Most IT companies I admire take their green credentials very seriously, and most of them know there is still a long way to go.

I've been following the work of The Green Grid, a group of IT firms in the data centre/server space working to make them more efficient, and I'll be following up with the group in the near future.

But Greenpeace this week has decided to single out arguably the world's biggest web company, Facebook. Obviously, Facebook has a quite extraordinary number of servers. It must do in order to serve its mind boggling 500 million users.

In a press release, the campaign group said: "Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo today sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking him to commit his company to a plan to phase out the use of dirty coal-fired electricity. The letter further calls on Zuckerberg to use his companies considerable influence to become a champion for action on climate change."

It added: "We were alarmed in January by the company's announcement that it would build a coal-powered data center in Prineville, Oregon. Then, we were further dismayed by Facebook's second announcement about its data center: it plans to double its size! That means twice the energy use, twice the coal, and twice the global warming pollution."

Obviously Greenpeace has been very effective over the years at putting pressure on individuals, governments and companies. And they've picked a high profile target designed to give their campaign exposure.

And their campaign, called Cool IT, is very interesting. It's a leaderboard, which in the words of Greenpeace, "evaluates global IT companies on their leadership in the fight to stop climate change".

Greenpeace says: "The IT sector possesses the innovative spirit, technological know-how, and political influence to bring about a rapid clean energy revolution."

You can view the leaderboard here.

In summary, Cisco leads the IT field, along with Ericsson, HP and Intel. At the foot of the table are Sharp, Sony and Panasonic.

Intel is in the lower half. And here's what Greenpeace says:

"Intel has taken management of its carbon footprint seriously. As the operator of a significant number of data centers, it has made some direct investments in renewable electricity generation, and has been the largest purchaser of renewable electricity in the U.S. for the past two years.

"Unfortunately, this same commitment has not been seen in its engagement approach to climate and energy policy development. This is quite surprising from a company that has built its brand identify around an ability to drive innovation. Strong domestic climate and energy policy is what is needed to spur innovation and drive demand for IT energy solutions in the U.S."

Now there's one sentence there that really leaps out at me, and I suspect you too: Intel is the largest supplier of renewable electricity in the US.

Despite this, Intel has not been engaged enough in policy direction, according to Greenpeace. It's a strong accusation and one I'll be asking Intel about directly in the coming days.

So what marks Cisco out as the leader?

It is on the "basis of its thoroughness in documenting the impact of its solutions offerings, which reduce energy consumption in areas such as building design and energy management, telecommuting, and smart grid deployment."

"Cisco is also one of the most active companies in demonstrating leadership on climate and energy policy advocacy — particularly in the EU," says Greenpeace.

These leaderboards are always good for generating headlines. But Greenpeace has gone to some lengths to explain why firms are placed where they are in the chart. So there's food for thought for all firms mentioned. And I'll be following up with Intel soon.

Power and data centres: two issues forever locked in an embrace.

As our need for data increases, so too does our need for storage. Data centres have been the solution to our cloud based world for many years. But the way we power those centres, arguably, hasn't kept pace.

So how data rich are we today?

Well, Google's Eric Schmidt said recently that every two days  we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003 .

That’s something like five exabytes of data, he said.

Five exabytes? That equates to 250,000 years of DVD-quality video every 48 hours.

With companies like Google providing the tools for this content explosion and Intel creating the hardware that powers those tools we need solutions to our power needs.

And it will only get more pressing. The amount of data we are creating is growing exponentially. Intel is forging ahead into the world of embeddable microprocessors. Soon we will be harvesting, creating and consuming data at an almost inconceivable rate.

It's all got to be stored somewhere. The cloud sounds so nebulous and so intangible but everywhere data is stored 'out there' you can bet there is a very real data centre storing and serving that data with lots of storage and lots of computing power.

And they need power. Intel has aided the battle to create ever more efficient data centres thanks to Moore's Law. Each generation of its microprocessors are more efficient than the previous. In short, you can do more with less.

But what about a firm like Google for whom information management is the key to their success. How are they dealing with the power conundrum?

