Rob Bernard knows green. As the Chief Environmental Strategist at Microsoft he walks the talk of reducing our carbon footprint, and evangelizing the impact of our actions on both the environment and quality of life. Our quality of life, and the quality of life others on the planet wish to enjoy.
Our Commitment
At Microsoft we are committed to software and technology innovations that help people and organizations around the world improve the environment. Our goal is to reduce the impact of our operations and products, and to be a leader in environmental responsibility.
(From Rob Bernard’s presentation at Data Center Dynamics, 6 Aug 09, Bellevue, WA)
Rob told the story of his first week at Microsoft. In their Redmond campus, Microsoft provided logo Styrofoam coffee cups to both visitors and employees. Lots of cups. Almost two million Styrofoam cups a year ended up in the trash.
Immediately prior to joining Microsoft, Rob had taken his family on a short trip to Oregon, where he stopped for a coffee break, and noticed the barrister provided him a paper coffee cup that included a printed notice the cup would bio-degrade within 30 days of use. Dust to dust. And about the same price as the Styrofoam cups. Those environmentally unfriendly landfilling non-biodegradable Styrofoam coffee cups.
Needless to say, Microsoft is now using biodegradable coffee cups, made from recycled paper stock.
The Green Telephone
Rob gave another example of simple things we can do. Oddly, he was not evangelizing Microsoft products, but rather talking to us as one planet resident to another planet resident. He gave the example of telephones, computers, and video. Most of us have a telephone plugged into the wall at home, next to a desktop or personal computer, in the same room as a television set.
Rob simply explained that he has now unplugged the telephone and television, and uses all three services off a lower power draw “Energy Star” computer. No more need to burn electricity to power redundant utilities within the house.
Microsoft Carbon Production
Microsoft is not perfect. In fact Rob noted as a company they had produced more than 936,000 tons of carbon in 2008. This is considered a grossly unsatisfactory condition for a company such as Microsoft, which employs some of the greatest minds in the world. Now Microsoft is on a corporate search and destroy mission to seek out and eliminate waste. Not only internally, but also to provide the lessons learned in the quest to reduce their negative impact on the planet to everybody. Kind of “open source” green.
Part of the philosophy is to lead by example, within the Microsoft campus, and stress to employees that everything learned at campus may be transferrable to their personal lives and homes.
Act with Transparency, Let Employees Inspire
- Understand your impact
- Share and borrow best practice
- Employees lead by example
- Compostable dishware
- Connector Bus (employee transportation from home or “park and rides”)
- Kitchen Grease (contribute to bio-deisel)
- Help individuals drive change
- Support employee engagement
- Measure, measure, measure
(From Rob Bernard’s presentation at Data Center Dynamics, 6 Aug 09, Bellevue, WA)
He actually believes, evangelizes, and strongly urges Microsoft employees to live the talk.
The Data Center Challenge
Rob advised the delegates the US Government is preparing to study the potential of taxing data center operators who consume too much utility power. He went on to urge data center operators to aggressively attack the existing inefficiencies of data center designs, and start a structured approach to rethink, rebuild, and redesign our approach to data centers.
Do you use blanking panels to reduce inter-cabinet hot air recirculation? Are you working on consolidating individual applications into server-based applications? Do you really understand the implications of running high powered computer and server systems which only use 5~10% of their CPU and disk capacity? When possible, do you insist on buying and deploying “Energy Star” equipment, for, well,… for everything?
One problem many data center operators have is they really don’t even know how much energy their data center, much less individual components of the data center, is actually using. As much as we’ve seen it in the news, most data center operators have not even attempted to calculate their Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) rating or factor. That is the equation that shows how much power you consume for support services in the data center vs. actual power being applied to IT equipment and operations.
Bottom line is how do we fix problems when we have not even audited our equipment and power consumption? We’ve got to get smart. A data center drawing 10 megawatts of power is producing a creepy amount of carbon, so we better start taking it seriously. And oh yeah, the government is going to eventually regulate our industry (since some data centers consume nearly as much energy as the city of Fresno), and penalize those data center operators who cannot prove their efficient use of power.
Consider the Cloud
It is here. It is working. It helps consolidate inefficient data centers into efficient data centers, eliminating much of the unused processing and storage capacity we insist on burning our limited CAPEX to fund. If we can bring our cloud utilization up to 80% through virtualization of existing stand alone server systems, well – we will recover considerable operational and capital expenses by eliminating hardware that consumes electricity, space, and costs a lot to purchase.
Smaller companies can gain even larger benefit by outsourcing their processing and storage to commercial cloud Infrastructure and Software as a service (IaaS/SaaS) providers, eliminating their need to operate a data center – period.
