Archive for March, 2009
We have all been doing this – buy some new light bulbs, screw them in, and save the planet – simple. It was until I picked up an interesting article in today’s New York Times: A lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say [...]
Look for bulbs with the Energy Star label, which indicates they meet at least minimal performance requirements. Be aware that compact fluorescents can take one to three minutes to reach full brightness. This is not a defect. The place where people are most likely to use compact fluorescents, closets, may be a poor choice. Experts at [...]
Sometimes religious leaders say stupid things, sometimes they say dangerous things, often they are irrelevant and out of touch. Rowan Williams is a religious leader who quite obviously gets it. Here’s how the BBC reported on his views on climate change and the impact of doing nothing. Brilliant, quite brilliant. God will not intervene to [...]
The BBC reports today that state supported and practical steps are being taken to train the young solar and wind power engineers of the future. The guys who install and maintain wind turbines and solar panels. In Tehachapi, California, it can feel like four seasons in one day. In this remote corner between the Sierra Nevada [...]
Laurie O’Donnell (@laurieod) leaves LTS Scotland where he has worked as Director of Learning and Technology for eight years building the internationally recognized GLOW Schools Intranet. The Scotsman Newspaper reported that film maker George Lucas said to the US House of Representatives: ‘In what must rank as one of the most heady compliments ever given to an [...]
Twittering earlier with Mike Pinkerton (@mikepinkerton) at Google – he tells me that there is no date yet for releasing Google Chrome for Mac OS X. Mike explains some of the stuff going on inside Google Labs in his blog Sucking less, on a budget. What’s up Google, don’t you like (care about) the Mac community?
I met with David Wright from Verari yesterday and we were talking about high density computing and power particularly about Verari’s data center in a container product. That got us to talking about power distribution problems and the fact that some of the big firms have been buying up sites in old US steel towns [...]
I have been in Milford MA with my friend and colleague Steve Duplessie of the Enterprise Strategy Group this week working with Steve and his team around a number of key announcements from Cisco on their entry into the Data Center Server market. There is a lot of information to take in but here is [...]
Last year I spoke to Ron Croce COO of Validus DC Systems about their unique approach to Data Center power provision. He and I both share strong backgrounds in power engineering and the certain knowledge that the way that data centers are powered today is fundamentally flawed. Today’s data centers take power from the grid [...]
I published a brief article last month about a set of test we were doing on a production data warehouse that was performing very poorly. Running the database on a Dell Server with 4 x 73GB SAS drives configured in RAID0 we got a respectable 575 IOs per second (IOPS) on a random write test. [...]
