Driven by

Captains of Sustainability Number 1, 2010

Panduit builds one of the world’s most intelligent buildings life in information

Driven by

Nature

1Joshua Sigel of UNFI, a leading distributor of organic, natural, and specialty foods. Sustainability is ingrained in how the company does business.

kathleen dooher

Future Cities Studying Climate Change Ember on Smart Energy EMC on IT and Energy Efficiency

inside 7 Storing the Sun MIT’s Daniel Nocera has figured out how to store solar energy. 11 Ms. Winkler Goes to Washington EMC’s Chief Sustainability Officer testifies before the Senate. Driven by Nature 15 Sustainability is ingrained in how UNFI does business.

Future Cities 22 Joseph Pelton offers guidelines for creating intelligent communities. 30 Building Smart for Sustainability Panduit pioneers intelligent building systems. Revolutionizing the Study of 36 Climate Change The Web has given scientists a new way to collaborate. Smart Energy 43 Ember brings energy efficiency to homes and businesses. Information Infrastructure 47 EMC’s Jeff Nick on how information becomes more valuable with efficient IT. Are Private Clouds Green? 52 EMC’s Sanjay Mirchandani answers with a resounding “yes!”

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sustainability Wikipedia defines sustainability as “the capacity to endure.” The World Commission on Environment and Development speaks of “forms of progress that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes it as “the satisfaction of basic economic, social, and security needs now and in the future without undermining the natural resource base and environmental quality on which life depends.” Whatever definition you prefer, it’s clear that sustainability is emerging

kathleen dooher

The technology that permeates every aspect of modern life promises to enhance our “capacity to endure.”

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Sustainability [continued]

as a core value in business and government. This issue of ON highlights “Captains of Sustainability”: researchers, entrepreneurs, and IT practitioners who are creating sustainable technologies and driving them into the very fabric of our daily lives. What they share in common is an embrace of innovation and a commitment to the practical application of technology to solve real-world challenges. In a Q and A session with Jason Rubin, MIT’s Daniel Nocera discusses how he cracked one of the toughest challenges in solar energy, developing a robust and affordable approach to storing the sun’s energy. Jean Gogolin explores how the Web is fostering large-scale, global collaboration in the study of climate change. Joseph Pelton describes some of the attributes shared by the world’s “smart” cities and traces how Arlington County, Virginia, has earned a place among their ranks. Robert LeFort, CEO of Ember, explains how low-power mesh networking will soon enable the thousands of “dumb” devices that surround us at home and work to communicate with each other and with an intelligent energy grid, allowing us to

manage our energy consumption with precision and flexibility. We also profile two companies that are practicing what they preach. United Natural Foods, Inc.—a wholesaler of organic and natural foods—has adopted sustainable practices throughout its business, addressing efficient water use, power consumption, fleet management, and facility construction and management. Panduit, which helps customers optimize the physical infrastructure through simplification, agility, and operational efficiency, has incorporated advanced principles of intelligent building design into its headquarters. Lastly, three articles by Kathrin Winkler, Jeff Nick, and Sanjay Mirchandani, all at EMC, reflect the company’s far-reaching commitment to sustainability. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to follow the example of these leaders in adopting sustainable practices in your own sphere of influence. Christine Kane [email protected]

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i the stats

As worldwide energy consumption grows, sustainability initiatives will help offset the toll on our natural resources, economic stability, and quality of life.

TOTAL CO2 emissions (millions of metric tons)

1990

per capita CO2 emissions 2000

(metric tons of CO2 )

2006

1990

2000

2006

4.1

3.9

4.4

1.7

2.0

2.6

12.0

12.2

12.1

World

World 21,899

24,055

28,704

Developing Regions

Developing Regions 6,803

9,731

13,817

11,173

11,961

12,244

Developed Regions

Developed Regions

Source

World Consumption of hydroelectricity and other renewable energy 2030 l 2025 l 2020 l 2015 l 2010 l 2003 l 1990 l

Quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs):

26.3

32.7

45

49.1

53.1

57.8

62.4

Source

Closing the gap Rapid growth in the developing world is closing the gap between energy consumption in mature and emerging economies. This holds true for total and per capita consumption.

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i the stats (continued) world electricity generation by fuel, 2006 – 2030

30 trillion kilowatthours

20 Renewables Coal

10 Natural gas Nuclear Liquids

2006

2010

2015

2020

2025

2030 Source

From 2006 to 2030, world renewable energy use for electricity generation grows by an average of 2.9 percent per year, and the renewable share of world electricity generation increases from 19 percent in 2006 to 21 percent in 2030.

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i the stats (continued) utilities, in their quest to improve energy efficiency, will have the biggest jump in IT spending of any sector: 11% in 2010 compared to 2.6% across all industries.

11%

How much electricity do your appliances use? Cost per year 500 kW $42

1000 kW $83

1500 kW $125

2000 kW $166

Electric blanket Home computer Television Microwave oven

2.6%

Dehumidifier Well pump Aquarium/terrarium Source

Dishwasher Electric cooking Freezer

100 petabytes

(1 petabyte = 1 quadrillion bytes) The amount of data generated by 140 million smart meters sending updates every 15 minutes. Source

Waterbed heater Clothes dryer Washing machine Refrigerator

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Pool pump Spa pump & heater Source

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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Daniel Nocera Cracks the Code of Solar Energy

g Storing the Sun

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” This quote, widely attributed to Mark Twain, applies to the subject of solar energy as well. Everybody talks about it, but nobody has figured out how to store it. Nobody except Daniel G. Nocera, that is. Len Rubenstein

R

esearch notes

Last year, Dr. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and a Professor of Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, solved one of the great problems that has stood in the way of broader

adoption of solar energy. The power of the sun, after all, is no good at night or on rainy, overcast days. What has been lacking to date is a way to store solar energy so that it can be used whenever it is needed. Dr. Nocera’s lab figured out a way to use the sun to easily and cost-effectively split water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be cheaply stored until combined on demand to create a hydrogen fuel that can generate electricity. This technology, married to a photovoltaic panel, a storage tank, and a fuel cell, would enable homeowners to

power their homes—and their fuel-cell cars—on or off the grid. News of Dr. Nocera’s discovery has raced around the globe at the speed of light, its potential impact on society and the environment inspiring astronomical levels of enthusiasm. One German researcher called it “probably the most important single discovery of the century,” and Time magazine named Dr. Nocera one of the 100 scientists “who most affect our world.” With the world now beating a path to his laboratory’s door, ON managed to sneak in to ask him a few questions.

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storing the sun [continued] The primary-use scenario for your invention seems to be homeowners with photovoltaic panels on their roofs. Businesses, with their plants and data centers, consume much more energy than households do—can they someday benefit from this technology as well? Yes. We’re already at the benchmark where we can power an average home easily. To meet structures with much larger energy requirements, we would have to improve the technology by a factor of 10 per unit time—in other words, it would have to work 10 times more quickly. That’s assuming your goal is to be off the grid completely. It’s possible to use the technology for some of your power needs and still remain on the grid for the rest. I’m particularly interested in applying this technology for poor people and the non-legacy world. A lot of developing nations don’t have a reliable energy infrastructure in place; my invention can help them to cost-effectively generate and distribute power using resources they already have—sun and water—along with some other reasonably inexpensive materials. How about vehicles that travel long distances, such as trains and airplanes? Could this technology offset some of their energy use?

