Tom Raftery
Tom Raftery is the lead analyst of GreenMonk , the Energy and Sustainability practice of industry analyst firm RedMonk.
Tom has a very strong background in social media, is the former co-founder of a software firm and is co-founder and director of hyper energy-efficient data center Cork Internet eXchange.
Is Cloud Computing Green?
I gave the keynote address at the Digital Trends 2011 event organised by HePIS and CEPIS in Athens recently. My talk was on Cloud Computing’s Green Potential and in my presentation, I claimed that Cloud Computing is NOT Green. I started the talk by explaining what Cloud Computing is and the many advantages it can [...]
Don’t forget – where your cloud apps are hosted helps determine their carbon footprint
Back in July of this year (2011), the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), in conjunction with Verdantix, released a report titled Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century [PDF warning] which erroneously claims Cloud Computing is Green. Shortly after it was released, I wrote a long post outlining exactly where the report was [...]
Facebook hires Google’s former Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl, and increases its commitment to renewables
Google has had an impressive record in renewable energy. They invested over $850m dollars in renewable energy projects to do with geothermal, solar and wind energy. They entered into 20 year power purchase agreements with wind farm producers guaranteeing to buy their energy at an agreed price for twenty years giving the wind farms an [...]
Data Center War Stories talks to SAP’s Jürgen Burkhardt
And we’re back this week with the second installment in our Data Center War Stories series (sponsored by Sentilla). This second episode in the series is with Jürgen Burkhardt, Senior Director of Data Center Operations, at SAP‘s HQ in Walldorf, Germany. I love his reference to “the purple server” (watch the video, or see the [...]
HP joins ranks of microserver providers with Redstone
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® [...]
Smarter cities – cities of almost any size can now go digital, with all the efficiency gains that brings
I attended an IBM Smarter Cities analyst event last week, and it was, not surprisingly, very interesting. What is the whole rationale behind making cities smarter? Well, there are a number of factors. For one, the world’s population has doubled in the last 40 years (from 3.5 billion to almost 7 billion). And with the [...]
TEPCO using realtime information to help reduce energy consumption in Japan
TEPCO, the Japanese power company who own the Fukushima nuclear power plant, are in an unenviable position. Their Fukushima nuclear power plant is the site of one of the world’s worst industrial accidents, they have been accused of not just incompetence but of falsifying safety records and yet they have to continue to supply power [...]
Carbon Disclosure Project’s emissions reduction claims for cloud computing are flawed
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is a not-for-profit organisation which takes in greenhouse gas emissions, water use and climate change strategy data from thousands of organisations globally. This data is voluntarily disclosed by these organisations and is CDP’s lifeblood. Yesterday the CDP launched a new study Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st [...]
SAP starts highlighting sustainability customer success stories
I had a great chat with SAP’s Jeremiah Stone (Senior Director, Sustainability Solution Management) while we were at Sapphire Now in May. Craig Cmehil was good enough to video it for us, so here we are talking about SAP’s Sustainability solutions and SAP’s move to letting its customers recount their sustainability success stories. Here is [...]
IBM’s Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities announcements
Smart buildings are a topic I’m interested in and so I devote significant coverage to them on this blog. One of the reasons for that is that, for example, in the US alone, buildings are responsible for about 70% of the energy consumption and for about 40% of the greenhouse gases emitted and by 2025, [...]
