Friday 24 December 2010

Innovative IT Recycling Competitions

Carbon3IT Ltd are sponsoring the Innovative IT Recycling Competitions being run by the British Computer Society, more information can be found on this link

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.14826


Thursday 23 December 2010

Seasons Greetings.

We wish all our readers, customers and clients a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

We have a lot of things planned for the New Year including taking the ITILv3 Foundation Course & Exam.
We are talking to a number of potential customers in January, why not request a meeting to discuss your Green IT needs or just for a chat about Green IT and what it can do for your business.
Please contact on info@carbon3it.com or telephone us on 01926 843389 or 07897 780337

Monday 20 December 2010

Still want to get into the cloud?

Only last week I was speaking to a chap at the Green Grid Technical Update EMEA about the prospect of the law entering a data centre and getting up to mischief.

Well, it seems that its already happened judging by this link

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/data-centers-ra/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+wired%252Findex+%2528Wired%253A+Index+3+%2528Top+Stories+2%2529%2529&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

I think we can agree that the law in what ever form it takes is not technically savvy, and if any criminals and by this I mean kiddie porners, fraudsters and other ner'do wells have access to or own any item within a cloud data centre where your equipment is also housed, then you can expect some disruption.
Policemen will just take everything or seal the building preventing access, they'll also cut the comms links and they wont be very careful about it.

In this case the FBI took routers and network access equipment and I am sure I dont have to remind you that the network is what controls access to your equipment and in a hosted environment also provides the means for your virtual server to be moved in the event of a equipment or power outage.

Another very good reason to be very careful when you choose to get into the cloud

Thursday 16 December 2010

Good Day

Well, today I attended the Green Grid Technical Update for EMEA.

Lots of things coming down the line from them, including the Data Centre Maturity Model, basically an extended and enhanced best practices guidelines to be read in conjunction with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres. We were advised that the Server manufacturers are really upping the ante with energy efficiency measures, and the advice is to put pressure on your server supplier regarding energy efficient equipment. this will in turn get fed back to the server manufacturers and hopefully lead to further innovation in the server sector.

I also had some good news, I passed my last OU Module and have been awarded a degree.
I can now put BSc (Hons) Tech (Open) after my name! I am very pleased, its only taken 7 years!

As the festive season is upon I would like to take the opportunity to wish all our readers the very best for the holiday season.

We'll see you in the New Year unless there is something really juicy to let you all know about.

Saturday 11 December 2010

CRC Consultation Ends 17th December

The government has organised a couple of amendments to the CRC which can be found on this link:

CRC Consultation

The rationale and the proposals in detail can be found on this link:

http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/Consultations/crc-amendment/897-cons-amend-crc-energy-efficiency-scheme.pdf

I have been asked by the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group to review these proposals and how they will impact DCoperators, this is in progress and will be posted on the BCS website when completed.

The BCS DCSG will not be providing a response to the actual consultation as the timescale is too short to allow proper consultation with DCSG members.

Anyway, if you are a DC operator take a look at the proposals and if you have anything to say, make a response.

Monday 29 November 2010

EU Code of Conduct Data Centres Energy Efficiency

Just a short note to advise that I have now passed this exam and have contacted the BCS with regard to becoming an assessor for the new BCS Data Centre Accreditation awards scheme.

Please visit the BCS website for further information regarding the awards criteria and process.

Please note that the BCS Data Centre Assessment is in addition to any participation or endorsement to the EU Code of Conduct and provides a definitive assessment of where the subject data centre is on the road to energy efficiency.

Thursday 25 November 2010

WMICT Cluster

I attended the West Midlands ICT Cluster conference today and oh woe is me, yet more clouds.
Clouds are this and clouds are that, but yet when you talk to people about cloud services even those that work in the cloud and ask them the questions, they dont know.
If the people that work in the cloud cant answer simple questions then who can?

As blogged many times, organisations really really need to think carefully about entering the cloud, dont be taken in by the greenwash about the cloud being greener, its not.


