Tag: dell

Sustainability, social media and big data

The term Big Data is becoming the buzz word du jour in IT these days popping up everywhere, but with good reason – more and more data is being collected, curated and analysed today, than ever before.

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter announced last week that Twitter is now publishing 500 million tweets per day. Not alone is Twitter publishing them though, it is organising them and storing them in perpetuity. That’s a lot of storage, and 500 million tweets per day (and rising) is big data, no doubt.

And Facebook similarly announced that 2.5 billion content items are shared per day on its platform, and it records 2.7 billion Likes per day. Now that’s big data.

But for really big data, it is hard to beat the fact that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider creates 1 petabyte of information every second!

And this has what to do with Sustainability, I hear you ask.

Well, it is all about the information you can extract from that data – and there are some fascinating use cases starting to emerge.

A study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene found that Twitter was as accurate as official sources in tracking the cholera epidemic in Haiti in the wake of the deadly earthquake there. The big difference between Twitter as a predictor of this epidemic and the official sources is that Twitter was 2 weeks faster at predicting it. There’s a lot of good that can be done in crisis situations with a two week head start.

Another fascinating use case I came across is using social media as an early predictor of faults in automobiles. A social media monitoring tool developed by Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business can provide car makers with an efficient way to discover and classify vehicle defects. Again, although at early stages of development yet, it shows promising results, and anything which can improve the safety of automobiles can have a very large impact (no pun!).

GE's Grid IQ Insight social media monitoring tool

GE have come up with another fascinating way to mine big data for good. Their Grid IQ Insight tool, slated for release next year, can mine social media for mentions of electrical outages. When those posts are geotagged (as many social media posts now are), utilities using Grid IQ Insight can get an early notification of an outage in its area. Clusters of mentions can help with confirmation and localisation. Photos or videos added of trees down, or (as in this photo) of a fire in a substation can help the utility decide which personnel and equipment to add to the truckroll to repair the fault. Speeding up the repair process and getting customers back on a working electricity grid once again can be critical in an age where so many of our devices rely on electricity to operate.

Finally, many companies are now using products like Radian6 (now re-branded as Salesforce Marketing Cloud) to actively monitor social media for mentions of their brand, so they can respond in a timely manner. Gatorade in the video above is one good example. So too are Dell. Dell have a Social Media Listening Command Centre which is staffed by 70 employees who listen for and respond to mentions of Dell products 24 hours a day in 11 languages (English, plus Japanese, Chinese, Portugese, Spanish, French, German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Korean). The sustainability angle of this story is that Dell took their learnings from setting up this command centre and used them to help the American Red Cross set up a similar command centre. Dell also contributed funding and equipment to help get his off the ground.

No doubt the Command Centre is proving itself invaluable to the American Red Cross this week mining big data to help people in need in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

HP joins ranks of microserver providers with Redstone

Redstone server platform
The machine in the photo above is HP’s newly announced Redstone server development platform.

Capable of fitting 288 servers into a 4U rack enclosure, it packs a lot of punch into a small space. The servers are System on a Chip based on Calxeda ARM processors but according to HP, future versions will include “Intel® Atom™-based processors as well as others”

These are not the kind of servers you deploy to host your blog and a couple of photos. No, these are the kinds of servers deployed by the literal shedload by hosting companies, or cloud companies to get the maximum performance for the minimum energy hit. This has very little to do with these companies developing a sudden green conscience, rather it is the rising energy costs of running server infrastructure that is the primary motivator here.

This announcement is part of a larger move by HP (called Project Moonshot), designed to advance HP’s position in the burgeoning low-energy server marketplace…

Friday Green Numbers round-up 05/28/2010

Green numbers
Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

Tech company sustainability reports reviewed

Corporate Social Responsibility
Original photo by ATIS547

I was asked on Twitter recently where to find a list of links to tech companies’ CSR reports.

I didn’t know where to find one, so I built one and as well as just the links, I also added in a few extra observations I noted about the reports.

Company Latest Report Format Remarks External Audit GRI Index CEO involved
SAP 2009 Online with downloadable data Highly interactive, includes social media, video & ability to comment inline Independently audited by KPMG Yes – A+ Rated Yes
BT 2009 Online and PDF Granular links and multiple PDF download options Yes Yes – A+ Rated Yes
Intel 2009 PDF custom builder High level of granularity No Yes – A Rated Yes
Dell 2009 PDF Very detailed document – v little detail on website No Yes – B Rated Yes
HP 2009 Online with PDF download Granular links, some videos & interactivity Some, yes Yes Yes
Cisco 2009 Mostly PDF’s with some info available on web Lots of good videos Some Yes Yes
Sony 2009 Online and PDF Comprehensive report No Yes Yes
Microsoft 2009 PDF Lacks necessary detail No No Yes
Nokia 2008 Online No obvious link to a downloadable report Some, yes No No
Logica 2008 Online and PDF Comprehensive report No Yes Yes
IBM 2008 Online with PDF download Granular links & Social Media options No Yes Yes
Adobe 2008 Online and PDF Lots of pretty pictures but light on text No No Yes
CA 2008 PDF CA’s first sustainability report – good 1st effort No Yes – C Rated Yes
SAS 2008 PDF Good PDF report badly left down by poor supporting website No Yes – C Rated Yes
Oracle 2008 PDF Summary of 2009 report available but full report still not out No No President
Apple None
Amazon None
Google None

As previously reported here…

NightWatchman saving energy

Night Watchman
Following on from my earlier post about the importance of turning things off, we had a briefing the other day from a company called 1E.