Again, right now this is ideal for the fuel-cell car. In January, Honda announced that it’s making a huge investment in home-refueling stations; this is now possible and practical because I can provide a cheaper way to make hydrogen. But for long-haul transport, liquid fuel—which can be made from biofuel—is still preferred. So that remains a research goal. Late last year, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it was awarding grants to develop hydrogen-based solar fuels, so we’re ahead of the curve already. We can take the hydrogen from water, but optimizing it for specific applications depends on lots of engineering issues. Given the magnitude of the problem you’ve solved, the solution when described seems deceptively simple. How long did it take to get it right? I like to describe it as a big lake, and you know you need to get to the other side, but you can’t cross it in one giant leap. So you lay down stepping stones that enable you to make gradual progress. For this project, the stepping stones represent 25 years of work. We explored multielectron reactions, coupling protons to electrons, but the real key was to study how plants use photosynthesis from the sun to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This

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storing the sun [continued] process became known in just the last four years, and we were able to study and learn from that. We didn’t try to rebuild the architecture of how plants do that, but we took the essence of those architectural elements and incorporated them into our design. It really provided a clear roadmap for our research, and it wasn’t long after we figured out how nature does it that we were able to do it. And the research still goes on. As a scientist, I always want to know how things work and how to make them work better. So rather than resting on our discovery, we’ve been refining it and have developed a second catalyst that works as well

Solar panels

Solar panels provide electricity when the sun is shining

Plug-in car

Fuel cell

Electrolyzer

Oxygen

Catalyst

Fuel cell provides electricity when the sun is not shining

Hydrogen

Water

Stored oxygen

Storing solar power

Stored hydrogen

storing solar power Solar panels work well when the sun is out, but not when it sets. In a major scientific breakthrough, MIT’s Dan Nocera has figured out how to store solar power for ondemand use.

or better than the first one. We just submitted a paper on it to a journal. The catalyst seems to be a critical part of your breakthrough. Can you explain what it is and why it was so innovative? The catalyst is what splits the water molecules and allows the hydrogen ions to make hydrogen gas. Previous attempts to develop a suitable catalyst were unsuccessful either because the materials were too expensive or too much energy was required. Furthermore, they tend to break down over time. What we did was to develop a cobaltbased molecular catalyst that sits in a solution of cobalt and potassium phosphate, so it is able to regenerate itself as it breaks down. That is absolutely the key to my discovery and the thing I’m proudest of. This is the first selfhealing catalyst ever developed. And that’s an important property because that means it can work with dirty water, even waste water. Expensive electrolyzers require absolutely pure water or else they get cruddy and stop working; in developing nations, you can’t rely on the quality of the water supply, and you don’t want to impact their potable water sources.

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storing the sun [continued] Enabling materials to repair themselves versus trying to create something that is indestructible: Do you believe that is a useful model for other researchers studying sustainable solutions to consider? Definitely. I think that if you begin to look beyond sheer indestructibility, it can open up new avenues for research. And I think that’s particularly important when the technology in question won’t necessarily be deployed in carefully controlled environments. If you can’t eliminate constraints, you have to be able to work around them. Are there risks to storing hydrogen and oxygen on one’s own property? What we would do is to store the materials in underground storage tanks. Certainly there’s a potential risk in any form of energy, but it’s really no different than methane, which we use all the time. But scaling the technology from a lab application to actual household and neighborhood implementation will require the expertise of companies that specialize in using this kind of material safely. What other obstacles—scientific, economic, political, social, regulatory, or other—stand

in the way of wide-scale adoption of this technology? As with any new technology, there are a few. I want to serve the poor, and while my discovery is cost-effective in and of itself, it relies on photovoltaic panels for the front end and a fuel cell in which to mix the hydrogen and oxygen, and these materials need to be cost-effective as well. I’m in the process of trying to forge partnerships with companies and organizations to make this happen. Scientifically, there are still some refinements we need to do to ensure that it is super robust and maintenance free. These things are going to be in remote areas around the world, so it needs to be something you can set up and leave alone for years, and it will continue to work reliably. From a regulatory standpoint, there aren’t a lot of federal standards having to do with fuels; generally, they fall under the purview of local fire codes. But I’ll need partners to help suss that out. What’s most exciting and promising, though, is the social acceptance my invention has received. People are very enthusiastic about this, and that proves that it satisfies a very real need. As a scientist, you can’t ask for anything more than that. A

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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Appearing in February before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, EMC’s Kathrin Winkler provided an overview of how information technology is contributing to energy efficiency. A condensed version of her testimony follows. justin renteria

S

enate scene

Ms. Winkler Goes to Washington

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winkler [continued] Thank you, Chairman

Kerry and members of the Subcommittee for this opportunity to discuss the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in enabling a more energy-efficient economy. My name is Kathrin Winkler, and I am the Chief Sustainability Officer for EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 technology company headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. EMC specializes in building information infrastructure, the digital foundation for storing, protecting, and maximizing the value from information assets.

This morning, I’d like to convey three key points: • That ICT is driving efficiency aggressively within the industry; • That ICT is central to unlocking increased energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions throughout our economy; and • That Congress has a role to play in working with industry to realize ICT’s full potential. Looking first at information technology’s use of energy, the industry has dramatically increased performance per kilowatt in virtually every generation of its products. Our customers expect us to reduce their operational costs and help them defer or avoid the capital costs of data center expansion. Our stakeholders are asking us to reduce emissions. And in our technology culture, efficiency is a core design principle of good engineering.

For these reasons, the ICT industry finds itself competing on three levels: • On the energy efficiency of our products; • In how we’re reducing the carbon footprint of our operations and our supply chains; and, most importantly, • In the market for products and services that make ICT operations more efficient. Efficient operations are important because the greatest opportunity for reducing energy consumption in ICT comes not from the products themselves, but from how they are used; from consolidating underutilized equipment and eliminating over-provisioning of resources. One of the most gamechanging technologies in this arena is server virtualization, software that enables a single physical server to run multiple operating systems at one

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winkler [continued] time. Without virtualization, most servers are being used at only five to 15 percent of their compute capacity. With it, companies can consolidate loads from hundreds of servers down to a few dozen. Server virtualization initiatives based upon software from one company, VMware, have measured aggregate power savings estimated to be greater than the electricity consumed annually in all of New England for heating, ventilation, and cooling. With the amount of digital data growing 60 percent per year, other breakthroughs focus on the efficiency of the data storage infrastructure. Solid state drives, for instance, consume 38 percent less power than their predecessors for the same capacity and 98 percent less for the same performance. Data deduplication eliminates redundant copies of data,

“

Investments in research and innovation will be critical, but we needn’t wait: The means to realize huge efficiencies in ICT and across a broad range of industry sectors are available today.”

reducing the amount of hardware and thus energy used to manage it. Cloud computing, referred to in the President’s budget as essential “to achieve efficient and effective IT,” is a model that delivers ICT as a service. It offers even greater consolidation and can offload peak demand, thus reducing over-provisioning in corporate data centers. EMC uses these technologies in its own ICT infrastructure, contributing to a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 20 percent per dollar of revenue in just three years. ICT firms are also cooperating. In organizations such as The Green Grid, we bring together

end users, vendors, and service providers to develop metrics, build tools, educate data center operators, and collaborate with government and industry organizations around the globe. Yet, this is only one-fiftieth of the story. It is estimated that ICT accounts for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But what about the other 98 percent? Studies have shown that by 2020, ICT could abate as much as five times the emissions as it generates. This phenomenon is already apparent in our home state of Massachusetts, historically a leader in information technology, and now a state whose energy productivity is one of the highest in the nation.

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winkler [continued] We see ICT’s potential in the energy sector with emerging Smart Grid technology, where ICT will provide the information and tools for utilities and consumers to make more informed decisions. In transportation, ICT is the engine for reducing fuel use through optimization of routing and of freight packing, as well as the aggregation of fleet performance data to evaluate vehicle technologies, fuel choices, and even driving styles. There are many other examples, but there are barriers, too. Congress can help us overcome obstacles to reducing ICT’s two percent by: • Demanding that the federal government lead by example, implementing best practices and technologies in what is the largest ICT infrastructure in the world; • Bridging split incentives in the federal infrastructure

through the institution of appropriate reporting mechanisms; • Continuing investment in cloud computing and nextgeneration ICT research at NIST; and • Collaborating with industry to promote the development of metrics and tools. To leverage the potential of ICT for the other 98 percent, Congress should: • Expand the availability of broadband to connect cities and rural areas; and • Collaborate with industry to develop a national strategy for the use of ICT to improve energy efficiency and reduce CO2 in the economy.  To summarize, the ICT industry is in a race to the top. We are investing in technology and business model innovation. We are collaborating to drive standards and competing to drive the market.