And another thing, infrastructure as a service, beware beware beware.

Imagine you do enter the cloud and set up a host of servers, you'll be thinking about DR services as well wont you? Remember that some cloud service providers are also renting space in co location facilities, and you could unknowingly be buying DR services in exactly the same place as your primary service is located...if that particular facility goes down then you are going down as well.

Wednesday 24 November 2010

The Dirty Brown Cloud

Cloud Computing seems to be a buzz word at the moment, lots of organisations are promoting cloud services such as SaaS (Software as a Service) PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). so what are all these new wonderful services that are lurking in the cloud?
Answer: Nothing you dont already do.

Software as a Service is something like Citrix, the ability to open an internet portal and access a service from a server instead on on your PC, indeed any application that has been "web enabled" will run in the cloud.

Platform as a Service, ah this will be sharepoint or indeed any other collaboration type software where many users can access information over the web (intranet!)

Infrastructure as a Service, hmmm having servers and other storage capability located anywhere except in your own building, think DR!

What are the Green Benefits?

Reduced Electricity? Nope, additional equipment is required to give that 24/7/365 Resilience that many organisations think is the be all and end all of IT, so to provide this additional security cloud data centres need additional UPS's, additional networking and additional back up cooling systems

Reduced Cooling? Nope, as above in order to provide the additional resilence additional equipment is required, this equipment needs to be always on and even at idle will still have an energy overhead.

Reduced Hardware? Nope, in order to provide the resilience required, cloud operators will need to have large amounts of redundant servers and storage literally waiting for an outage at another Data Centre, so that that can move the applications and data across to the standby systems.

Reduced Software? Nope if anything additional software is required to provide security and resilence.

Cloud Services are simply a way for Data Centre operators to use up the spare space in their data centres. The data centres that are expensive to build and operate, especially now that the CRC is a pure carbon tax.

Data Centre operators will also face large carbon tax bills in the future, simply because they are not efficient, even the most green data centre operator in the UK will be charged lots of tax and pay for a lot of electricity and who is going to pay for the increased energy and tax bill?
Look no further that the clients who have adopted cloud services.

Oh and I almost forgot, if we look at the energy generation breakdown in the UK for 2009 (DUKES)

Coal - 28%
Nuclear - 18%
Gas - 45%
Imports - 1%
Renewables - 7%
Other Fuels - 1%

We can see that the UK is dependent on the importation of natural gas (our north sea fields are essentially deplete) and coal.

The cloud is dirty and brown, and in order to become clean and green a whole new way of providing cloud services is required and we are developing a new green cloud approach that we feel will be of benefit to the UK.
Watch this space!

Friday 19 November 2010

Busy Busy

This week started with a funeral for my cousin Andrew, who sadly passed away after a short battle with Cancer. This meant a trip to London to pick up Mother, then a trip back down to London to visit a potential client.
Then another trip back to the Midlands for a BCS Meeting.
Then another trip to London to take an exam.
This weekend I'll be doing family stuff and also preparing some information on a project we'll be carrying out early next year.
Sunday looks like dinner with the Ryders, I'll be cooking as usual.

On the Green IT front however, lots of things to think about and post later.
Until then enjoy the weekend.

Friday 12 November 2010

This Week...

started with a trip to the Green IT Expo at the QE2 Conference Centre in Westminster.
As always the seminars and quality of speakers was outstanding and anybody with an interest in Green IT or Sustainable Computing should mark this as the premier event in the Green IT Calendar.
Very PC launched a number of new products at the event as well as a new website and I was lucky enough to be invited to their after show party at the Cinnamon Club Bar (Thank You Peter!)
The view from most people that I spoke to was that Green IT was going to be high on the corporate agenda this year mainly due to a need to cut costs.

