Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist

About this site

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 09:51:00 -0800

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.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / "It's all about the infrastructure" by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations Group

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:44:00 -0800

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:

Border wars: Plumbers union fights green building because the waterless no-flush urinals will "spread disease". Um, don't you mean they will spread "less work for plumbers?"

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:23:00 -0700

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??

30 Days of Sustainability: Sustainable Homes

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:47:00 -0800

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.

Build your building like a termite mound for lower capital cost, lower running costs and therefore lower rents

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 12:11:00 -0700

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.)

Massive Change - the future of global design

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:32:00 -0700

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.