Investments in research and innovation will be critical, but we needn’t wait: The means to realize huge efficiencies in ICT and across a broad range of industry sectors are available today. Through its actions, Congress can accelerate our transformation to an energy-efficient economy. EMC is passionate about the current and future contributions being made by the ICT industry in enabling energy efficiency, the ultimate renewable resource. Thank you, Chairman Kerry and members of the Subcommittee for this opportunity to share our perspective, and I ask that my full statement be made part of the record. A is vice president and chief sustainability officer at EMC. She blogs at http://www.interconnectedworld.typepad.com/ Kathrin Winkler

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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| By Beth Schultz

S

ustainability is a way of life for this leading distributor of organic, natural, and specialty foods.

Driven by

photographs by kathleen dooher

NATURE

With a company motto of “Driven by Nature,” United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), strives to incorporate sustainability in all business practices—not just in the products it distributes (think of just about anything on the shelves of your nearby Whole Foods grocery)—but in every decision it makes. Founded with environmentalism in mind more than 30 years ago, UNFI still embraces a core value of “social and environmental responsibility for the health of the planet.” For its commitment to operating an environmentally friendly business, UNFI has earned the 2009 Environment and Sustainability Award recognition from Nutrition

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driven by nature [continued] Business Journal. It takes pride in its green initiatives, which UNFI says guide and inspire not only employees but also clients, and in the thought leadership

it provides on topics such as use and conservation of energy and water, solar energy, waste reduction, recycling practices, and sustainable building materials.

“UNFI’s commitment to serving our customers and maintaining our position as the nation’s leader in the natural and organic distribution space goes significantly above and beyond our expertise in the industry. Sustainability, whether through internal resource conservation, renewable energy, or associate development, remains a strong focus for the company and an ethic we do not compromise on,” says Joshua Sigel, vice president of IT operations and applied technologies for the company. As testament to this, for example, UNFI’s Chesterfield, New Hampshire, distribution UNFI’s Joshua Sigel stands in front of a rooftop solar display that generates 175,000 kWh of power annually for UNFI headquarters. The facility was designed to achieve LEED Silver certification for commercial interiors.

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driven by nature [continued] center recently received the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR rating, designating it as one of the most efficient distribution facilities in the country. To qualify, the facility had to place among the top 25 percent of the most energy-efficient facilities in the United States.

UNFI also taps the sun’s energy for electrical use, operating massive solar panel arrays on distribution center rooftops on the East and West Coasts, says Tom Dziki, senior vice president of sustainable development at UNFI. In Dayville, Connecticut, for example, a 550-kilowatt solar

photovoltaic system output more than 500,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean energy in 2009—an equivalent emissions reduction to removing 69 passenger vehicles from the road for one year. Likewise, UNFI generated more than 1.7 million kWh of clean energy last year, or

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COMPANY HEADQUARTERS (pictured throughout) is a model for sustainable building practices. Less than 10 percent of debris from construction went into landfills. The facility offers ample natural light (left) and makes extensive use of recycled materials.

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driven by nature [continued]

Diagram designed by Richard Levy

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By consolidating five data centers into a single primary data center, depicted above, UNFI will gain substantial savings in equipment and energy consumption over the next five years.

576.3 metric tons of carbon emissions avoided, from a 1.19-megawatt system in Rocklin, California, Dziki says. That array comprises 7,000 panels covering 175,000 square feet.

Green inside and out A new corporate headquarters is all about sustainability, too—located inside a refurbished American Locomotive Works building, UNFI selected the space, from top to bottom, with energy savings and low emissions in mind. The solar panel sitting atop this building is expected to produce 175,000 kWh annually, reducing the amount of electricity UNFI needs to buy from the grid. And inside, motion-activated sensors and flow controls have helped the company reduce water and

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driven by nature [continued]

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energy use by 40 percent and 25 percent, respectively. UNFI doesn’t stop with the critical building infrastructure. It has selected office carpets made from 100 percent recycled materials, Forest Stewardship Council-certified

interior doors, and Green Guard-certified office furniture. For construction and interior finishes, it uses materials with low or zero volatile organic compounds, which can vaporize and send harmful or toxic vapors into the air.

UNFI is pursuing Silver LEED certification for its new headquarters and its distribution centers by focusing on smart water and energy use, recycling, and other environmentally sustainable elements. But assuredly, Sigel

Motion-activated sensors and flow controls (left) help reduce water use by 40 percent. Open interiors mean that most work spaces have a direct line of sight to the outdoors (right).

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driven by nature [continued]

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UNFI corporate offices are located in a refurbished American Locomotive Works building (top) in Providence, Rhode Island. All office furniture in the facility is Green Guard-certified (left), and office carpets are made from 100 percent recycled materials.

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driven by nature [continued] says, green initiatives do not come at business expense. “UNFI was founded upon the tenets of superior service to our customers, the distribution of quality products, and environmental sustainability. We take pride in our approach to the environment and are constantly seeking new information and technologies to assist us in both reducing our impact on the planet and better serving our customers through sensible business practices,” Sigel says. Sustainable transformation Take, for example, the company’s recent decision to consolidate from five to a single primary data center—and in the process create a sustainable data center architecture. UNFI, working with EMC Consulting, undertook an IT transformation and data center

consolidation that significantly boosts its disaster recovery and business capabilities while promising to net the company substantial savings in equipment and energy consumption over the next five years. For example, the data center, housed in a 300,000-plus-square-foot warehouse, receives power from the Dayville solar array. Virtualization has played a central role in the company’s IT efficiency story. With EMC Consulting’s help, UNFI has virtualized hundreds of servers, a large part of its infrastructure. “By essentially unplugging and virtualizing servers, we were able to lower our power consumption,” Sigel says. “Less hardware drives a lower heat profile, which then lowers our cooling needs. So the green benefits are vast.” Besides the new virtual

servers, running on ENERGY STAR-rated hardware, UNFI has migrated its stored data from EMC Symmetrix DMX3 and EqualLogic iSCSI arrays to a higher-end DMX-4 infrastructure. The company now relies on a storage service catalog that offers optimized storage aligned on a price/ performance basis to key business requirements. The newly consolidated, stateof-the-art data center and disaster recovery hot site delivers the required level of service to all areas of the business in an efficient, sustainable manner. “Reducing our footprint and our heating and cooling requirements are positive impacts from a green perspective,” Sigel says. “Though green benefits didn’t necessarily drive the project, much like anything we do at UNFI, they were interwoven in it.” A

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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| By Joseph N. Pelton

If our society is to survive and thrive in the face of rapid population growth and escalating energy demands, future cities must be intelligent and sustainable.

Future Cities Alcaeus of Tarentum, who lived 2,600 years ago, wrote, “Not houses finely roofed, or stones of walls well built … make the city, but men able to use their opportunity.” Today, the collective and coordinated energies of people living in cities drive technological, social, or political change. Cities are the forge where our future will be annealed.

How do we know this? It’s simple math. It may have taken as long as 100,000 years—from the first appearance of Homo sapiens until 1830—for the world’s population to reach a billion people, at which point 10 percent lived in cities. Today, only 180 years later, the population has increased almost sevenfold, to 6.7 billion, and over half of all people live in cities. By 2050, the U.N. estimates, those figures will be 9 billion

and 60 to 70 percent. This trend presents immense challenges for places where the great majority of people will live. Biodiversity is diminishing, with consequences that have yet to be understood. Water scarcity is a growing threat in many major cities including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Mexico City; an estimated 25 million people have migrated to escape water shortages. The rise of super-automation, enabled by

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future cities [continued] smart, self-aware machines, may very well lead to long-term “technological unemployment,” which will strain economic systems in unprecedented ways. In celebrating our species’ capacity to rise above such challenges through innovation, environmentalist Amory Lovins wrote, “The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones. And the oil age will not end because the world will run out of oil.” Rather, societal needs—coupled with human inventiveness and our ability to recognize opportunity—are what pushed us to make the leap from stone to metalbased technology. Those same traits will be required for us to surmount the challenges we face today.