Some commentators are still promoting cloud services as the best way that organisations can become greener and cut costs, however nothing at the event has persuaded me that a move to the "dirty brown cloud" (dirty and brown because most data centres are powered by coal) will result in greener IT or for that matter a reduction in costs.
As I have blogged before, any organisation intending to move to the cloud needs to think very very carefully over what this means, both in the short term and over a longer timeframe.
I have doubts over the long term costs, service levels, the ease of amending or breaking a contract, the lack of open standards and fundamentally the so called green credentials of data centres providing cloud services.
Add to that the very real possibility that new data centres in the Uk are likely to be hit with the overall reduction in power generation caused by the large combustion directive and the nuclear decommissioning.

Here at Carbon3IT Ltd we believe that the current cloud model is fatally flawed and needs to be reviewed in line with external events not with a cosy view that everything will be fine.
Over to you cloud providers...

On Wednesday we attended the DataCentre Dynamics conference at the Lancaster Hotel, and specifically the EU Code of Conduct Data Centres Energy Efficiency update for stakeholders event, hosted by Paolo Bertoldi and others (Apologies for not catching all your names!)
There are some proposed amendments to the code out to the stakeholders for discussion and debate, including the new DPPE metric and others. Paolo has advised that the slides from the various presentations will be available on the EU Code of Conduct Website shortly.

All in all, a good week for those involved in the Green IT sector, lets hope that between us we can push the message home that Green IT is here to stay and that those organisations still dithering can make their minds up and get involved.

We have also progressed a few opportunities this week and hope to have some resolution soon... watch this space.

Friday 22 October 2010

Carbon3IT Ltd Update - Changes to CRC EES

The Government has announced that the CRC is to be radically changed.


However, apart from letting us all know that there will no longer be the reward kickback (additional monies over and above the £12/per tonne carbon payment to be returned if the company implement energy savings and thus reduce energy consumption) there is little detail.

Carbon3IT Ltd believe that the CRC was overly complex anyway and that simplifying it is the first step in the right direction.
We had felt that rewarding those who have taken the initiative to implement and reduce energy consumption and penalising those that may have intensive and complex energy needs was always going to be subjective, difficult to implement and unwieldy in terms of administration.

Now, the CRC is a pure carbon tax, and I dont know why some commentators feel that it has been implemented by stealth (it was always going to be a carbon tax!) organisations will still need to implement energy monitoring equipment and not rely on possibly in accurate meter readings/bills.

This where Carbon3IT Ltd can help, we can provide energy monitoring software and hardware at a value for money price, our 100 point monitoring system including it equipment monitoring can provide full and total energy monitoring and control for SME's and branch networks from less than £10,000, the system will pay for itself within 1 year (provided the results and recommendations are acted upon) and continue to accrue savings in subsequent years.

Sunday 26 September 2010

Energy Efficiency Roadmap - Amsterdam

I went to the Interxion "Energy Efficiency Roadmap" seminar in Amsterdam last Thursday.
This was a very interesting event rounded off by a visit to Interxion's energy efficient data centre.
A list of the speakers can be found on this link:

http://www.interxion.com/efficiency

It seems that our european partners are laughing at the UK's CRC energy efficiency scheme and the problems it is causing, and there is a very real threat that new cloud computing data centres will not be built in the UK. This is not as serious a threat as it may seem, as it is my belief that just other european states will come to embrace carbon taxes and energy efficiency schemes like the CRC, so as they say he who laughs last...
But the CRC EES does give the UK a real opportunity to embrace energy efficiency in Data Centres and we should start to think outside of the conventional DC model.

On a similar note, we see that Microsoft are also calling for a radical rethink on how data centres are built, including the notion of ITPacs, or pre-assembled components, these are not containerised units a la google but rather designed, and built to order for individual customers.
The full article can be found on the computer weekly website here:

www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/08/27/242541/The-new-future-of-datacentres.htm

However, some interesting discussions took place and some development work on these potential projects will be taking place after the 7th October..watch this space.