Interestingly, they are pledging to use ever greater amounts of wind power.

The basic points of their plan in their own words:

• We will purchasing 114MW of wind power for twenty years; other than that we cannot disclose specific terms of the deal.
  
• We think this is a structure that makes long term financial sense for Google.  Through the long term purchase of renewable energy at a predetermined price, we’re partially protecting ourselves against future increases in power prices.  This is a case where buying green is simply the right business decision.
  
• We’re buying 114MW of wind power over 20 years.  NextEra will be able to debt finance the project based upon our commitment to take on power for such a long term, presumably at much more favorable terms than otherwise given that they have a credit-worthy offtaker committed for 20 years.
  

So what does this mean? Well, 114MW is enough to power 'several' data centres according to Google. In context, 114MW is about a third of the power generated by the 33 onshore wind farms in Wales. It's a small start but an important one, I would argue.

In statistical terms all data centres are aiming for a low PUE rating.

PUE puts a focus on maximizing the power devoted to the equipment running applications and minimizing the power consumed by support functions like cooling and power distribution

For example, a PUE of 2.0 indicates that for every watt of IT power, an additional watt is consumed to cool and distribute power to the IT equipment.

So in those terms this is the kinds of rating data centres are aiming for:

Scenario    PUE

Current Trends    1.9

Improved Operations    1.7

Best Practices    1.3

State-of-the-Art    1.2

To get to below 1.2 PUE firms are having to rethink their energy needs and how they build and operate data centres. HP has announced a new modular data centre construction system (pictured above) which reduces the PUE to 1.12. Google says its data centres are hitting 1.12 also

Leading IT firms have come together to form The Green Grid. With the aim of improving data centre efficiency and understanding the power needs and issues.

There's a long way to go but with our appetite for data not about to diminish, it's essential work.

Ever fancied strapping yourself in front of three engines, two of them from jet aeroplanes, hitting a go button and hurtling along at a speed designed to propel you beyond 1,000 miles per hour? Me neither. I tend to like my life these days.

But seriously this is what the folks at the BLOODHOUND project are planning. And of course, its safe, because they're seasoned veterans at this sort of thing. Headed up by Richard Noble OBE, this team have already set up a land-speed record that broke the speed of sound.

And they've also got wider ambitions. Ute Gorjzewski, from the Intel side, explained to me that the project aims to also inspire children to become the scientists, engineers and mathematicians of the future because just being a racing car driver would not be enough to make projects like this happen.

Using the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series in a HPC cluster it was a piece of cake to develop the car's body shape down to the last nanometre. And this is a fine science indeed. Minute inaccuracies in the body shape's aerodynamics could potentially send it spiralling into orbit... or it could become the world's fastest plough. So getting it wrong isn't an option.

Lots of schools have hooked into the project and are basing educational activities around the project, and Intel is sponsoring it.

It's exciting, compelling and inspiring indeed.

“Recent progress towards a complete understanding of the universe has been impressive, but many puzzles remain,” said Professor Stephen Hawking, principal investigator, COSMOS. “Cosmology is now a precise science, and we need supercomputers to calculate what our theories of the early universe predict and test them against observations of the present universe.”

Intel continues to underpin the infrastructure required to deliver new discoveries in the field of Cosmology. Clearly customers value the scalability, memory capacity and efficiency of the Intel Xeon 7500 processors.

You can read the full SGI Press Release at: http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2010/august/cosmos.html

What a stupid question, why would anyone want to give their own laptop a ‘Poison Pill’?

Consider this, about 2 million laptops disappear every year and the number is growing. Almost all of them are never seen again.
It’s bad enough losing a personal laptop as it can contain critical personal information. Imagine how much more serious it would be if you run a small business and your laptop disappears one day. Think of the consequences, what data do you have on your laptop hard drive;

• Company accounting
  
• Employees pay details, bank accounts
  
• Employee personal data
  
• Customer names and addresses
  
• Customer banking/credit card information
  

No telling what would happen if this gets into the wrong hands and it most likely will at some point. Plus you have also got to replace an expensive company asset.