Intelligent Communities: What future cities might look like

The answer will likely come through new energy and ecotechnologies that give us highly efficient “intelligent cities” with a zero carbon footprint; information and communications technologies that enable “smart” healthcare and education systems; and policies that encourage zero population growth. Not only will many of these technological and economic innovations germinate and flower in our future cities, they will also be embodied in how those cities operate. So, how do you become an “Intelligent Community”? Smart technology is a key part of the process, but a high degree of collaboration and a long-term commitment is required among many

stakeholders: federal, state, and local government; the business community; major institutions; and an informed citizenry. Retrofitting existing infrastructure can be done, and it has been done in many communities worldwide, including Copenhagen, Stockholm, Ottawa, and my own home for the last 30 years, Arlington County, Virginia. The accompanying article, on Arlington’s evolution from a traditional suburb to a “smart city” today, illustrates many of the core principles that forward-looking cities are following to create sustainable urban environments with clean energy, efficient resource consumption, and a robust economic foundation.

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photographs by chris hartlove

Is “the Arlington way” the way of future cities?

As the smallest county in America, measuring only 27 square miles, Arlington County, Virginia, has long recognized the importance of using all its resources wisely.

recession proof?

BusinessWeek ranked Arlington as

the safest city for weathering a recession, due to its high share of jobs in strong industries.

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future cities [continued] The county first embraced a philosophy of “smart growth” 35 years ago, when it created the Long Range County Planning Commission, which coincided with planning for the Washington, D.C., Metro system. Over time, “the Arlington way” has come to epitomize smart, sustainable development that emphasizes eco-friendly transportation, superb education for a diverse population, the embrace of technology to improve government, and active citizen involvement in civic affairs. This past January, Arlington’s long-term vision was validated when the county was named a finalist for the prestigious “Intelligent Community Award” given by the Intelligent Community Forum, a think tank that studies the economic and social development of 21st

Arlington is one of the most diverse communities in the U.S. and also one of the best educated, strengths that reinforce each other. century communities. Arlington is one of just seven finalists being considered from over 450 entries from around the globe. Implicit in the award is a recognition that smart development drives economic growth and stability. Arlington has long been a magnet for high-tech and research components of the U.S. government and related commercial enterprises. The county is home to the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, academic research labs, and many companies in the defense industry. In October 2008, BusinessWeek ranked Arlington

as the safest city in which to weather a recession, with a 49.4 percent share of jobs in strong industries. Here are some of the things that make Arlington a “smart” place to live and work. ƒ Smart people, who understand that education and diversity drive excellence Arlington is one of the most diverse communities in the U.S. and also one of the best educated, strengths that reinforce each other. Its residents represent over 125 different nationalities. Its students speak more than 100 languages. The school population is both ethnically and economically diverse, with

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future cities [continued] 40 percent minority enrollment and 30 percent of students qualifying for school meal subsidies. Arlington sees nothing but

strength in this diversity: The county’s four high schools were all ranked on Newsweek’s 2009 Top U.S. High Schools list, and three were in the top 100.

Over 90 percent of graduates planned to attend colleges or universities. Valuing education seems to be in the gene pool: In 2006, CNN Money ranked Arlington as the most highly educated community in the U.S., citing the 35.7 percent of residents holding graduate degrees. Through nearly 100 commissions and committees, Arlington has harnessed all this brain power to create a more prosperous and sustainable community. ƒ Land use and transportation planning that is entwined Arlington’s highly walkable, urban villages have evolved, based on the Metro Stop Bulls-Eye development concept. Eighty-five percent of development is concentrated in 10

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future cities [continued] percent of the land area. High-density, mixed-use neighborhoods combine residential, commercial, and retail properties clustered around Metro stations, which provide access to Washington, D.C., just across the Potomac River, and to major facilities in Arlington such as the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Metro access, bike-friendly streets, and Zipcar-type services allow a high percentage of residents to live, work, shop, and play without necessarily owning or using a car. Wi-Fi service at key Metro stops makes public transit more userfriendly, allowing commuters to check their e-mail while en route, tourists to look up parks and museums they plan to visit, and locals to arrange to meet their friends at the coffee shop most convenient to all.

ƒ A long-term commitment to energy efficiency Several years ago, the county established Fresh AIRE (Arlington Initiative for Reduced Emissions) to improve the

energy efficiency of county government. Building on this foundation, in 2010, Arlington convened a Community and Energy Sustainability Task Force in partnership with large govern-

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future cities [continued] ment facilities, utility companies, and other major landowners. The task force will address the entire community’s energy consumption and study ways to reduce the tons per capita of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that Arlington generates. ƒ State-of-the-art emergency management Building on experience gained during the 9/11 attacks— when Arlington officials coordinated the emergency response efforts of multiple agencies—the county maintains a state-of-the-art Emergency Communications Center. The facility maintains live audio, video, and/or high-speed data connections to other local jurisdictions in the D.C. area, federal agencies located in Arlington, and national databases and emergency management systems—thereby

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future cities [continued] allowing a coordinated regional response. Emergency officials can track the location of first responders; view status information on local, regional, state, and national conditions; monitor air quality and wind-dispersal patterns; and connect to mobile command centers for Arlington’s police and fire departments. A mobile emergency Wi-Max system works in tandem with the FBI to support national events that take place in Arlington—most recently the Marine Corps Marathon, which hosted 40,000 runners. ƒ More efficient, responsive government Arlington uses technology to increase the convenience and efficiency of county services. Using a Customer Assessment and Payment Portal, residents

and businesses can pay taxes, fees, and other charges five times faster than in the past. Telework options ensure continuity of key government services, even during emergencies. When a recent snowstorm shut down county offices for several days, over 1,000 employees were able to work remotely, and automated communications kept citizens informed. Residents can watch county board and school board meetings online and search meeting agendas and video via text captioning. Under a federal grant, Arlington is installing an ultrawideband network to connect all traffic signals by 2013. This will allow the county to proactively manage traffic congestion and facilitate rapid evacuation during major emergencies. A second goal is to connect all county

facilities and public schools, so services can be shifted off the commercial broadband network they run on today and instead run on public facilities. A Joseph N. Pelton is the award-

winning author of over 30 books on satellites, telecommunications, and the impact of technology on society. He is co-editor of Future Cities: Designing Better, Smarter, More Sustainable and Secure Cities. Dr. Pelton is a member of the IT Advisory Commission for Arlington County, Virginia, and was a member of Arlington’s Long Range County Planning Commission throughout its existence, from 1975 to 1977.

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photographs by chris lake

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Panduit creates a showcase for intelligent building systems By Beth Schultz

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ Building Smart for Sustainability

panduit president Tom Donovan and CIO Joanne Tyree pause in the

airy lobby of the company’s headquarters. “We wanted to give everyone exposure to sunlight and to the outside environment,” says Donovan.

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building smart [continued] Call it a tribute to its Midwestern roots, but Panduit Corp. has long thrived on a straightforward efficiency that has had it embracing environmentalfriendly practices since opening its doors in 1955. “We’ve always been a practical company, relying on functional concepts,” says President Tom Donovan. In fact, he says, sustainability, a corporate goal many companies have only recently tuned into, has been a guiding force at Panduit since before he landed on the company’s doorstep 29 years ago. “Driving sustainability has been a core value since the company was founded, with a focus not just on lean manufacturing but on lean everything and on driving out waste in all forms,” he says.

