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Christopher Vollmar is a Storage Architect supporting customers in Canada and the Caribbean. He is a Certified Consulting IT Specialist and a Design Thinking practitioner. He has also been a contributing author to the the 
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Happy Earth Day 2009
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Happy Earth Day everyone!
This week I am in Costa Rica to celebrate[Earth Day] and promote IBM's [Smarter Planet strategy] to help solve the world's energy and environmental problems. This is thethird in the series. The first two posts were:
Most people are familiar with the [star rating system] that rank most hotels from one star (budget class/economy) to five stars (deluxe/luxury). The nicest hotel I've been to was the [Burj Al Arab] in Dubai, which claims a seven star rating. For eco-tourism, there is a similar "Green Leaf" rating system. According to Patrick,the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo [ICT] (tourism board of Costa Rica) rates hotels from one leaf (adopting some measures, like separating recyclables shown above) to five leaves (entirely carbon neutral).This Green Leaf system seems more important to European and Canadian tourists, but those from United States may not even be aware of it. The food at these hotels vary. The typical dish here for breakfast, lunch and dinner is the Casado, consisting of mostly rice and beans. I have found thatCosta Rica has come up with as many creative ways to combine rice and beans in various proportions as Starbucks® serve various combinations of coffee and milk.The locals might be accustomed to a steady diet of rice and beans for every meal of every day, but those of us from North America aren't! Not counting tourist flatulence, Costa Rica has[pledged to be carbon neutral by 2021], the country's 200th birthday. Sadly, most folks in the United States don't categorize their hotels with a Green Leaf rating system, nor do they even bother to categorize their recyclables. I spent 18 months in the field doing Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) assessments for clients, and most didn't categorize their data either.So, the next time you have some combination of coffee and milk, whether its a Latte, Misto, Espresso, or Macchiato, remember that the coffee came from acountry trying to be more environmentally responsible, grown by a farmerwho eats a simple diet of rice and beans, and has no problem separating different categories of recyclables. Perhaps you will remember to separate your data, and store it on an information infrastructure based on an envi We're all on this planet together. |
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Power to the Costa Rican People
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This week's theme is Earth Day and the importance IBM has placed on energy and environmental conservation. I am traveling through Costa Rica, ranked by Forbes as the fifth greenest and [cleanest countries in the world]. Europe was home to the top four in the survey of 149 countries, ledby Switzerland, and home to 14 of the top 20. Colombia came in ninth. United States was a pathetic 39th.
In yesterday's post, [Green Water for Green Energy], I covered geo-thermal energy with a visit to the hot springs.My next activity was a rafting trip down the Peñas Blancas and San Carlos rivers, heading towards Nicaragua, to discuss hydro-electric power. Half of the hydro-electric power in this country is driven directly by river flow, and the rest relies on stored water in lakes. Back in 2007, Costa Rica had a drought, and this affected the hydro-electric capacity, resulting in brown-outs and power outages. When more than 80 percent of your energy comes from this source, droughts can be devastating. Rain patterns for Costa Rica have a dry season from mid-December to April, lots of Rain in May and June, a "short summer" (called affectionately El Veranito) with little or no rain in July, and then more rain the rest of the year, averaging over 150 inches of rainfall per year. This was billed as a "Safari Float" ride.The water level was low, "Class I", the slowest possible rating, giving our raft guide Pedro a chance to point out a variety of birds, monkeys, iguanas and crocodiles. Iguanas and Crocodiles are protected endangered species in Costa Rica, and are notsupposed to be killed for food or sport. (Hint: don't bother, both taste like chicken)Joining us in our raft is Pamela, the 9-year-old daughter of one of the employees of the rafting company, [Canoa Adventura]. This wastheir version of take Along the way, we saw a bulldozer knocking down trees and scooping up the rich soil.Costa Ricans consider trees and soil as renewable resources, reducing the need to purchase foreign fossil-based oil for cooking and chemical fertilizers.The name of the country, Costa Rica, literally means "rich coast" in the Spanish language, and with a string of 112 volcanos, the silt has plenty of mineral content that is good for agriculture, from coffee and bananas, to sugar cane, oranges and African palm. Midway down the river, we had an "energy stop" to rest from all the paddling. This involved a visit to Don Pedro's farm, he is 98 years old, has four daughters, five grandchildren, and three grea On the ride back, we stopped at the famous "Iguana bridge" where we could see up close and personal a dozen or so of these huge lizards. Our guide Marcos fed them some papaya. Agreat way to appreciate bio-diversity in action! |
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2009 IBM Conferences to Consider
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Did you miss your chance to attend Storage Networking World last week? IBM has some upcoming conferences that might be of interest to you.