1E entered the power management space about 10 years ago when they wrote NightWatchman. NightWatchman is a PC power management application which aims to reduce the energy wasted by computers not being turned off at the end of the working day.

They were well ahead of the market (remember, they started 10 years ago, long before there was any power management built into the operating system) and, in fact, they had a hard time selling NightWatchman until about three years ago.

NightWatchman is now deployed on 4 million PCs worldwide savingcustomers US $360 million in energy costs and preventing 3 million tons of CO2 emissions, according to 1E.

As an interesting aside, the name NightWatchman came from the fact that the software was originally written for a company who had a security guard going around at night turning off computers and monitors! In fact, in the first seven years it was sold as a security and patching tool (it would allow companies to shut off computers in the evening and schedule a window in the middle of the night during which the computers would power up to download any security updates and patches which had been released).

In their whitepaper, entitled ‘Why Power Schemes are not Enough?’ [PDF] 1E make a great point –

It is impossible to monitor and report on the energy used by your PC estate (and therefore the cost and CO2 emissions this causes) using only the built-in tools that come with Windows. Because of the lack of built-in monitoring of energy usage, organizations are unaware of the lack of effectiveness of Windows sleep timers.

Windows power schemes should therefore not be used as the mechanism for reliable overnight and weekend energy saving for PCs.

Dell rolled out NightWatchman and wrote a white paper on the experience [pdf] – from the case study:

1E NightWatchman software saves files and closes applications and shuts down or places into sleep mode computers in the Microsoft Windows environment while preventing data loss and application errors. It also allows computers to be turned off from a central location, at a specified time, while providing extensive reports for management.

NightWatchman works with SMSWakeUp, which repowers computers in synchronization with Microsoft SMS. Administrators can boot computers from a centralized command so they can deploy security patches or new applications during off-hours.

By deploying 1E’s NightWatchman and SMSWakeUp applications to its 50,000 client computers, Dell expects to realize up to a 40 percent reduction in computer-related energy costs, which could translate into US$1.8 million in savings annually.

AT&T also installed 1E and from the release on AT&T’s rollout [PDF] it said:

[AT&T] is launching the NightWatchman® PC power management solution from 1E on 310,000 desktop computers across its domestic operations to help improve energy efficiency. Powering down corporate PCs during non-work hours is expected to save AT&T more than 135 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year and eliminate 123,941 tons of carbon dioxide emissions — equivalent to the electricity required to power 14,892 homes.

1E also have a server version of their NightWatchman software – this program identifies under-utilised servers, allowing them to be either re-deployed or decommissioned – fewer servers means less energy consumed by server sprawl. NightWatchman Server also has an energy management component built-in which has the added benefit of reducing heat from servers and therefore the air conditioning load in data centers required to cool the servers.

All of this means less energy costs and fewer CO2 emissions for companies. Go 1E!

by-sa

Dell's hellish batteries recalled

According to a report in the New York Times today, Dell is recalling over 4 million laptop batteries because of their propensity to catch fire or explode!

Up to now the advice has been if you think your battery might be one of those likely to catch fire, take it out of the laptop and just use the power cord!

If you have a Dell laptop you can check to see if your battery is affected here.

Dell do well!

In case you missed it, Dell started a blog in the last couple of weeks. So what? Well, Dell has been roundly panned on the Internet for around 12 months now for not being responsive to criticism, for not listening. The term “Dell Hell” came to be coined referring to Dell’s poor customer service. Dell’s share price dropped.

Obviously people in Dell started to take notice!

The new Dell blog started quietly with a post on a Dell gaming machine (the XPS 700) – no fanfare, no press releases, just this seemingly innocuous post.

There followed a couple of more posts on Dell’s blog before the blogosphere noticed. Several prominent bloggers on spotting the blog hammered it for not linking to other blogs:

It’s a blog in content management system name only. The subtitle is “direct conversations with Dell� but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness.

and Steve Rubel said:

They could use the blog to engage the community in a genuine conversation on the critical issues that have dogged them for years now as well as the good things they are doing

Kudos to Dell though. They demonstrated that they are listening by linking to posts critical of them, by implementing many of the suggestions made to them by the blogosphere and by publishing even the most critical (non-profane) comments made on their blog:

What the heck is this drivel? This has to be the worst attempt at a corporate blog I’ve seen in a while, it provides no information, no value and is in no way entertaining or compelling. No comments from M. Dell, no comments on things that are going on etc.

Worthless….

Dell still have a few things to iron out in their blog (permalinks for comments would be nice, as would a relevant category listing on each post and a link to this blog would be cool too!) but if they continue to be as responsive as they have been, they are in serious danger of turning their poor reputation around.