Tuesday 7 September 2010

New Website Up and Running

New Website up and running. Please take a look and give us some feedback (good or bad!) http://www.carbon3it.com/ We are still running our 250 seat free Greentrac Proof of Concept pilot, please use the website contact page for more information and to arrange an initial consultation.

Thursday 19 August 2010

Data Centres Forced to Leave UK by CRC ?

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/government-energy-plans-could-prompt-data-centre-exodus-8772#comment-17417


This is an interesting article. Now I dont believe that any organisation would necessarily upsticks because of CRC, it might, and I stress might make some organisations think twice about locating a new data centre in the UK, but the complexity and potential problems that could be caused by moving a data centre would be, for some, too risky.


That said, the Department for Energy and Climate Change has offered a CCA (Climate Change Agreement) to the Data Centre industry if it can provide a useful productivity metric, that is to measure what a Data Centre does and how much energy it takes to do it, and then take steps to reduce the amount of energy but keep the same productivity in future years.

Because the IT equipment put into Data Centres is getting more efficient as each year goes by, it could be argued that this will happen by default, however how long is a piece of string? Business growth usually means more servers, which in turn need more energy, more servers would mean more productivity, so we have a classic vicious circle.
We've seen the vicious circle in computing somewhere else have we not? Oh Yes, that would be the software/hardware vicious circle described in one of my earlier posts.

So, is the vicious circle a required component within computing? it seems like it but the question is, do we need to break it in order to reduce our industries total reliance on electrical energy, a resource in the UK that unless something is done pretty quickly will see our little green, amber, blue and red lights flicker out.

Wednesday 28 July 2010

HP Modular Data Centres

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/industrynews/article.php/3895141

So, what do we are think about this idea?

I quite like it, although there have been manifestations of this type of modular DC before, from other Vendors such as Sun. I dont know of anyone who has built one in the UK. I suspect that UK planning laws put the kybosh on that sort of thing

I cant believe that an equivalent DC costs $51Million dollars to build though verses $21 million for a modDC.

I reckon that you could construct and fit out a DC that costs far less than that.

Monday 26 July 2010

What is a Consultant?

What indeed is a Consultant?

The dictionary definition or rather the Wikpedia definition states:

A consultant (from the Latin consultare means "to discuss" from which we also derive words such as consul and counsel) is a professional who provides advice in a particular area of expertise such as management, accountancy, the environment, entertainment, technology, law (tax law, in particular), human resources, marketing, emergency management, food production, medicine, finance, life management, economics, public affairs, communication, engineering, sound system design, graphic design, or waste management.

A consultant is usually an expert or a professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. A consultant usually works for a consultancy firm or is self-employed, and engages with multiple and changing clients. Thus, clients have access to deeper levels of expertise than would be feasible for them to retain in-house, and may purchase only as much service from the outside consultant as desired.

So, what does a consultant do?, seems to me that if an organisation has a specific brief, say "what is the most suitable type of equipment for a task, then the consultant will be able to say "ah, that'll be equipment x, and for the following reasons" he wouldn't be much of a consultant if he dithers about and says "well, ah, theres two or three options that will perform the task, but I really cant say which one is the best"

Because, in my opinion, he should already know what is the best, or he should upon receipt of his brief, go out and conduct research and if neccessary test each appliance or application to detemine if it is the best.
Perhaps, he should come up with a report detailing what elements of each product overlap and if they have a unique selling point or feature that rises them above the also-rans.

In short, the consultant does the work that you have paid him to do.

Providing options for equipment/services etc to potential clients is tantamount to saying "well I'm not much good as this consultancy lark, but I've done a bit of research and come up with these three or four products, heres the pricing, now you decide"

Which is precisely what the client has paid you for, so why should he pay you, he's still got to make a decision, all you've done is narrow down his search.

I wouldn't pay for this low level service model.

When we specify a product or service, its because we have done the hard work, we've conducted the research, we've looked at the features and we've made the decision.

Trust is the one key attribute that is essential for a consultant, and what it boils down to is "do you trust your consultant to provide you with the best possible result for the brief you have set them?"