Hopefully, this will give you enough time to plan and make travel arrangements!
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Welcome Carlos Pratt to the Storage Blogosphere
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I am proud to announce that fellow IBMer Carlos Pratt has launched a new IBM storage blog[GreenSpeed].
I'd like to expand a bit on how I know Carlos. Back in 1999 I was asked to lead a team at IBM Tucson to install Linux on our local z800 mainframe, and run tests to confirm that all of our IBM disk and tape storage offerings attached successfully. I was, at the time, lead architect for DFSMS on OS/390 and management felt that my knowledge of the S/390 instruction set was all that was needed to pull this off. My team was a collection of people from a variety of other hardware and software teams, and Carlos came over from the Disk Performance test team. Needless to say, there were some challenges. The port of Red Hat and SUSE Linux over to the mainframe required special device drivers, and in some cases, we actually needed to make changes to the Linux kernel. While it was over 100 degrees outside, we were in the test lab wearing jackets with a refrigerator thermometer hanging on the wall to monitor our ice cold working conditions. And of course, we had our internal skeptics. At the time, Linux was only a few percentage points of marketshare, and a few unenlightened souls did not see any reason to invest in support for a new operating system until it was more established. People with a "Wait-and-See" attitude don't last long at IBM. Fortunately, smarter heads prevailed, and now that Linux is well established as the operating system of the future, we can all look back and say "I told you so!" Carlos was a "get things done" kind of guy. Working with frequent patches to the Linux kernel, device drivers under development, and a team fairly new to this new operating system, Carlos was able to provide the driving force to get our tests done. So, please check out Carlos' new blog!
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SNW 2009 Best Practices Award Finalists
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The awards will be announced on Tuesday, April 7th at the event during the General Session: 10:00-10:15 am "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program Of course, I'll be rooting for the one above that used IBM's XIV disk storage system to reduce their energy consumption, improve their utilization, and simplify their management.
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Pulse 2009: IBM ProtecTIER data deduplication
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Finishing off this week's series of Pulse 2009 videos, I wrap up with a video on IBM's exciting data deduplication appliance.
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Pulse 2009: IBM Disk with Tivoli FastBack
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Continuing this week's series on Pulse 2009 video, we have a double header. Bob Dalton discusses our entry-level IBM System Storage [DS3000] and midrange IBM System Storage [DS4000] disk systems, followed by Dan Thompson discussing [IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack] software.
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack is the result of IBM's [acquisition of FilesX], a company in Israel that developed software to backup servers at remote branch offices running Microsoft Windows operating system.
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Barbara Sewell explains IBM N series
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I just got a series of videos made at last month's IBM Pulse 2009 conference.Rather than flood you with all of them all at once, I will post them all separately.
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Water Water Everywhere
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..., nor any drop to drink"From Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Actually, I've been so busy this week that I am just now getting to this week's theme of Smarter Water. Since it was St. Patrick's Day this week, I thought of discussing IBM's project to help Ireland. Working with the Marine Institute Ireland, IBM has created a system to monitor wave conditions, marine life and pollution levels in and around Galway Bay. Here is quick excerpt from IBM [Press Release]: "This real-time advanced analytics pilot is turning mountains of data into intelligence, paving the way for smarter environmental management and development of the bay. Or... I could have used water as a metaphor for the "tidal wave" of information. For many,we have a lot of raw data, but not suitably digestible information in the form we need it. But then I found this photo.
At this point, you might be asking what any of this has to do with IBM.
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IBM Presents April 2009 at upcoming SNW in Orlando
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IBM will be demonstrating solutions throughout the conference, includingeight SNIA tutorial and breakout speaking sessions, a panel discussion, two new Summits (Cloud Computing, and Solid-State Storage), and four Hands-on-Labs:
Plus, IBM will have a huge 10 foot by 20 foot booth located in the Expo hall and a kiosk in the Platinum Galleria. The demonstrations highlighted in the IBM booth will showcase Information Infrastructure solutions, which will help simplify, reduce risk, increase efficiency and lower costs. I won't be there myself, but you can ask my IBM colleagues about:
As sponsor of this event, IBM has received a limited number of free conference passes. We will be assigning these upon request to IBM clients and prospective clients. If you would like to go, contact your IBM Business Partner or local storage rep.Act fast! First come, first served.
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