heart over the last 18 months and it's because I came to realize that blogs are not just another type of web page. Blogs are an extended conversation - a conversation between the reader and the author, between authors of different blogs and between readers. In this post (that's what a blog entry is called) I'd like to share with you why I changed my think and how I think you can get the most of your blog experience (assuming you aren't already an experienced blogger, in which case you are free to leave).

Let's start, however, with a short video 3 minute video called Blogs in Plain English from the Common Craft Show. Click on the big "play" button in the middle of the image below and, assuming your school doesn't block everything useful on the web, you'll see a quick explanation of blogs in the browser window.



So, like I said, I had a change of heart about blogs. In the summer of 2006 my wife Eva was teaching a week-long class in Web2.0 tools for teachers at Bellevue CC. One night she brought home a book called Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom by Will Richardson. She plopped it down in front of me and said "I need to review this by tomorrow, when can you start reading". (Nearly 30 years ago I typed a couple of her term papers for her and I've been paying for it ever since.)

Working through the examples in the book forced me to blog right. I read Will's blog and then followed the links in his blog roll to other related blogs that he reads. I set up a RSS feed reader account so I received notice when new content was available and added several of the most interesting blogs to the feed reader. And while I did not immediately start posting comments to any of the blogs, I did start discussing them with friends and family. Today my feed reader has about 30 news feeds, half that I read regularly and a quarter that I am "trying out". Often I read my blog on my internet-enabled cellphone while I'm killing time. And now I have my own blog and I am introducing you to blogging.

It was a pretty big change in a relatively short time, but I am finding that if you don't fully embrace the new tools of the web and cellphone then you won't really be able to assess their usefulness to you. So if you are ready, I'd like you to try getting into blogging, at least for a month or so. Here's what I'd like you to try:

1. Comment on a blog. At the bottom of this post you will see my name, the time I posted this entry and the number of comments. Click that link and leave me a comment. Tell me what you thought of the video clip or the color scheme or your previous experiences in blogging. Generally you want to follow a blog for awhile before you start commenting, so this will give you a safe experience for posting a comment. However, your comment will be read by everyone, so don't me about that troublesome rash or give me your home phone number.
   
2. Share a blog. Once you're done with your comment, go back to the same area of the post and you will see a little envelope icon. Click it and you can email a link to a friend or co-worker. Add a little comment so they know what you are doing or send it to yourself for practice.
   
3. Visit sites in my blog roll. My blog roll is a list of blogs I read, enjoy and respect. It's in the white section of my blog on the right-hand side under my bio. Navigate to a couple of the blogs on my list and then try linking to some on that author's blog roll. Don't forget to read some of the comments too. I would recommend 2 Cents Worth and Dangerously Irrelevant for those thinking about education at more general level. U Tech Tips and Cool Cat Teacher are written by folks in the classroom every day. Marketing and business instructors might want to try Micro Persuasion. Fellow board members in the business world might find Kirkland-based Futurist.com or the Long Tail interesting. If you like the newest toys try Engadget and if you wonder how those cool maps are made try Google Maps Mania. If none of those sound interest you can go to Technorati and search for your favorite topic. You might be surprised how many blog posts there are about chindogu.
   
4. Use a RSS Feed Reader. Okay, this one you don't have to do right away, but a RSS feed reader reader improves the experience because you don't have to remember to return to each site and you don't have to figure out what's new. I use Bloglines, but many people like Google Reader. You don't need a gmail email account to use Google Reader, but if you do have gmail you might find it the easier to setup. Liz Davis has created three videos, or screencasts, on using Google Reader which you can find at her professional development YouTube playlist. Once you have the reader setup, come back to Advisory Bored and at least two other blogs to your reader (for now).
   

That's it - time for you to start reading. I'm going to start posting regularly, weekly I hope, so if you don't have time for item #4 then just navigate back to the Advisory Bored every so often until you have time to work with the RSS feed reader. Please post a comment if you have a question.

Tags: blogging, blogs, Will Richardson, Common Craft Show

XP or Vista: Teach the transition

If you are teaching IT, particularly at a community college where course content needs to be aligned with business, you should be adding Vista training to your programs now because corporate America isn't embracing Vista at this very moment (article 1, article 2, article 3, article 4).

Oh, you heard me right. I'm suggesting you need to add training for a product that isn't being widely used and which many are actively resisting. Let me explain.

The primary reason to teach Vista is that while corporate IT did not want to jump in with both feet upon initial release, they will eventually upgrade to Vista. The planning for Vista migrations will start in earnest in 2008 with actual implementations running through 2009 and into 2010. So organizations will need Vista-savvy staff in the very near future to handle the assessment and planning phases of the project.

Read that last sentence again. Corporate IT needs people who are familiar with Vista and can help them survive the conversion. Simply put, you should be teaching the transition. That would included methods, tools, project management and analysis (finally a tangible reason for general CIS students to take systems analysis).

I manage application development, so I'm not an expert in desktop management (please jump in with comments if you work the desktop), but it is my experience that it would be extremely valuable to have staff that could, among other things:

• prepare an organizational readiness assessment to determine if and when in-house and vendor applications; hardware and peripherals; and the user community are ready for Vista.
  
• describe and use new Vista features that might offer a real benefit to the organization (BitLocker, widgets or Windows Defender) so that the whole conversion isn't done solely out of fear of "falling behind".
  
• use tools that simplify the assessment, testing and implementation process. These would include, but are not limited to, the application capability toolkit (ACT), Virtual PC and SMS/Operations Center.
  
• create a business case for either moving or waiting, weighing organizational needs against the costs of migrating (both time and money for the migration and the opportunity cost of projects not done because of the migration).

I will also suggest that these classes might target working professionals who see their company's Vista migration as a great professional development opportunity for themselves. These young professionals may not need a degree, but a couple of classes or a certificate might be a nice fit. Consider a lab class to provide them the chance to get hands on with the tools in a safe, non-production setting (something hard to come by in many small and medium sized businesses).

Let me close by going back to the beginning. If you want to align your educational programs to my business needs, then transitions are the name of the game. In addition to XP/Vista, we are dealing with SQL Server 2000 to 2005, Office 2003 to 2007; SharePoint Portal Services to MOSS and SMS to Operations Center. Those institutions that are ahead of the curve - prepared with programs as the need emerges - will be able to deliver a valuable educational experience for their students.

Tags: Vista, XP, operating system