…because I’m quite busy starting my new company

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There are tons of CO2 and GreenIT calculators on the web – Here are some examples:

Business

• http://www.forrester.com/GreenIT
• http://www.vmware.com/solutions/green/calculator.html
• http://www.webex.de/go-green/calc.php
• http://www.business.gov/manage/green-business/energy-efficiency/calculate-savings/energy-saving-calculator.html
• http://www.microsoft.com/environment/greenit/

Personal

• http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=popuptool.atHome
• http://www.digitaltips.org/green/energy-calculator.asp

If  you have a look on these and try some calculations, you will come to the point that saving miles of traveling is the most efficient way IT can minimize your companies CO2 footprint.

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I’ve just read an highly inspiring article about similarities and differences of the electrical grid and the internet. The article is written in a very clear and easy to understand English and includes some interesting numbers which are normally off-topic.

• How internet concepts and technologies can help green and smarten the electrical grid (Srinivasan Keshav & Catherine Rosenberg)

Enjoy reading!

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The day before yesterday I couldn’t really sleep well – Somehow I was still thinking about green-IT stuff. So I got up, took my iPad and started sketching down my thoughts. In that nightly sketching session the following pictures were created:

… …

And as you can see: Sketching on the iPad goes very fast but it isn’t that easy to make it look nice

PS: I was using Adobe Ideas…

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In the last weeks I was thinking and researching about green IT very often. That’s why I’ve decided to create a new page dedicated to green IT. On that page you can find actual green IT news (fetched from Google News), other green IT resources, a green IT baseline calculator and my actual thoughts about green IT.

Happy reading!

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In the last weeks I was looking for an open source web based project management tool and I’ve found teambox.com – A very good pm-tool with twitter like communication functions that can be installed on your own server

In this article I wanna show, how to use teambox for management of an IT infrastructure project. Therefor I’ve created an example project which is called “application delivery infrastructure” which goal it is to implement Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop and Access Gateway with Provisioning Server and XenServer – A real IT infrastructure project

OK, before we speak about project management, we have to define what we wanna manage. In theory project management includes the following dimensions:

• requirements (or goals) management
• problem management
• tasks/time management
• ressource management

Unfortunately I didn’t find a way to use teambox for real ressource management, that means there is no way to check if a ressource is overbooked and there is no way to show that a planned parallization won’t work

But all the other things can be done very well. And if you think of real IT infrastructure projects that implement a new technology, you usually don’t have that much ressources, so you can do that part with an excel sheet or project file.

So let’s start with the requirements management – which is the most political part of project management in IT infrastructure projects (We all know the head of IT, that tells us, that this and that feature has to be implemented before the project is done…). So, for requirements management there are so called pages in teambox. Pages are Wiki like websites were you can add structured text and files very, very easily.

The screenshot above (click on it for full size) shows the requirements of my project. Usually you generate a list like this in the presales appointment but sometimes you have to build it by yourself because the salesman didn’t need to ask a real consultant

In both cases it takes literally no time to create your req page in your teambox project. With this req page all project members always have the chance to look at the goals of the project, which helps to create a culture of open communication in your project team. Keep in mind, that you as the project manager have to maintain this list until the end of the project. And keep in mind (double) that every change in project requirements usually changes the time and budget aspects of your project. So you might wanna show the req page to the project owner (customer) from time to time…

Additionally to the requirements management you have to deal with orders and receipts:

So if you put them on a second page in your teambox project you always have access to all the details of project hardware, software and service.

Now we come to the most hated topic among IT infrastructure specialists – documentation. I’ve experienced that it helps that you as the project manager structure the documentation and let the specialists fill in the technical details. This task can also be done with a teambox page very well:

As you can see in the screenshot above I like to structure the documentation files into lists, written documentation and product documentation. However you can use teambox pages in various ways to structure your documentation

Let’s talk about problem management. Which is something that is usually done by email. I’ve experienced that this is not always usefull, because not everybody is reading cc-emails and often questions are repeated by different team members. That’s why it makes sense to do the problem management with a …(you guess it?)… right – teambox page:

A page divided into open and closed problems does the job perfectly. Don’t forget to add the solution to the problem if it is solved and the solution is not obvious (like in my example). After solving a problem you can easily drag it to the section for solved problems.