Before even entering the building, for example, a visitor might notice that the exterior windows don’t look into offices. Rather, all offices run down the building’s center spine, leaving unobstructed views to the outside. “We’ve got a beautiful campus, with views of trees and a creek. But when I close my office door in the old headquarters, nobody on the other side can see outside,” Donovan says. The new building, on the other hand, features a rectangular footprint with the distance from the windows to the center spine calculated based on the angle of the sun and how far daylight can penetrate into the building. “We wanted to give everyone exposure to sunlight and to the outside environment,” Donovan explains. “I’m looking out glass walls to the outside windows, and so is everyone else.” While the open, airy design maximizes the use of natural light and makes for a readily visible sign of greenness, the real sustainability story is taking place in the background. “In today’s world, in order to be green and sustainable over the long term, the building has to be intelligent—and I would argue,” Donovan says, “that this is one of the world’s most intelligent buildings.” What, you might ask, makes a building so brainy?

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ A smart, new building

But Panduit took sustainability to new heights— five stories, to be exact—in its new world headquarters building officially opening this spring on its Tinley Park, Illinois, corporate campus, 35 miles south of downtown Chicago. The building, which anticipates earning Gold-level certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, is a gleaming showcase of what the modern, sustainable business is all about.

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building smart [continued]

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ It’s one whose policy-based building systems are so intertwined and automated that when an employee comes to work on a Saturday afternoon, a swipe of his security badge triggers the heating and lighting in his office area to power up. Or, for

example, it’s one that, upon receiving an external camera feed of a man running toward the building from the parking lot, engages locks on entry points and alerts security personnel to a potential problem. It’s a building that, should energy usage

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building smart [continued] peak in certain areas, systems will have the ability to take action based on predetermined rules. “It’s about intimacy of control,” says James Brew, a principal architect with Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent “think-and-do-tank” on efficient and restorative resource use. And that intimacy isn’t just tied to people, he adds. “It’s about knowing where and when your building is using energy and then synchronizing that energy use not only with occupants but also with climate. So as climate changes, building systems will be able to anticipate the loads needed based on fuzzy logic and learning from the day before or previous weather conditions and understand what it needs to do to respond,” Brew says. As a leading adopter of intelligent building systems, Panduit is still learning how all of this integration and automation will play out in its new headquarters. “Whether these sorts of things will happen in real time is yet to be determined. We’re just starting to understand the power of having all these systems able to talk to each other,” says Joanne Tyree, Panduit CIO. “What we’re doing, we’ve come to find, is unique.” Jack Heine, a research vice president at Gartner, Inc., agrees that Panduit’s intelligent building

and sustainability program is innovative—and says it’s one other companies would do well to emulate. Particularly impressive, he says, is the degree to which this was a collaborative corporate effort involving not only facilities but also IT and other groups to study many different operational aspects of a building. “There’s a changing paradigm in the workforce, and buildings require greater flexibility,” Heine says. “Panduit has given all of this a lot of consideration, and that’s important.” Donovan puts it this way: “We didn’t just need more space, we needed better space.” This space, he adds, would help drive an increase in collaboration—a critical cultural goal— improve operational efficiencies, and incorporate sustainability elements not possible in the company’s old, 1960s-era headquarters building. “The new space gives us the opportunity to bring all this to bear in one project,” he says.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ Intelligent convergence

The world headquarters building is a realization of Panduit’s own Unified Physical Infrastructure (UPI) approach for converging core systems and facility functions, says Vineeth Ram, Panduit’s vice president of global strategic marketing.

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building smart [continued]

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ very smart The building design integrates communications, computing, control, power, and security systems on a unified network, manageable from a unified operations center.

“Integrating communications, computing, control, power, and security systems on a unified network, manageable from a unified operations center, optimizes a building’s physical infrastructure and, ultimately, leads to energy and other operational efficiencies,” Ram says. “The converged, IP infrastructure comprises stateof-the-art technology from myriad world-class providers, including EMC, coupled with enterprise

management applications and supported by Panduit’s UPI-based solutions.” A state-of-the-art data center, also located in the new building, supports the automated intelligent building systems, Tyree says. “Our strategy is to consolidate, standardize, and simplify, so we’ve taken those principles to build a data center with an eye on high availability, sustainability, and energy efficiency and apply

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building smart [continued] those same things to this new set of business applications—meaning, the intelligent building— we now support,” she explains. Within the new data center, Panduit’s server infrastructure will be 60 percent virtualized, compared to 10 percent previously. “Clearly with increased use of virtual servers, our energy and space usage go down dramatically,” Tyree says. In addition, Panduit is modernizing the platforms on which it runs its Oracle enterprise management applications and, on the storage side, it’s consolidating from a variety of disk storage devices onto a unified storage platform from EMC that will save the company an estimated $250,000 annually in operating costs, Tyree says. The network comprises Cisco’s latest Nexus switching technology plus Panduit’s own copper and fiber optic high-speed data transport networking solution, smart cabinets, and accessories. “All of these things will allow us to run much denser and more energy efficient,” says Tyree, noting that the new data center will open with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of no worse than 1.7 and possibly 1.5, down from the existing data center’s 2.1 rating. Developed by The Green Grid, an industry consortium, the PUE is a

commonly used metric for measuring the amount of data center power consumed by IT gear. “We want our data center to be a showcase, a working model of our solutions for our customers, so we collaborated closely with our facilities team to make sure we were using our solutions and our partners to our best possible advantage,” Tyree says. “But at the same time,” she adds, “one of my goals is bringing down the cost of running IT so we can free up money to do innovative things. In a lot of ways, the new building and data center will help me do that.” Indeed, Donovan says. And as much as Panduit aimed to create a highly intelligent, sustainable building, it did not do so in the absence of a rigorous business case. “We don’t do anything without a strong return on investment,” he stresses. “The sustainable elements of the building had a three-year or better straight, hard payback. Plus, they provide huge soft benefits, like improved employee productivity.” Sustainability doesn’t come easy. It takes innovative leadership, a comprehensive operational view, and a smart business case. But, as Panduit shows, with thoughtful processes and a long-term commitment it can be done well, to great business benefit. A

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eru abcdg abcdghi jklmno corrund erumquia tus mi, ut et repu daecaese alique verest offitur ntiamus et opta is quas dolupis quaturia et, quas ilibus evel id iosam ad quo dolo re quidem. Musa que et magnihi liquund eli wa temque iRum res magnim

the web is revolutionizing The study of climate change

Over the last 20 years, scientists have collected vast amounts of data about climate change, much of it accessible on the Web. now the challenge is figuring out how to integrate all that information into coherent datasets for further analysis—and a deeper understanding of the Earth’s changing climate. In 2000, more than 20 countries began deploying an array of drifting, robotic probes called Argo floats to measure the physical state of the upper ocean. The floats, which look a little like old-fashioned hospital oxygen tanks with antennas, are designed to sink nearly a mile below the surface. After moving with the currents for about 10 days, they

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climate change [continued] gradually ascend, measuring temperature, salinity, and pressure in the top 2,000 meters of the sea as they rise. At the surface, they transmit the data to a pair of NASA Jason satellites orbiting 860 miles above the equator, then sink again to repeat the process. So far more than 3,000 floats have been deployed around the world. The data they’ve collected has provided a big leap forward in understanding the upper levels of the Earth’s oceans—and their effect on global climate change— in the same way as early weather balloons expanded understanding of the earth’s atmosphere. What’s more, the data they collect is available in near real time to anyone interested, without restrictions, in a single data format.

Dr. Thomas Peterson, a scientist at the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, has been with the data center since 1991. “Back then,” says Peterson, “people came to us for integrated climate information because it was so hard to find the large amounts of data they needed to derive the information themselves. With the Internet, people can just download the data from the Web.” The Argo floats are funded by some 50 agencies around the world. The program is one example among thousands of the ways in which the Web is facilitating scientists’ understanding of global climate change. Without the Web, in fact, the float system would not exist.