I have seen plenty of small business surveys where respondents cite security as a top priority but often this only extends to antivirus, antispyware and firewall etc. Antitheft technology is relatively new but deployment is growing rapidly and it’s not just for the NHS and MoD.

How does Antitheft technology work? Quite simple really, if your laptop goes missing or gets stolen a timer or internet-activated ‘poison pill’ permanently disables the laptop rendering the data secure and the laptop unusable. Click here to see more information and a great short video Antitheft Homepage

A disabled laptop can display a customizable recovery message with contact information to help return the laptop to its rightful owner.

For those of you old enough to be car drivers in the late 80’s and early 90’s you will remember the pandemic outbreak of car radio thefts. Car radio theft on this scale was dramatically reduced by adding security features; PIN codes that had to be re-entered when the radio was disconnected from the vehicle. Can Antitheft technology for laptops have the same effect?

My RSS feed groans under the weight of feeds everytime I do a refresh and I know I really should prune the 438 different feeds I have.

So I've been thinking about the essential IT bloggers and tweeters I follow and thought I'd pass on my recommendations - as long as you pass on yours.

Ed Bott - a great journalist about Windows, with a great strength in debunking myths and half truths around Windows products.

I recommend his Microsoft Report column highly. His Twitter is here.

Jack Schofield is a veteran of the UK computer industry and a top notch journalist. He has been writing Ask Jack, his IT advice column, at the Guardian for many years.

John Gruber has been writing acerbic blog posts about Apple for sometime. He is not to everyone's taste, but he really gets the Apple developer community, and really understands the Cupertino's aims and goals.

Mary Jo Foley is another Microsoft-focused blogger at Zdnet. And like Bott she is essential reading for understanding what's going on at Redmond.

Robert Scoble used to work for Microsoft as an evangelist, but is now a blogger, Tweeter and social media legend who spends most of his time meeting new tech firms. If you want the inside track of whats coming down the track, he's the man.

John Toigo is THE man when it comes to storage and data management. He blogs at Drunken Data.

And for the web, can I recommend Jeremy Owyang.

The fact you are reading this on a blog site created by Intel probably means you understand how small and large companies can use social media to good effect. At least, I hope you think it is to good effect.

Hardly a day goes by without more companies embracing social media - from blogs, to Facebook, and from LinkedIn to Twitter, by way of Flickr and YouTube. There are a lot of conversations happening out there.

But do IT executives really believe in the value of social media - or is it just a passing fad to them?

Well, UK enterprises are "embracing the business opportunities offered by social media", according to new research, commissioned by Open Text Corporation.

The research shows that more than 50% of enterprises surveyed in the UK are using social media in the workplace and 95% believe social media offers business an opportunity to improve communication with both internal and external audiences.

A total of 43% confirmed business drivers for using social media are its direct and personal route of contact with customers and partners.

However, 41% said security was seen to be the biggest barrier to long-term adoption registering, with 20% reporting that a lack of control over message was also a concern.

• More than a quarter of large organisations expect social media to improve customer service
• 93 percent of respondents believe corporate blogging can help corporate communications
• 33 percent of businesses found that corporate employee training videos were most valuable with 30 percent listing product demonstrations
• More than a quarter of organisations regularly use Twitter for business purposes, but the most popular site is Linkedin with 35 percent
• 40 percent reported that Facebook and Linkedin were both preferred social media sites for ease of use

So it's all good, right? Well, it's not so simple. Many companies are still grappling with social media - to the extent, that some companies don't even have social media guidelines.

While domestic wired broadband grabs most of the headlines, it's clear to many that mobile broadband is the big talking point.

Anyone who has ever tried to use their mobile device for a sustained period of work has probably suffered the frustration of slow speeds and dead spots.

William Gibson, the science fiction author, famously said: "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."

He could have been talking about mobile broadband - he wasn't - because he describes perfectly the sense that mobile wireless networks are the present and the future, while at the same encaspulating the problem.

For example - I own a very nice smartphone. The problem is that while at home I can barely get a 3G signal. Not much use for whizzing the world wide web over mobile broadband.