After creating all this pages you might get lost – But therefor there is a built in pages overview:

Now it’s time to start the most important topic – tasks and time management. In teambox tasks are managed by task-lists and tasks (Who have thought that?). First you should create all your tasklists (without tasks). You can easily do that by using the headlines from your req-page. When you’ve added the tasklists you should set the beginning and the end dates of each tasklist (on the right side you can see a helpful gant-chart ):

After you have created your projects tasklists you can start filling them:

Fortunately that is not all you can do with teambox – For further details take the teambox tour! One more hint: Try out the discussion function with your team…

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Today VMware and SalesForce announced their new service, which they called vmforce. It is a platform as a service (PaaS) offer for all the webapp developers of this world. That in fact is not very surprising if you think of the following facts:

• SalesForce is a leader in the Software as a Service (SaaS) market.
• VMware is the technology leader in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market.
• The third cloud computing market Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the one they didn’t enter so far.

So obviously these two Silicon Valley based companies combine their knowledge to enter the PaaS market.

More surprising is the fact, that this new platform is not using ruby on rails (convention over configuration) or php (personal home page), which is used by most PaaS offers – No, it is using Java…!

It is hard to say which platform is going to win the race but one thing is clear today: PaaS is a huge boost for webapps vs. binary apps…
…maybe one day we don’t have to care about the software stack on our laptops anymore

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Cloud computing seems to be the big topic of this year. There are tons of e-papers on the internet – Here is a short list of the better ones:

• Demystifying the cloud – Janakiram MSV
• Demystifying cloud computing – Cisco
• Demystifying clouds – John M. Willis
• Demystifying cloud computing for higher education – ECAR
• Cloud Computing Use Cases – Cloud Computing Use Case Discussion Group
• introduction to cloud computing – ThinkGrid

Have fun reading them…!

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Most people don’t care about email security but would be very mad if someone open their mail and copy it. Most of the people don’t know, that an unencrypted email is like a postcard – So who can read your email?

To answer that question you have to look at two different scenarios:

1. You send an email to a colleague.
2. You send an email to someone from a different domain.

The first scenario isn’t that scary:

The only person (besides the recipient) that can read your email is your own administrator. Sure your own administrator you trust but what about it-service companies? Their consultants often have access to your mailbox too. Furthermore you should be aware, that your email-client (software you use to write emails) communicates over a secure protocol with your own mail server. Otherwise someone can read your email before it is even send.

The second scenario is more scary:

Here you have three people (besides the recipient) that can read your message:

1. Your own administrator / it-service-provider.
2. Someone in the middle (like employees of the company’s internet service provider or some hacker on the internet in general…).
3. The administrator / it-service-provider of the recipients mail domain.

Beside that you should be aware of the email clients protocol again. If you use your phone to send and receive emails the security of the email clients protocol is important too.

Ok are you scared now? Don’t worry, there are some simple things you can do to improve the security of emails with confidential content:

1. Be sure, that your email client is using an encrypted protocol to communicate with your email server – So you shouldn’t use pop3 or imap without encryption! And if you use a webmail client (like gmail), you should check if you use it with SSL encryption – You can see that in the address line of your browser: If there is a ‘https://’ it is secure if there is a ‘http://’ it is not secure.
2. If you have to send confidential information via email, you should put the confidential stuff into an encrypted zip-file and attach the encrypted zip-file to the email. In that way you can be sure that only people with the knowledge of the decryption password can read the information.

For the second part you need a secure way to send the decryption password – A good way is to use a different medium (like text messages or a phone call). Another way is to put a little puzzle into your email – If you have a business card of the recipient you could for example write something like:

The decryption password are the first 8 characters of the 4th line of the backside of your business card.

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All the IT infrastructures on this world are responsible for 2% of  the co2 output of this worlds societies. Which is equal to the co2 output of 50 million cars. [1] So in my opinion every company and every government agency should try to minimize the energy consumption of their IT infrastructures. But this isn’t easy…

You have to know which parts of your IT have high energy consumptions. The first classification inside IT infrastructure is:

• the data center consumes 45%
• and the IT infrastructure outside the data center (workstations, laptops, beamers, phones etc.) consume 55% [2]

Now you think – Wow what is consuming so much energy in my data center? Here comes the data [3]:

With that knowledge you can start identifying the big wastrel by measuring energy consumption and you can identify inefficient hardware. And be aware the fact, that disk arrays can only spin down to 80% of the energy consumption they have under full load – So you might consider start using storage virtualization techniques like thin provisioning or data deduplication – less disks >> less energy consumption

[1] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867
[2] http://thegreengrid.org/
[3] http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/churiedel.pdf

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