Rob Sells the Audience
Throughout his presentation the audience remained silent, fixed on his words. It is easy to listen to a man who not only knows his material cold, but also projects an enthusiasm which reaches into the soul of everybody present. And those who were squeezing into the back of the room to hear more of his ideas, stories, and visions of a greener future.
I am sold, as were a couple hundred other conference participants. I want to be green, and will not only try to bring more conscientious effort to my personal life, but also become a micro-evangelist in my company. And a macro-evangelist to my industry.
Rob’s website is http://www.microsoft.com/environment
John Savageau, Long Beach
Years ago, in the stone age of computing (~1990), I used to access an X-Window environment on my Sun Sparc5. Pretty cosmic stuff for the time, and gave a lot more control over the UNIX operating system than if a non-systems person like me would have through the command line. The applications, such as Asterisk (an old office suite for UNIX), were ahead of the times, giving us a very good idea of what the future held in a client-server world.
The UNIX environment allowed us to operate our workstations either in stand-alone mode, or fully networked into a mesh of other workstations. Any of the workstations interconnected in our “Internet” could operate as an application server for any other workstation on the network. All you needed to know was the IP address (or later domain name) of the workstation, and be able to pass the security check.
This accomplished a number of objectives. It ensured that losing one work station would never kill the entire network of applications. It allowed a certain level of efficiency to better utilize available resources (e.g., unused resources on workstations were used by server applications). And it allowed individual users to log in from any workstation and execute the applications they needed to do their work – location independent from their home workstation.
The PC Comes to Town
Personal computers started showing up in numbers in the mid-1980s. The PC was originally designed to stand alone, running applications stored on either “floppy disks” or hard drives (~10Mbytes). If you wanted to share files with others, you would save your file on a “floppy,” and use the “sneaker net” or “snail mail” to get your files to another location.
Portable computers and early laptops allowed a new level of mobility for data files, but still rarely had access to a network. The exception was for some of us in the military who had dial or some dedicated access to the MilNet, through a series of TAC Access points scattered around a global network military bases and other locations. Even then, passing a file to another person was generally a process of using the “File Transfer Protocol/FTP” or “TelNet” to upload or download a file of data from one personal or location to another.
This model continues for the most part today, with the exception data files are much easier to transfer via email attachments, or shared file areas than in the past.
Desktop computers and laptop computers still have individual copies of software such as Microsoft Office loaded on individual computers. When we use an application it is loaded off a local or attached hard drive, and files are created and saved locally. At some point the files may be synchronized with a central file server, however about 90% + of files created on a local machine retain an image of that file on the local machine.
The Virtual Desktop Environment
We are finally starting to complete the full circle back to individual workstations becoming clients of central servers housing applications. This “thin client” includes accessing applications that you may not even think of as client server or virtual desktop. You might use Yahoo mail, Gmail, or Hotmail. You can access those mail applications from anywhere in the world (that does not censor or restrict access to applications), and the individual messages and attached files remain on a server located, well located someplace out there in the clouds of Ether.
So we are already getting mentally prepared to start weaning ourselves off the need for having dedicated applications on all our desktop computers and laptop computers. With Microsoft Office 2010, and other virtual environments such as Google Apps, the need for local images is starting to fade.
On the corporate LAN, using a server-based office suite may render local desktop computers obsolete. If the processing is done on a central server, or in a distributed cloud environment, then all you may need is a good keyboard, mouse, sound system, and monitor. If your Internet access at home or in remote locations from the office LAN is adequate, then you will get the same performance out of your central application server.
And imagine not having to worry about virus and spyware monitoring or management. Imagine not being responsible for software patches, security updates, version updates… Imagine as a user that you can now contrite your efforts on creating value for your business, and not if your MS Outlook application is losing messages… IT worries about the applications and data integrity, you worry about working and creating value.
This is of course in a fully connected world. However, as a frequent traveler, it is also clear to me you are never far from being connected. In the US nearly all carriers offer “air cards” to their subscribers allowing Internet access from nearly any location with a wireless or mobile telephone signal. Every coffee house in America has wireless access. Most city areas have public WiFi access available either free (Yeah Long Beach!), or through subscription.
Yes, we do live in a connected world. And exceptions are exceptions. If I am using my computer on top of a mountain to help calculate environmental trends or impact, then yes. I will need to have a full suite of powerful applications located on my laptop computer.
You Still Have Your Apps
As I sit today, I can remotely access any application residing on my home computer via my network-connected laptop. Of course this is a micro-version of what we’ll see in the future. With the power of virtualization and cloud computing, even my desktop computer will no longer need to serve the purpose of supplying applications to my remote NetBook.
Questions remain with users, including myself, on how we will be able to ensure privacy, data integrity and security, ease of adding additional applications, hundreds of questions about the future.
