Using Earth Day

According to Wikipedia, Earth Day is "one of two different observances, both held annually during spring in the northern hemisphere, and autumn in the southern hemisphere. These are intended to inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth's environment. The United Nations celebrates an Earth Day each year on the March equinox, a tradition which was founded by peace activist John McConnell in 1969. A second Earth Day, which was founded by U.S. politician Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in in the late 1960s, is celebrated in many countries each year on April 22." A couple of enterprising virtualization technology companies have done their best to use this event to highlight their technology.

Cassatt and datacenter efficiency

Cassatt presented the results of a datacenter efficiency study that they had executed. This study asked Cassatt customers what they thought about various topics related to power consumption that showed that the respondents were concerned improving application agility, reducing power usage and several other "Earth Day" related topics.

As with the CA study I mentioned in a previous post, the survey sample is important to consider when looking at these results. It's pretty clear that a sample made up of Cassatt customers may not be representative of the market as a whole. People in this category are more likely to support Cassatt's key marketing messages than the IT population as a whole. That being said, some pretty major organizations are Cassatt customers and if they implement strategies to reduce power consumption and heat generation, it will have an impact on the environment.

If you're interested in reading more about the results of this study, they can be found here.

Transitive, platform independence and energy efficiency

I got a wonderful note from Transitive's public relations team concerning Earth Day. I was delighted by the creativity shown in finding a way to relate virtual processing environments, such as those offered by Transitivive, to Earth Day festivities. Here's a snippet of the their message:

Transitive recently estimated that we could save a major telecom 10m kW/h per year by decommissioning all of their aging SPARC servers and replacing them with a smaller number of modern x86 servers running QuickTransit.

The telecom’s CO2 emissions by 4300 tonnes annually. This is comparable to taking 819 cars off the road, since an average car generates 5250kg of CO2 per year.Transitive’s QuickTransit® cross-platform virtualization solution enables software applications to run on any hardware platform without any source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports. The worldwide drive for increased IT efficiency and reduced data center carbon footprints has led many IT managers to define a proactive data center consolidation strategy that requires decommissioning of legacy hardware and the migration of workloads to more energy-efficient, industry-standard platforms.

Since Sun is one of Transitive's partners (along with HP and IBM), they wouldn't be too angry about such statements. They would be first in line to replace older SPARC-based systems with one of their new systems. HP and IBM would also like to "help" Sun with this problem by replacing the older machines with one of their fine industry standard systems.

Marketing and Creativity

Creativity is often found when people look at the same things we all are looking at but, think something different, something useful to get their messages across to the market. Both of these examples show different ways that Earth Day could offer a platform to deliever a company's messages.

What do you think? Did these efforts succeed?