Studying human-caused change Humans have probably been studying weather at least since they began raising crops. But rigorous climatology—the study of weather patterns over decades, centuries, or even millennia—dates only from the late 1800s. The study of anthropogenic, or humancaused, climate change is much younger. Until the 1950s, few suspected the earth’s climate might be changing as a result of human activity. And if a scientist in, say, Germany did suspect it, it would have been difficult indeed for him to work with scientists in England or China to explore the possibility. By the 1980s, as evidence began accumulating of rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, scientists who were pursuing particular aspects of

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climate change [Continued]

BUOYS WILL BE BUOYS This visualization shows the locations of the ARGO buoy array, over time. The buoys measure ocean salinity, column temperature, and current velocities.

climate change independently began holding international conferences to exchange information. But not until the 1990s did the Web enable them to collaborate remotely, in real

time. That collaboration, along with the enormous amounts of data collected using web technologies, has revolutionized the field. Today, climate scientists

conduct studies with colleagues on the other side of the world, hold marathon webinars, and co-author papers with dozens or even hundreds of collaborators, all via the Web. Scientists use the Web to access, monitor, and share everything from in situ data collected by such means as the Argo floats and a worldwide network of 100,000 weather stations, to remote data from radar and satellites, to paleoclimatologic indicators like tree rings and core samples from glaciers and ancient lake beds. A staggering amount of data The sheer volume of scientific data on climate is staggering, collected around the world by government agencies, the military, universities, and thousands of other institutions.

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climate change [continued] Today, climate scientists conduct studies with colleagues on the other side of the world, hold marathon webinars, and co-author papers with dozens or even hundreds of collaborators, all via the Web.

NOAA stores about 3,000 terabytes of climate information, roughly equal to 43 Libraries of Congress. The agency has digitized weather records for the entire 20th century and scanned records older than that, including some kept by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. All of it is accessible on the Web. As part of its educational mission, NOAA has even established a presence in the Second Life virtual world, where members can watch 3D data visualizations of a glacier melting, a coral reef fading to white, and global weather patterns evolving. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an equally important player in climate research. Its Earth Observing System (EOS) of

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climate change [Continued] satellites collects data on land use, ocean productivity, and pollution and makes its findings available on the Web. There is even a NASA-sponsored program involving a network of beekeepers to collect data on the time of spring nectar flows, which appears to be getting earlier (http://honeybeenet. gsfc.nasa.gov). The U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization’s Group on Earth Observations (GEO)—launched by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and the G8 leading industrialized countries—is developing a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS, both to link existing climatological observation systems and to support new ones. Its intent is to promote

common technical standards so that data collected in thousands of studies by thousands of instruments can be combined into coherent data sets. Users would access data, imagery, and analytical software through a single Internet access point called GEOPortal. The timetable is to have the system in place by 2015. But—and this is a huge but—despite the wealth of information that’s been collected bearing on climate change, finding specific datasets among the thousands of formats and locations in which they’re stored can be daunting or even impossible. How MIT’s DataSpace could help Stuart Madnick, who is the John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technology

at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, believes a new MIT-developed approach called DataSpace could help. “Right now, papers on hundreds of subjects are published, but the data that backs them up often stays with the researcher,” says Madnick. “We want DataSpace to become the Google for multiple heterogeneous sets of data from a variety of distributed locations. It wouldn’t necessarily work the way Google does, but it would be as useful, scalable, and easy to use, and it would allow scientists to access, integrate, and re-use data across disciplines, including climate change.” As a simple example of how DataSpace could work with respect to climatology, Madnick posits that a scientist wants to know the temperature

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climate change [Continued] and salinity of the water around Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, over the past 20 years. Data that could answer the question could exist in all kinds of locations, from nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, to NOAA, to international fishing fleets. But right now, there is little or no integration of that data. DataSpace could perform that integration, which can require adjustments ranging from such simple things as reconciling Centigrade data with Fahrenheit, to compensating for differences in the ways various instruments measure. Semantic Web technologies DataSpace would incorporate “reasoning systems” that would “understand” disparate data in a way that now requires human

intervention. Often called Semantic Web technologies, such linked-data systems would collect unstructured data, interpret data that is structured but not interpreted, and interpret what the data means. How would such Semantic Web technologies be used to study climate change? Madnick provides an example. “Microbes are the most abundant and widely distributed organisms on Earth. They account for half of the world’s biomass and have been integral to life on Earth for more than 3.5 billion years. Marine microbes affect climate and climate affects them. In fact, they remove so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that some scientists see them as a potential solution to global warming. Yet many of the feedbacks between marine

biogeochemistry and climate are only poorly understood. The next major step in the field involves incorporating the information from environmental genomics, targeted process studies, and the systems observing the oceans into numerical models. That would help to predict the ocean’s response to environmental perturbations, including climate change.” Madnick believes such integration of disparate data, including genetics, populations, and ecosystems, is the next great challenge of climatology, and that Semantic Web technologies will be needed to meet the challenge. A Wikipedia for climate change? Another approach being developed at MIT is the

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climate change [Continued] Climate Collaboratorium, part of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. MIT Sloan School Professor Thomas Malone describes the Climate Collaboratorium, still in its formative stage, as “radically open computer modeling to bring the spirit of systems like Wikipedia and Linux to global climate change.” His hope is that thousands of people around the world—from scientists, to business people, to interested laypeople— will take part via the Web to discuss proposed solutions in an organized and moderated way and to vote on proposed solutions. Malone has written, “The spectacular emergence of the Internet and associated information technology has enabled unprecedented opportunities for such

interactions. To date, however, these interactions have been incoherent and dispersed, contributions vary widely in quality, and there has been no clear way to converge on wellsupported decisions concerning what actions—both grand and ground-level—humanity should take to solve its most pressing problem.” Malone says the Collaboratorium will not endorse positions, but be “an honest broker of the discussion.” Disproving disinformation Asked what the biggest challenges are facing climate change scientists, NOAA’s Tom Peterson answers, “Communication. Too much is written by scientists for scientists, so it is often too dense for laypeople to understand. It’s rare for a

scientist to take time out of trying to make progress on scientific questions to rigorously disprove some of the widely propagated errors about climate change.” Still, what is truly remarkable about how the study of climate has changed over the past 20 years is the way the Web has given scientists from around the world, in disparate areas of research, a new way to collaborate. Thanks to the Web, many millions of people not only within but also beyond the scientific community now have access to an enormous tapestry of information. And new technologies like the Semantic Web will undoubtedly enrich that tapestry. A

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Smart

... the ceiling fan.

Energy From an energy perspective, we’re surrounded by dumb devices. But hopefully not for long. In this interview with ON publisher Gil Press and editor Christine Kane, Ember CEO Robert LeFort explains his company’s role in bringing smart energy to homes and businesses.

How smart is energy today? Except for building automation, where there have been a lot of advances in the last 20 years, the answer is “not very smart.” For most people, energy is the third largest bill after the mortgage and car payment. Capgemini identified 15 electrically significant loads in a typical house. Yet we have no idea how much energy each of these uses consumes, at what cost, or where the biggest savings could be gained.

A colleague was saying his father-in-law unplugs the VCR every night because of the blinking blue light. He’s saving milliwatts, but in the meantime he’s got a freezer in the garage that wastes more energy in one night than unplugging the VCR will save in a year. On the utility side, some companies know so little about their customers’ energy consumption that, if there’s a power outage, they find out when the first person calls to complain. They know how

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smart energy [Continued] big the outage is based on how many calls they get. That’s not a very efficient control system.

asia kepka

Ember describes its technology as wireless, low-speed mesh networking. Can you explain what you do? The name Ember is short for “embedded radios.”

We’re a network and a platform company whose products allow OEMs to put embedded radios into what have always been dumb sensors and controls: things like thermostats, pressure and humidity sensors, light switches, and motion sensors. This turns them into smart devices that can communicate with each other and with smart meters, which also incorporate Ember technology. It’s kind of “the Internet of things.”

Robert LeFort

of Ember describes lowspeed, mesh networking as “the Internet of things.”

What does a smart meter “know”? It knows how much energy you’ve used this past hour, day, and month to date; what are the periods of peak consumption for your household, and how much it’s costing you so far. This information is stored locally and is also communicated back to the utility. As smart devices become commonplace in homes, the smart meter will also collect data from the individual devices that make up the home area network or HAN—the refrigerator, thermostat, dishwasher, remote controls— and allow them to be managed individually. With better information and better control comes higher efficiency and convenience.