If so, great buy the product.
If not, maybe you need to get a new consultant or change your original brief

Thursday 15 July 2010

CRC Latest Data

As of the 12th July, some 738 organisations had registered for the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, and information declarations had been made by 254 non corporate organisations (public bodies) and 3167 corporate bodies.

Bearing in mind that the Environment Agency had originally estimated 6,000 bodies would fall under the scheme, and then revised this in April to some 12,000 - 15000 organisations, there still seems to be a lot of companies that have yet to register.
Registration closes on the 30th September 2010, and woe betide those companies who fail to register, as the documentation states "CRC is a mandatory scheme. Any organisation that does not comply with its legal obligations under CRC may face financial and other penalties. In addition, the Administrator will publish details of all organisations who have not complied with their obligations under the scheme"

So, seems to me that this is fairly clear, if you fail to register you may be fined and face other penalities and possible publication as being a "naughty" company.

I'm going to have a look at the registered participants/information declarations dataset and calculate how many IT companies are present on the list and report back.
It will be interesting to see how many companies are practising what they preach or not as the case may be.

Tuesday 6 July 2010

Data Centre of the Future...

I posted yesterday about going to this conference and very good it was too.
Speakers from Cisco, Intel, VMWare & Gartner suggested, nah told us that the cloud was to be the future.
I disagree, when asked how many new shiny data centres would be built to cater for the projected growth in the cloud, because it is the future after all, no one from these blue chip corporates could tell the assembled throng, and when questioned on how new data centres could be built when the UK faces a serious potential energy gap come 2015 due to the decommissioning of nuclear and the closure of some coal fired power stations and even today no data centre can be built within the M25 because of a lack of power infrastructure and capacity, they wobbled on about new energy efficent servers and virtualisation and erm well anything to erm well ah, we are sure that erm. Yeah Guys ok, just tell us that you do not have a clue and that the cloud is built on a cloud, and unfortunately you cant live on a cloud unless you are Captain Scarlet on Cloudbase 9.

It is my belief that the cloud in the UK cannot survive the issue of power, data centres need power and lots of it. The cloud envisaged by the speakers at the conference spoke about IaaS, thats Infrastructure as a Service, Paas, thats Platform as a Service, and finally Saas, which is Software as a Service on a grand scale, and I mean GRAND.
Millions of Corporate Users and Billions of New Internet Users will all be using cloud services, and this means hundreds of new data centres, hundreds, and each one will need at least 10MW of power.
Now, how much capacity do we have in the UK?

There are many power stations of all types and sizes in the UK. A diversity of generating technologies is essential as it means that we are not over-reliant on one fuel source. Between them, the power stations in the UK have a generating capacity of some 83.5 gigawatts (GW) and produced 385,560 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity in 2008. Source:http://www.aepuk.com/about-electricity/how-electricity-is-generated/

And of the 83.5GW Capacity, over 25% are to close by 2025, over £200Billion of new investment in Power Stations, the smart Grid and Smart meters is needed to address this gap, thats more than the bankers needed to be bailed out.

21 GW - Total capacity of power stations expected to close between now and 2025 – about a quarter of our current generating capacity.
Source:http://www.aepuk.com/about-electricity/facts-figures/

On the figures above 100 New Data Centres will require a 1GW Power Station but we are going to lose 21GW of Capacity.

So, the cloud is going to expand, this must be true because some big IT industry players have told us so, but there is a fundamental disconnect between the power available and the power demand that the cloud is going to have.

I wonder how this is going to pan out, in the meantime, you can begin to monitor your energy consumption in real time and manage your IT by requesting IT energy management from Carbon3IT Ltd.
Our contact details are listed above.

