Gmail Up To 80 Times Cooler (More Energy Efficient)?

In a recent blog post David Jacobowitz, Google's Program Manager, Green Engineering and Operations, says cloud-hosted gmail is many times more energy efficient than privately hosted corporate email systems. He says:

"We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient than running in-house email."

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You can read the analysis this claim is base on here (PDF). The case study considered energy used by the local clients, the network, and the servers in both Gmail via Google Apps and small, medium, and large corporate email systems.

There are two reasons, Google says, that its cloud is more efficient than your in-house-served email:

1. Many thousands of emails systems share the virtual servers in Google's cloud. Thus storage and computing cycles can be allocated much more efficiently. Since peaks of use of the different users and systems won't generally overlap, less reserve capacity needs to be kept available per account compared to a single-company system. Also, a small company on Gmail can use only a fraction of a server if that is all it needs, which wouldn't be possible if it had to provide its own.
2. Google's custom server and power supply hardware, custom software, and sophisticated data center engineering (cooling) make Google's systems among the most energy efficient in the world.

Larger systems (their case considered a firm hosting 10,000 email users) are significantly more energy efficient than small users (the case modeled a 50-user system)--using perhaps one-twentieth as much juice per user. Google just extends this, provisioning millions of users and operating with correspondingly greater efficiency per user.

Here are the results Google calculated:

Business Type	Annual Energy Per User
Small (50 users)	175 kWh
Medium (500 users)	28.4 kWh
Large (10,000 users)	7.6 kWh
Gmail	<2.2 kWh

Thus an email user on a system hosted locally by a small business uses 80 times as much energy per year than a Gmail user. Gmail is 80 times "cooler".
In fact the carbon footprint of Gmail is even smaller than this energy comparison would imply. Since 2007 Google says it has been completely carbon neutral, buying carbon offsets to cover emissions that it hasn't been able to eliminate by efficiency measures or purchase of renewably generated electricity.

The Google post also gives some figures on the energy consumed when you watch a YouTube video.

This article in InformationWeek mentions some of the other issues beyond pure energy economics that are relevant to the cloud vs in-house decision.

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Reposted from Doc's SCN blog.

Ford Mines Drivers' Minds (Behaviors) To Save Gas

Can your car anticipate your driving patterns and optimize its performance to use fuel more efficiently, or extend your range if you are driving an electric vehicle (EV)? Can it see into the future? Ford is trying to develop the software and systems to enable it to do so.
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Google has been developing technology for cars to drive themselves, but the Ford project has more limited aims. If your car could gather information as you drive, and gradually build a model of your driving habits, plus download information about your driving environment, it could fine-tune its operation to save energy.

Chevy Volt

Ryan McGee, technical expert on vehicle controls architecture and algorithm design at Ford, says, “We have this massive amount of data. The question is what to do with it.”

A recent piece from Greentech Media outlines the concept:

"Code-named Green Zone, the software tries to anticipate where you plan to drive. Say it’s 8 a.m. on Tuesday. Your car knows that this is the second day in a five-day sequence in which you drive 23.5 miles to the same destination. The software crunches data about your driving habits, the topography of the drive, any details about traffic and time-to-destination, and information about how the car performs. It then tries to maximize the power the car draws from the battery pack and minimize the work performed by the gas engine."

This scenario is for an EV with a backup gas engine, like the Chevy Volt. But the same concept could be applied to hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius, plug-in hybrids, full battery-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, or even just internal combustion gasoline or diesel vehicles.

The article says the car's systems would connect to cloud-based data resources to manage all the necessary data. In addition to data from the car and driver themselves, such a system would obviously also incorporate data such as the local current and forecasted weather, the local topography and traffic along the anticipated route, the availability of charging points at the likely destination, and so on. Each of these is a complex data model of its own.

Your car would know (probabilistically from historical data, via models, or via real-time data collection along the route) what the traffic was like ahead. In hybrid vehicles the different systems (electric motors, gasoline engine) operate optimally under different conditions. The car could plan its use of these resources to most efficiently deal with different speeds, idling times in stop-and-go traffic or at lights, anticipated episodes of acceleration or braking, and so on. It wouldn't have to wait for you to press the gas or the brake to know what was going on.

Greentech says "The probabilistic principles underlying the experiment are similar to predictive algorithms exploited by search engines. In fact, Ford uses Google’s predictive APIs."

We are all familiar with the computers that have become important parts of automobiles to operate their many high-tech systems. But now we should get ready for cars that have whole IT systems, and communicate moment-by-moment with vast data structures in the cloud.

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Reposted from Doc's SCN blog.

The photo is by Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz from Wikimedia Commons, used under his Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Sustainability and the CFO

Sustainability, environmental issues and "green" have long since moved from "nice to have" parts of Corporate Social Responsibility, often part of the Corporate Communications (PR) portfolio, toward the center of management of the firm. A sign of this is the increasing involvement of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in sustainability issues. Most sustainability and environmental data is like financial data. It is financial data in many cases. (See this previous post for a discussion of the types of green data firms are faced with managing these days.).
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A new report (pdf) from consultants Ernst & Young discusses this trend. It says, among other things:

• The old "social responsibility" and "corporate citizenship" silos are crumbling.
• Institutional investors are deciding that "climate change and sustainability issues often bear directly on companies’ risk profiles, their reputations and their financial performance."
• "These trends are changing the CFO's role in three critical areas: investor relations; external reporting and assurance; and operational controllership and financial risk management." The report discusses each of these three areas.

What does this mean for IT?
Finance, bookkeeping, control, and financial reporting, all managed by the CFO, are leading consumers of IT. Thus the office of the CFO is very experienced and sophisticated about the management of such data, and the products and services that are available. By contrast the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) or equivalent manager in charge of sustainability was often connected to PR or communications, corporate health and safety, legal and regulatory, or facilities. These functions don't have the clout and experience that the CFO has in using IT to efficiently manage data, or using data for management (BI).

So my theory is that getting the CFO involved in managing the firm's sustainability will lead to the use of much more sophisticated data management tools and services. Also, mining corporate sustainability data to provide guidance to management will be obvious to the CFO. And the CFO has the clout to get the data management products he or she needs.

External reporting in particular has traditionally been the responsibility of the CFO. The formal quarterly and annual reports, and the auditable data that underlies them, have been his or her job. As companies try to assemble data and submit reports, for instance under the Global Reporting Initiative, they are reinventing approaches that have been mastered by the finance department.

So if you have been involved in designing or implementing financial software, there is a whole new world awaiting your attention.

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Reposted from Doc's SCN blog.

Earlier post about Timberland's decision to have the sustainability function report to the CFO.