This site contains my general blogging, published articles, and information on speaking dates where I discuss how business, technology, and finance can be used to create an open, healthy, and environmentally and economically vibrant society. Please feel free to contact me at troy at troyangrignon dot com to rant, discuss, or have me speak at your organization.

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

"It's all about the infrastructure" by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations

• The cloud sounds romantic but it's 1.5 million pounds of batteries, 1 million pounds of steel, 300 miles of cable. Not so romantic. (Image courtesty of Niall Kennedy's Flickr photos)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Opex and Capex are THE KEYS: If your revenue goes up a hockey stick....and your CapEx and OpEx curves go up with it...you haven't succeeded
• [finally!! Somebody else is talking about this!! This is super critical in SaaS. It's easy to make a company deliver apps over the web. It's hard to do it in a way that you can serve a lot of people cost effectively and make more profit as you scale.]
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Scale: can you scale up to 3.5GB/minute TOMORROW?
  
• Reach: Microsoft is running services in 235 countries around the world
• Servers: This is critical
  
• configration optimization: go for standardization / optimization
  
• Density: watts/square foot is important; drive density up by 200% you can drop power costs 40% (!).
  
• Storage costs: There has been an 85% drop in a Terabyte of data THIS YEAR.
• Technology evolution: staying on the curve helps you be operationally efficient.
  
• Data center critical success factors. (there are more but she wouldn't share them)
  
• connectivity: critical
• location, location, location (close to connectivity and supplies and resources and people)
• materials and equipment: (if you buy a million pounds of steel and steel prices go up....you have a $5M bill)
• trades and labour: we have waited months for an electrical person
• power:
• we now count in terms of megawatts not square footage. That is a key metric.
• 30-40% of your power usage is COOLING!!!! so build green!
  
• looking at solar - it's incredibly important to us
  
• Opening a data center in Quincy Washington that is completeley carbon neutral
• Additional useful links:
• Operations: The New Secret Sauce.
  
• Generators for Data Centers Getting Hard to Find
  
• Behold the Server Farm
  
• Microsoft bets big on Server Farm
  
• Wired / The Information Factories
  
• Data Centers on rise in rural areas
  
• Utility offers millions to help data centers go green
  

I'm intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés:

When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC

SUSTAINABLE HOMES

Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted by the Sustainable Building Centre and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of BC.
 
Moderator: Helen Goodland is the Executive Director of the new Sustainable Building Centre on Granville Island and is a LEED accredited architect with over 15 years of experience in green building design, education and construction.

Please visit http://www.sustainablebuildingcentre.com for more information.

Andrew Zolli (again) points out a fantastic project known as the Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe that was modelled on the termite mound (see biomimicry) and that resulted in 10% lower up front capital costs, lower ongoing running costs, and 20% lower rents for its inhabitants compared with the building next door built with a normal HVAC system. (That last bit is an assumption - the article does not explicitly state the next door building's heating cooling system mechanism.)

This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.   more »