Monday 5 July 2010

The future of IT is....

largely driven by the manufacturers and we have a vicious circle of software vendors bringing out new packages or updates on a regular two to three year basis, these tend to push the hardware to its limits and as a result new software is closely followed by hardware manufacturers bringing out newer faster, more powerful equipment with additional processing, memory, hard drive and storage capacity, which in turn is seen as a spur to software development to use the additional processor, memory, hard drive and storage capacity, and so on and on and on.
We cannot blame the manufacturers for this, after all, innovation is the name of the game in the IT industry and the first company to market usually gets a nice piece of the pie, but eventually the others catch up and do it cheaper.
But, is this sustainable? one would think not.
One must remember that the manufacture of PC's is not really environmentally friendly, a single pc can use up to 240 litres of water during the manufacturing process, not to mention the toxic componments and waste generated. The processor is the greatest cost component in a PC and it is unrecyclable, there is nothing in a processor that can be used again, so when corporates dispose of a PC, the value of it falls to about £75, which is normally the cost of disposal. not great value for money then?
So, what are the alternatives to disposal for a corporate PC? well some donate to charities for use elsewhere in the world or offer them to staff.
I think we are missing a trick here and believe that the best use of old pc's is to reuse the pc in a low capacity function. I'll be posting more on this in the future.

Cisco - Data Centres of the future - Roundtables

I shall be leaving shortly to go to London, so that I can attend the Cisco Data Centre of the Future breakfast meeting at the Grocers Hall in London tomorrow.
This should prove to be an interesting event and I shall post on this subject later in the week.

Green Enterprise World Forum

I went to this excellent expo and conference last thursday, and it was a shame that I was unable to attend the afternoon sessions.
Lots of very interesting people and technologies on show.
Of all the conferences and expos I have been to since I started Carbon3IT Ltd, this is definately one I shall be attending in the future.

Saturday 19 June 2010

The Future of the Data Centre

I had a great morning at the Future of the Data Centre conference at the Hilton Hotel, Park Lane, London.
It is my belief that Energy is THE only issue that will affect the Data Centre industry in the future, if we go down the "cloud" route, we will find out that clouds are made of water, have no real substance, can result in getting very wet, and can disappear as rapidly as they appear. In short, a move to corporate cloud computing needs to be tempered with care and a high level of scrutiny.

Potential buyers of cloud services should be, as a miminum thinking about:

1. Cost, yeah its cheaper now, but how much will it cost in ten years, when energy prices have gone through the roof and you have lost control of the ability to manage your own IT services because they are not on your site.

2. Uptime, how can you ensure 99.99999% uptime in your bit of the cloud, when its hosted by a 3rd Party who is also having to provide the same uptime to all its other customers, make no mistake, someone will lose out when the power stations begin to close and power costs rise.

3. Regulation & Compliance. Do you have to still report on the energy used by your cloud supplier for your CRC reporting?

4. Security, if an England fan can get into the England dressing room in a football stadium with relative ease, with all the security that FIFA has at its disposal, how easy will it be in a shared services cloud facilty for a technician to "visit" one part but get into another area and get up to mischief. Will DC Operators "escort" all visitors to their sites? I doubt it.

So, Cost, Uptime, Regulation & Security as a minimum.

I will be posting on this subject in the future

Sunday 6 June 2010

Outsourcing IT to India

Just a thought to companies planning to outsource IT operations to India and other countries, have you considered the energy impact?
India's power is in very short supply and 70% of the countries electricity is generated using coal fired power stations.
More information on India's energy mix can be found on this link:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/India/Electricity.html

Is it not extremely unethical to utilise a country for outsourced IT power when it cannot even supply power to its own citizens?

I'll leave that for the reader to think about, for me, its wrong and UK based companies should seriously reconsider all aspects of outsourcing not just the cost, because it will turn out to be more expensive in the long run.