Then I send a message to a friend via Twitter or a mail message from my company Outlook Webmail interface, and I realize it has already started, and we are taking baby steps to the virtual desktop. Learning to walk before running the virtual marathon.
John Savageau, Long Beach
Jogging along Sunset Canyon Drive in Burbank is great. You have the choice of peeling off into several great mountain trails, or you can just keep running the 
border line between the rugged Verdugo Mountains and the city of Burbank. From Sunset Canyon drive you are high enough to see the entire San Fernando Valley, as well as a glimpse of the Los Angeles skyline off to the south.
The best time is during sunset, as you see the tall Mexican Fan Palms dancing along the top of the city like a hundred green cotton balls and tumble weeds being whacked around the sky by tall Italian Cypress trees. The sunset brings out exciting colors of the palms, the city, and the rich reds, oranges, and the greens of the Verdugo Mountains. And the softness of the sun brings a warm softness to the community – a period of calm in a sea of dense humanity.
On those occasions when you really want a good workout, and have a burning desire to run the mountains, heading up Harvard Road to the Wildwood Canyon Road is a great place to unload excess energy. In addition, you will
take the wonderful views you get on Sunset Canyon, and multiply them 10 fold. However you need to have a real feel for off road running, as the trails soon get steep, and are not that hospitable for the casual runner.
On a recent morning trip up a mountain adjacent to Wildwood Canyon, I spied an old man carrying 2 five gallon jugs of water up one of the steeper trails, which ultimately led to the peak. Overwhelmed with curiosity, and a bit of fatigue, I could not help finishing my trek up the mountain and find out what this old man was doing.
(Here are a couple great shots of LA and the LA/San Fernando Skyline from Wildwood Canyon by SFXERIC on Flicker 1/2)
The Old Man of the Mountain
At the crest I caught up with the old man. He was watering a couple small saplings on top of the peak. Striking up a conversation I learned that he was 72 years old, had lived in Burbank since immigrating to the US from Chile following World War 2, and was retired. Thin, bronzed skinned, and in absolutely great shape, he explained that he hauled 10 gallons of water up the hill every morning to feed his saplings.
Why did he plant saplings on top of a mountain, so far away from everything, and visited by just a few people each day?
He exclaimed that at his age there is very little he can do to contribute to his city, neighborhood, or community. But he wanted to continue doing something useful with his life. A couple years ago the area burned during a wildfire (the “Castaway Fire” in late September 2005). Before the fire he enjoyed the beauty of Wildwood Canyon, the mountain trails running throughout the canyon, and the companionship he found with hikers who had nothing to do with him – except a mutual love of nature and the mountains.
As the entire area was burned to the dirt during 2005′s Castaway Fire, including all the trees and brush, he felt great sorrow at the loss suffered by nature, including animals native to the area and companions who drifted away following the fire.
He has no family left, completely on his own. He wanted to give back one small gift to Wildwood Canyon, the people of Burbank, and elsewhere who had given him such joy during his life. He knows fire is a part of nature that is necessary to replenish nutrients and eliminate dead fuel within the mountains and valleys of Southern California. On the other hand, he also believes that until it is time for the fires to come and take back the land, humans should use the land to enjoy their lives and indulge in the gifts of nature provided by his God.
The picture above is a shot of some burn with fresh growth coming up within the branches of the dead tree. Nature replenishing itself.
And the old man is so happy. Smiling, laughing, ready to tell a story – he is enjoying his twilight of life.
Since meeting the old man, I have spent a lot more time on the mountain. Every time I climb to the peak, I can see the soil at the base of his saplings is still moist, assuring me not only he is still watering the saplings, but also that he is healthy and strong enough to climb the mountain for his daily chore.
What the Old Man has Taught Me about Watering Saplings
As an animal of routines, I have the need to accomplish much of my life based on repetition. Now one of my repetitive tasks when in Wildwood Canyon is to carry a small bag, pick up the remains of those who have enjoyed the mountain, but may lack a bit of respect or discipline with their personal debris.
I don’t get angry, and have learned that beauty requires maintenance and effort. Wildwood Canyon will burn, but until the canyon’s time in the burn cycle is reached, there is a lot of fun to be had by all. Children, visitors, residents, anybody who needs to refresh their lives can accomplish their objective with a walk up the mountain. Maybe the old man has found a willing subject to pass the baton of love and responsibility of the canyon and mountain, or maybe I have just learned that a little bit of effort can have a huge impact on others.
Maybe it is not a deep thought, and maybe it has no real meaning in the big picture of life.
I hope everybody can find their own Wildwood Canyon, and maintain it with the love and passion of the old man.
I can’t stop thinking of the old guy, and will continue climbing the mountain in the hopes I will have the chance to meet and listen to him again.
John Savageau, Long Beach
