October 14, 2007

Forum focuses on business and clean energy

By ED COX
of The Chronicle

Tuesday’s Clean Energy Forum in The Dalles had the potential to be a geek fest, given the topic (“Virtualosity”) the sponsor (Software Association of Oregon) and the make-up of the panel (representatives from Intel, IBM, Portland General Electric, and Beaverton-based EasyStreet Online Services).

And yet, geek-speak was blissfully absent at the chat, which plainly set out to representatives of area technology companies the advantages of “going green” and of a new way of saving energy, space, and — by extension — money.

That would be “virtualization,” which some companies have used to reduce the energy use of computer facilities as much as 80 percent, between eliminating servers, cutting down on HVAC costs and saving on storage space.

Rich Bader, president and CEO of EasyStreet, explained virtualization via a personal computer analogy.

We run various applications, often simultaneously, on a single machine, he explained. But sometimes the isolation between those programs is less than perfect, leading to system crashes. The same thing happens on a larger, business scale, and as system reliability becomes ever more critical to companies, they have typically responded by isolating each application on a physically separate server.

That provides reliability, he said, but leads to “server sprawl” and inefficiency, with servers being used at 10 percent capacity or less.

Enter virtualization software, which he said allows companies to take each of those physical servers and “put it in a little box, a virtual machine,” and run them all on a single server.

Depending on the capacity of the server, the number of virtual machines that can be run ranges from five to 150.

Fellow panelist Al Thomason, portfolio manager and xSeries advocate in IBM’s North Plains office, told how his company helped the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center move from 1,000 discreet servers to 20 IBM System X servers using VMWare, which panelists described as the most popular and robust virtualization software.

In the process, he said, server utilization rose from 3 to 80 percent. California’s PG&E Corporation, parent company of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, achieved a similar jump by moving from 300 Unix servers to 6 System P servers.
The power — and cost — savings that result from such “server consolidation” are a big reason Intel is now embedding virtualization technology in every computer chip it sells, said panelist Jake Smith, Mobility Marketing Manager for Intel.

According to the panel, that intersection of new technology, good business sense and “being green” is only one of several confluences companies can find if they’ll “put on green-colored glasses,” as Thomason suggested.

“It’s about smart energy,” said panelist Thor Hinckley, manager of Portland General Electric’s renewable power program. “It’s sourcing it wisely and using it wisely.”

PGE is the nation’s leader in sales of renewable energy to residential customers, and is making more and more inroads with companies, as the example of EasyStreet shows.

Bader said his company’s decision to join PGE’s renewable energy program — which will also power a new annex to their data center — was an “act of faith” that started with being “passionate about green.”

Bader said that at the time he couldn’t justify the step, which meant spending $1,500 more on a $23,000/month energy bill, to his shareholders, but took it anyway.

“It’s been huge,” he said, noting that excitement in the Northwest around green power has given the company a somewhat unexpected but clear competitive advantage from a marketing point of view.

Hinckley predicted that, particularly in this area, “greener” companies are going to emerge as winners in what he calles the “new energy economy.”

Smith indicated that Intel aims to be among them, with a corporation-wide strategy of increasing use of renewable energy by 50 percent.

He also said that opportunities for energy-efficiency and sourcing renewables — especially through local utilities — are going to prove critical for the ability of “mid-market economies” like The Dalles to attract new business ventures.

“This is one of 14 or 15 places on the planet with the opportunity to participate in the next-generation economy,” he said. “Does this part of Oregon want to participate? That is the question.”