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smart energy [Continued] How will the consumer access the information? A display device will display energy consumption data, but in a simplified form. You won’t be able to tell how much a kilowatt/hour costs, but with one touch you can find out how much you’ve spent on energy this month. If your utility charges different rates at peak and off-peak hours, a green light will tell you when energy is cheap and a red one will tell you when you’re paying a premium. At some point, you’ll be able to see which devices are consuming energy, from most to least. By the way, we’re careful not to talk in terms of changing consumer behavior. The network should be smart enough and simple enough that a consumer can decide, “My goal is maximum comfort,” or “I don’t want to spend more than $200 a month on my energy bill,” and the system can educate him on what his options are. What’s the value of devices talking to each other? I’ll give you one example. Most bathrooms have a ceiling fan that you turn on after a shower to eliminate humidity. But you have no idea when to shut it off. Or maybe you forget to turn it off, so it runs all day. Now if you have a smart thermostat with a humidity sensor in the room, it can tell the

fan to turn off when the humidity returns to a normal level. Is that hard? No. But it’s an example of the hundreds of different things you can do once you have the intelligence that comes from devices sharing information. What are some major deployments that incorporate Ember technology? Last year, Gothenburg, Sweden, finished installing 300,000 smart meters in homes, with a backhaul network that provides two-way communication between the meter and the utility. The initial goals were fast and accurate meter reading and better quality-of-service information. If a home­owner calls to report a problem with a bill, a service rep can access the meter in a few seconds. With twoway communication, the utility can deliver new features and value-added services to consumers, which they are just starting to do. How about the commercial side? Hospitality is a solid application for us. Our devices are in three new hotels in Las Vegas’ City Center. In the Aria, which has 4,000 rooms, there are 75,000 to 80,000 Ember chips in devices that control the room lighting, the shades, the entertainment system, the room safe, and the

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smart energy [Continued] door lock. Interestingly, the hotels are doing this for comfort, convenience, and personalization. For example, when guests first enter their rooms, the blinds open to provide some natural light. A bedtime setting might close all the shades and turn off the lights. Guests can change settings or create their own, using the TV remote. We provide the wireless connections to make sure all these things talk to each other. With all the data that’s being collected, who’s going to own it? That’s a huge issue, and it’s far from settled. Today, in reality, the utility owns the data. And for that reason, I think utilities will look more and more like service companies, offering value-added services like equipment maintenance. If I see that your furnace isn’t performing efficiently, I can call you up and recommend a cleaning. But the government is starting to say the homeowner owns the data, raising the question of who will manage it in a way that offers value to consumers. Telcos and ISPs are showing interest. They certainly know how to manage content and deliver services to the home. And Cisco, GE, and Google are all looking at what their play is going to be.

How will smart energy get rolled out to homes on a large scale? The first step is installation of smart meters by the utilities. In the United States, Texas and California are the furthest along. They’re installing 20,000 meters a day. Next, they’ll start doing in-home pilots that incorporate smart, in-home devices into a HAN, particularly thermostats and displays. In the future, many major appliances and electronic devices will include smart energy features. GE, Whirlpool, and others have already made announcements to that effect. In the meantime, smart plugs—which sit between the appliance and a standard electrical socket—will provide basic monitoring and management for existing products. What are possible barriers to wide adoption of smart energy? A big factor is how regulatory bodies behave with the utilities. If you look at what made the Internet successful, it was openness, it was layers, it was competition. That is going to be hard to duplicate in the current regulatory climate. That doesn’t mean smart energy will fail. But it will move slower than it could, and therefore we will reap the benefits more slowly. A

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I

nfo tech

BY jeff nick The efficient, effective use of IT not only requires that we “do more with less” but also

derive more value from the information we process.

Information Infrastructure In today’s world, more than ever before, companies and individuals are aware of their responsibility to conserve resources and minimize negative impacts on our global environment. However, the role the IT industry plays in sustainability goes beyond energy conservation and elimination of waste. Our product is information processing. The efficiency and efficacy of IT translates not only into “doing more with less” but also yielding more value from the information we process.

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Our digital information universe is exploding and conservatively should reach 2,500 billion gigabytes by 2012. Eighty-five percent of this information will be managed by corporations at some point in its lifetime. The IT industry must make constant strides to improve on IT efficiencies in the processing of information. EMC possesses key technologies to help manage this explosion. Virtualization, for instance, converges workloads onto fewer servers and storage systems, boosting utilization to as much as 80 percent. Deduplication algorithms create links to original data rather than allowing repeated copying, providing an average 20x reduction in redundant data. And we have Flash: attractive because it increases I/O response, and its efficiency is quite im-

Figuring out

who

you are,

?

leah fasten

information infrastructure [continued]

what

you are, and

how

you are

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information infrastructure [continued] pressive. Flash consumes 38 percent less power than spinning disks—about 98 percent less when measured per I/O request. Flash is green. Finally, there’s information lifecycle management. It supports green IT by storing data on tiers, according to how the data is consumed. In healthcare, the MRI of a patient undergoing active diagnosis must be available instantly, so it lives on a high-performance tier. When the acute-care phase concludes, the MRI can be moved to a less energy-hungry archival tier. Economies of scale Each of these technology advances improves the utility of information processing as it relates to resource consumption. That being said, there is a new dimension to

sustainable IT emerging— focused on economies of massive scale—cloud computing. IT organizations deal not just with exploding data, but also infrastructure sprawl, identity and accesscontrol challenges, phishing, service attacks, new regulations, and reduced budgets. Those realities bring us to cloud computing for sustainability. Businesses are growing increasingly receptive to outsourcing certain processes to third-party experts in areas such as backup, recovery, and compliance monitoring. Rather than making huge capital expenditures to expand their data centers, these clients pay only for what they use. Cloud infrastructures contribute to sustainability in part because cloud service providers are

able to host many clients concurrently. A shared resource infrastructure means greater economies of scale, improving on power and cooling efficiency in aggregate. For example, a service provider can flexibly virtualize servers at an even more extensive, meaningful level than is possible in one internal IT organization. Cloud computing augments data center processes without adding infrastructure support challenges. Cisco, EMC, VMware, IBM, HP, Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com—all these IT providers are moving to enable service delivery via the cloud paradigm. Enterprises will take advantage of a common infrastructure and processes provided by a service provider at a greater economy of scale. The promise of cloud computing is to turn

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information infrastructure [continued] an IT infrastructure into a lowcost, efficient, shared, flexible service. That’s sustainable IT as a utility model. Lessons from the time of cholera Consumption of IT resources is a major issue, but so is the “production side” of the value IT delivers: namely, information. Data translates into information. Information morphs into knowledge. Knowledge equals power—the type of power that supports the sustainability of our planet and humanity. In 1854, Dr. John Snow was a London physician when the city experienced yet another cholera outbreak. In those days, people believed “bad air” caused disease. Dr. Snow wasn’t convinced. He interviewed patients, collected data, and analyzed cholera

incidents empirically. With this information, Dr. Snow created concentric circles mapping outbreak epicenters. He traced “ground zero” to a water pump in Soho. Its supply had been contaminated with cholera bacteria leaking from an adjacent cesspit. Explaining his techniques of data collection, monitoring, correlation, and analytics, Dr. Snow convinced authorities to remove that pump’s handle temporarily and halted that outbreak. How does his story reveal the value of information processes today? Look at 21st-century healthcare. We have silos of digital information—from healthcare provider, to radiologist, to clinician, to researcher, to the HR department of a patient’s employer, to pharmaceutical companies, and beyond.

We can do better They have information repositories that can’t be seamlessly connected because they exist in different formats, support different protocols, and have different record IDs. Given the information explosion and these obstacles to sharing across silos, it is increasingly challenging to replicate the data collection, correlation, and analysis Dr. Snow accomplished on his own in 1854. In today’s healthcare world, three tasks are problematic. The first is figuring out who you are. You’re known by numerous identities: your name, birth certificate, medical insurance number, social security number, driver’s license, employee ID. No standard exists for applying your identifiers consistently across information stores and across organizations.