Thursday 27 May 2010

Energy Ratings For IT Equipment

Just having a think about the energy rating scheme for domestic appliances and wondering why it couldn't be used for IT equipment
I know that there are a couple of schemes out there such as epeat and energy star but it is still confusing for organisations to select equipment that will be energy efficient over the equipments projected lifetime.
A lot of commercial organisations still prefer to purchase from the well known brands without considering the long term impact of energy consumption.
A prudent approach would be to combine base lining software as described in my previous post with accredited low energy pc's and servers, that may have a complete 5 year carbon offset associated with it.
In the home pc market, energy efficiency is not promoted and do users really think about how much energy their pcs are using?
There are some free energy monitoring tools out on the web for home users to implement energy saving measures on their home computers and to work out how much energy they are using.


Time for the computing industry to grasp the horns of the energy efficiency dilemma and get a recognised global standard for computing equipment.
Differing standards and a lack of transparancy causes confusion

Sort it out!

Monday 24 May 2010

IT Energy Baselining

Are you planning a Green or Sustainable IT strategy for your organisation?

What framework will you follow?

Here at Carbon3IT we recommend that your first action should be to baseline your current IT estate, this means to calculate the total number of devices present in your system and then determine the total energy consumed, and hence carbon emissions.

Whats that? you dont know where to start!

Well, Carbon3IT Ltd are VAR's for two energy monitoring/management products and are hoping to add a third in the near future.
Why do we carry two different systems and potentially a third?

A very good question and the reason is that one system calculates actual energy consumed on a device via the use of a "smart socket" this looks like a normal 6 socket extension lead, thus allowing the monitor, printer, speakers etc to be monitored as well, but it has a little secret device tucked away inside it that transmits the actual energy consumption data to a wireless ethernet zone controller that anyone with the appropriate security credentials can access from their own or any other pc in the network. The internet/intranet portal displays energy and carbon information that can be used to produce your CRC reports and provide information on energy use to your facilities manager/IT manager or management team.

However, we feel that the disruption that can be caused by unplugging all your IT devices to connect the smart sockets is really only warranted on SME IT systems or for trial energy monitoring sites not for companies that have more than 250 PC'S.

Thus we have a option for bigger customers or organisations that have more than one site that they need to monitor, hence our other product.

The second product we carry is a software based product that can be scaled globally to include all pc's in your organisation across the world. An agent is rolled out to a select number of PC's for trial purposes via your usual software installation method (via a .msi file, and with any systems management tool in the market) and the data is calculated using a specific algorithm that is tweaked and honed periodically to include real data gathered from real measurements. This data is then updated to a central server database at set intervals (configurable) where is can be read once again with anyone with the appropriate access rights, the beauty of this product is that it integrates with Active Directory and you can configure power policies and profiles to any pc in the organisation in order to manage your IT estate.

Out potential third product is another software based agent/server solution, we'll keep you updated as to when it becomes available in our product portfolio.

Carbon3IT believe that you cannot manage what you cant measure and we provide the tools for you to measure your IT Energy so that you can manage it.

Pricing is very competitive and the TCO and ROI for both these products is small, in fact both products will pay for themselves in the first year of use, and you will also continue to acrue the savings in subsequent years.
We also provide a try now pay later option on both products, we effectively are paid with your energy savings in the first year.

Contact us on c3it@btinternet.com for more information

Virtualisation & Thin Clients is not the only answer!

Many companies involved in Green IT will tell you that virtialisation and thin clients are the answer to sustainable computing. Its not!
Here at Carbon3IT Ltd we think that whilst virtualisation and thin client technology are methods of reducing your overall IT spend in terms of space, power and cooling, they are not the only ones.
We advocate a holistic approach, a fundamental review of all your IT activities, the striping out of un-used software, the removal of masses of identical files clogging up your storage, the reuse of pc's for older applications and for systems that do not require high spec pc's.
In essence keep it simple.
We can assist all types of organisations to reduce energy spend, clear out the clutter and make your Information Technology sustainable, contact us on c3it@btinternet.com for more information or visit our website www.carbon3it.com, we are in the process of updating it to provide a better user experience so please bear with us whilst we complete these updates.
We aim to update this site daily but sometimes life and business gets in the way.