According to latest figures, from Akamai, the average UK mobile speed was between 1 and 3.7Mbps. I don't meant to sound rude, but I find those figures suprisingly high. It's also not clear whether the average measurement takes time as a factor - because the problem with mobile broadband is that you never know when you really need the speed.

For example, if I take a train journey from London to Bristol and during that time I use my mobile dongle on 5 separate occasions and I get speeds of 3.7Mbps, 5Mbps, 215kbps, 0Kbps, and 512kbps, my average speed for the journey is about 1.89Mbps, which sounds pretty good.

But if at those moments I was getting the three lowests speeds were the times I really needed to check emails, read a document from the cloud, or find a presentation stored on my server, while the times I could get 3.7Mbps and 5Mbps were when I was reading the Sport on the BBC News website then the reality is mobile broadband has let me down - badly.

In the UK, we're beginning to see the building blocks of the future of mobile broadband technology be put into place. The communications minister Ed Vaizey has signalled the start of an auction of prized spectrum.

"The past 20 years has seen a revolution in mobile technologies and  devices that have transformed the way we communicate, learn and do  business," said Mr Vaizy.

"We want the UK market to remain at the fore of delivering  devices like the iPad and smart phones but they need the networks to  continue to improve and increase services," he added.

The auction will see two chunks of the spectrum - the 800MHz and 2.6GHz bands - sold off to the highest bidders.

The higher capacity 2.6GHz band will be more useful in towns and cities where lots of users require services, and where speed is most prized.

The measures include, reported ISP Review.

 

•                     Requiring OFCOM to co-ordinate a combined auction of 2.6GHz and 800MHz  spectrum as soon as possible in order that operators can deliver  widespread high speed mobile broadband;

•                    Requiring OFCOM carry out a competitive assessment of future 3G and 4G markets, including the potential for new entrants.  Their assessment  will inform the design of the auction, aimed at enabling delivery of new  competitive mobile broadband services for UK consumer and business  benefit;

•                    Liberalising 2G spectrum at 900MHz  and 1800MHz, implementing the EU’s revised GSM directive to allow  operators to use these frequencies for 3G technologies;

•                    Making 3G licences indefinite to encourage greater investment in 3G services to reach more consumers across the UK. They will also be made tradable, and;

•                    Requiring Ofcom to apply annual licence fees to reflect the market value of these  licences which will be applied after the initial licence term (ends 31  December 2021).

Interestingly, the government also lays out a stipulation that data carried on the 2100Mhz spectrum should have a minimum speed of 768kbps - which is hardly going to set the world alight. There is nothing stipulated for the 4G 2.6Ghz and 800MHz spectrum.

Of course, Intel has an interest here. It is pushing its Wimax technology as a 4G solution, particularly because it is cheaper, more flexible and easier to scale than the competing technology, Long Term Evolution, which actually doesn't meet the standards of 4G technologies.

There's an interesting piece in Going Wimax on the latest in the battle between the technologies, focusing on the US. It's certainly too early to call a winner, and we may end up with both technologies taking hold. While in the UK we are used to one telecoms technology being used in the 3G space, there have been two in the US for many years, and they are not interoperable. We may yet see that situation here in the UK.

ZDNet reports that LTE is "proving more popular in Europe" so feels it might be the winner in the UK. I'm not so sure - mainly because I think the market will want a true successor to 3G and an end to disappointing speeds. Wimax holds the aces here - it's faster than LTE.

As our appetite for more data on the go increases, so too will our patience for slow speeds be ever more tested. The Register has been holding frequent snapshots of mobile data atittudes and I think this view sums up many people's positions.

I like to do the 'spotify test'. If an (allegedly) 7.2Mbps connection  can't reliably stream a 96kbps low quality spotify stream it fails.  This isn't a hard test - I'm expecting them to be able to provide a mere  1/75th of their advertised bandwidth.

Where I am, there is only one provider that hasn’t consistently  failed this test. Coincidentally, it is the most expensive. And it’s not  exactly stunning either.

The future might not be entirely clear for mobile broadband, but we can at least hope it will become more evenly distributed.