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information infrastructure [continued] The second problem relates to what you are, informationally, as a patient. You are your insurance forms, doctors’ notes, prescriptions, diagnostic tests, and medical history: information that exists in many forms and repositories with different access methods. The third problem centers on how you are. Clinicians, healthcare providers, insurers, radiologists, and researchers must agree on who you are before interacting via secure information-sharing on what you are to establish how you are. The solution is information exchange as a service. Cloud computing as an information infrastructure utility can contribute to this. Consider the following multi-organization scenario: a physician’s order for a computed tomography (CT) scan goes to a radiologi-

cal imaging department, where a radiologist performs the scan based on the patient’s identity and the workflow order. The workflow translates the scan and sends it digitally to a data archive for audit and retrieval. The workflow also invokes remote radiological services, where a specialist retrieves the scan, assesses the image quality, and uses pattern-matching analyses and human expertise to evaluate the patient’s condition. The report is then returned to the patient’s physician and the hospital’s imaging center. Cloud-based information sharing—looking at all the information about us and our susceptibility to disease—helps discern how we are. However, it requires that we maintain information integrity and privacy through data governance, monitoring, and control.

In Europe and China, biobanks are emerging: digital information repositories of thousands of patients’ DNA and other biogenetic materials. Biobanks enable secure, anonymous exchanges of information among researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers attempting to cure complex diseases. Healthcare is the fastestgrowing area of digital information creation. We must provide cloud infrastructure for integration, identity reconciliation, and collaboration on anonymized information sets. It’s a new way that IT can support the sustainability of our humanity. A Jeff Nick is senior vice president and

chief technology officer at EMC.

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C

io corner

BY sanjay mirchandani

EMC’s private cloud environment offers many opportunities to improve energy efficiency.

Are Private Clouds Green? People classify cloud computing and private cloud environments as cost-saving efficiency generators. They’re correct to do so. But I call private clouds green as well. For the past couple of years here at EMC, we have been evolving our physical IT infrastructure into a private cloud. We have virtualized our Intelbased server environment. For stored data, we have employed information lifecycle management, energy-efficient Flash drives, and archiving technologies that have shrunk our data footprint and relocated it to much more energy-efficient SATA drives. We use state-of-the-art deduplication technologies for our backups and thin provisioning when allocating storage capacity to support business applications. We are improving the power and cooling systems in our facilities. We dove into this private-cloud building and infrastructure improvement with efficiency in mind. We absolutely had to replace and virtualize our

aging hardware if we wanted to improve the efficiency of the services we deliver. But efficiency improvements result in less energy use, too. So far, “green” appears to be a natural outcome of our private cloud. For example, our enterprise servers were probably less than 10 percent utilized in our physical data center. In our virtual environment, utilization hovers around 75 percent. After we consolidated and virtualized the servers in our Santa Clara data center, for example, we decommissioned hundreds of hosts and regained a staggering amount of floor space in the process. EMC teams are now using that space for Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) initiatives. Watching our IT groups worldwide take 1,250 servers down to 50 in the first wave and another 1,600 servers down to 40 or 50 in the second has been amazing for me. I like thinking about all that power and cooling we’re avoiding.

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private clouds [continued] Thin provisioning of storage capacity is another way “private cloud building” equals “sustainability improvement.” In the old days, we provisioned storage to support some future peak-usage setpoint for a given application. Whenever that application’s storage needs ebbed, however, we were still “paying for peak” from an energy perspective. Because a private cloud scales up and down elastically, we can provision and de-provision capacity automatically for average, not for peak. Theoretically, by boosting the storage utilization of existing arrays, we need to keep a lower number of arrays (primary and mirrored) powered up. Yes, we’ll scale and eventually buy more boxes; but until then, we don’t need them because thin provisioning so greatly increased our utilization of our existing storage. On the client side, a virtual desktop infrastructure will let us swap thousands of power-hungry PCs for thin clients that emit less heat and consume far less electricity. We’ll add data deduplication to that mix and shrink carbon Cloud Elasticity emissions even furCloud Elasticity

9 Petabytes

6.5 Petabytes

4.5 Petabytes

Because

a private cloud scales up and down elastically, we can provision and de-provision capacity automatically for average, not for peak.

ther. Storage virtualization has come of age, and EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems, which are purposebuilt for virtual data centers, offer big sustainability benefits. They consolidate more workloads into smaller footprints and are deployable with automated tiering, Flash drives, SATA, and spin-down for energy efficiency. Customers tell me they are doing the same things. The transition to more energy-efficient machines I don’t think EMC’s customers view private clouds as revolutionary sustainability solutions in and of themselves, however. Rather, customers regard private clouds as extending the good things (virtualization, consolidation, spin-down, dedupe, tiering, and so on) that EMC offered even before it began talking about private clouds. To customers, a private cloud is green because it extends an existing green trajectory. But there exists one connection between private clouds and sustainability that is exceptionally strong and often overlooked: faster data migrations off of old storage subsystems and onto energy-efficient new ones. Storage environments are huge nowadays. Ours

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private clouds [continued] is 6.5 petabytes. And migrating petabytes of data isn’t simple. The storage-system refresh process becomes a lengthy ordeal disruptive to the business. However, with sustainability being such a hotbutton issue, we need more than ever to upgrade to new-generation hardware that is easier to cool and is less power hungry. We couldn’t migrate onto new storage as quickly as we wanted in a physical environment due to the disruptiveness of the migrations. But in a virtual data center, it’s possible to migrate data from one array to another behind the scenes while applications are alive and without inconveniencing the business. We’ll retire powerhungry old machines faster because we no longer have to arrange for downtime windows in the middle of the night on multiple nights to perform the migrations. This is a huge departure from past practice. Cloud allows customers to reap the benefits of placing a fleet of energy-efficient products into the data center sooner—products with automated tiering, Flash drives, deduplication, virtual provisioning, and power-source improvements. At EMC, we were trying to migrate all the data from approximately 47 older CLARiiON arrays onto 11 newer, greener CLARiiONs. The migration

took us two years to complete because we had to avoid application disruptions. In a private cloud environment, it would have taken us just weeks to get the greener systems online. At each point in your process of evolving from a physical, old-school data center to a private cloud environment, you’ll be incorporating green-efficiency enhancements related to power use, cooling, floor space recovery, storage, servers, and the network. Five years ago, our teams perhaps didn’t think about IT efficiency from a green point of view. Today they do. I believe we have a responsibility in this era of IT to track our carbon footprint and share that information with our customers. It’s a cumulative journey; every step toward the cloud makes us a little bit greener. I multiply the steps we are taking by the thousands of data centers around the world dealing with the same issues. And when I think of a private cloud as nothing more than an efficient, elastic state that we want to achieve via technology, then saying that “private clouds are green” is not a stretch. A Sanjay Mirchandani is senior vice president and chief

information officer at EMC.

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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Editor in Chief & Publisher

Captains of Sustainability

gil press http://onlifeininformation.com

Panduit builds one of the world’s most intelligent buildings

Editor

christine kane

Managing Editor

life in information

jennifer bees

Design Director

1 Joshua Sigel of UNFI, a leading distributor of organic, natural, and specialty foods. Sustainability is ingrained in how the company does business.

RONN CAMPISI

Marketing Manager

Rita Gildea-Bryant [email protected]

Contributing Writers

Jean Gogolin Christine Kane Monya Keane Sanjay Mirchandani Jeff Nick Joseph Pelton Jason M. Rubin Beth Schultz

; ON, winner of eight publishing excellence awards in 2009.

SUBSCRIBE! www.EMC.com/on

Number 1, 2010

Driven by

Nature

Future Cities Studying Climate Change Ember on Smart Energy EMC on IT and Energy Efficiency Copyright © 2010 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission from EMC Corporation. EMC2, EMC, and where information lives are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this publication are the property of their respective owners. H6479

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