thinkingstring.com

Quocirca has taken up a phenomenal amount of my time since I joined with them earlier this year (which is a good thing). I’ve been busy writing and blogging under the Quocirca brand here and here (and check out other articles at the Quocirca web site). Meanwhile this blog has been left to rot alone.

At Quocirca the focus is on technology, specifically IT hardware, software, software as a service and related services as they relate to whatever business problem that is being solved. In relation to sustainability there (of course) much focus on energy efficiency at the device and datacentre levels, innovations in the energy metering world, and nascent efforts to produce sustainability dashboards. And much more as well.

But that leaves all the social changes, politics, legislation, and general societal trends out of the picture. Hence I intent to swing some of those voices to this blog, giving me a clear separation between technology and none technology discussions. However all related to sustainability.

Its all been ‘go’ since ThinkingString Ltd began providing coverage services to Quocirca Ltd. All the Quocirca folk have been very welcoming and helpful, but there has been a lot of organising to do in order to get my feet under the desk. Quocirca also has a great and trusted brand name and so the activity level has been on the up and up.

Quocirca has been looking at datacentre efficiency for a while, with both Clive Longbottom and Bob Tarzey also writing and researching around the pros and cons of various IT services provisioning models as far as their relative GHG emissions levels. My intention with Quocirca is to look at both efficiency gains, as well as the strategic role of IT as an enabler to the reduction of overall emissions by business.

What will be important in achieving efficiency gains will be to ensure that data centres are targeting a real emissions reduction, rather than focusing simply on productivity/energy. Making a data centre twice as productive per watt of energy consumed is laudable, however it is a wash in emissions terms if the gains are subsequently consumed by increased processing in the future. If business is serious about reducing emissions, we need to target an immediate 50% cut in energy consumption, and then maintain that level through the continued introduction of new technology and alternate energy production techniques.

We also need to make sure that any new technology introduced in order to reduce energy consumption doesn’t actually result in higher GHG emissions elsewhere. It is important to factor in the HW replacement lifecycle costs, and the energy going into the production of the latest gee-whizz-energy-efficient model that replaces the old tried-and-true one we already had. It is also vital that the manufacturing technique for energy efficient devices doesn’t generate harmful emissions. More on that later.

In the coming weeks I’ll be revamping the ThinkingString website and also this blog. I’m looking to combine it all and along the way simplify the layout, and simplify it from my point of view as far as administration is concerned. Much to do…too few minutes in the day.

Very pleased to announce here that I have joined forces with Quocirca. I’ll be covering “sustainability” for Quocirca. What does that mean? For a start I’ll be looking at both techniques and technologies to reduce the footprint of existing ICT services. This is getting a lot of buzz in the trade press as “GreenIT”, though as I have blogged about before - efficiencies are good business practice but they don’t get us where we need to get to. So more importantly I’ll be looking at the use of ICT, new energy generation techniques , and emissions capture technologies that are transformational in nature i.e. they enable a change in way that society and business operates.