Piers Daniell

I think it is very important when selling a product that the business itself uses whatever it might be. This definitely helps to iron out those annoying issues that a customer may see but also helps to understand the product better. It is something we have always taken very seriously at Fluidata and with our imminent office move thought it would be time to take it to the next level.

At the moment there is a lot of talk about cloud computing, but bringing that story to fruition is taking time, and somewhat frustrating with the conflicting views and different ways of cracking the proverbial nut. For some years we have been successfully delivering Layer-2 private wide area networks to our customers using our PWAN technology, but now we have gone a step further to demonstrate what can be done with it.

I am writing this article at my desk in the office but this actual machine is virtual (ie not installed on my local PC), residing in one of our datacentres. And that is not all - so is everything that my virtual PC talks to such as Exchange, SQL and our intranet. What used to all reside in our office has now made the transition to the datacentre delivering a large number of benefits without the headache you might imagine.

By using the PWAN technology, moving the firewall into the cloud was the first step so that our offices (just opened another outside of London) could communicate on private IP to the datacentres without a VPN (Layer 2). This then meant that office servers could be moved and accessed from the datacentre. IP addressing, Active Directory, DNS etc all now reside in the datacentre and serve our local networks through the PWAN. We then went through the process of virtualising the desktops to VMware’s excellent ESX product so that each desktop is still independent to the other and accessed via the Remote Desktop application.

This leaves us with the latest Windows 7 software on our existing PCs with the flexibility to hot desk to any PC in either of our offices, or anywhere in the world via a VPN to the PWAN. And because the majority of traffic is only mouse clicks, keyboard strokes and screen refreshes, our usage of the network has actually dropped.

We will continue to adapt the virtual network but with the flexibility of our new hosted environment there is an infinite amount of customisation possible. I am sure more businesses will follow our lead when they realise how easily it can be implemented.

I had a meeting last week with our Health & Safety advisors in respect to Fluidata’s new environmental commitments and working towards our ISO 14001 standard. This accreditation is a relatively new one to come out of BSI and provides businesses with the guidelines necessary to measure their impact on the environment and measures to take to reduce pollution.

As a young company I felt it was better to go for such accreditations early on than wait until the inevitable legislation when it would be harder to implement. As it is, we seem to be doing a lot right in recycling over 50% of our daily office waste, minimising electricity usage and ensuring everyone uses public transport where possible when commuting. Further advances in high definition video conferencing and a new modern office will help us reduce this impact even further. Hopefully we will become a beacon of light for other businesses to follow and a demonstrator in how embracing the green revolution can deliver long-term cost savings.

Apparently in all the waste currently generated in the UK only 9% is recycled, the majority of which is met by households. Businesses currently have it far too easy and unless you are producing something like a washing machine or a car can remain under the radar of our EU mentalist masters. One of the big issues is actually in a services economy such as ours, where it is very easy to show no local issues but instead outsource all the pollution problems to a third party. In much the same way manufacturers can outsource to China and hence produce very little pollution in the UK; our industry relies on datacentres consuming vast quantities of fossil driven electricity away from our offices.

Over 1% of all global datacentre consumption comes from datacentres which just goes to show how power hungry the information age is. Our addition of a new datacentre last year in Hemel not only met all the economic needs in terms of scalability but also meant we could offer our clients even more efficient hosting. By building a new site from a blank sheet of paper savings could be made in the thermal efficiencies of the site to ensure a reduction in power consumption. And I am sure further advances will be made in the coming years as electricity becomes even more expensive and IT progressively more powerful.

Small news release on the recent launch of our new datacentre in Hemel Hempstead. For the last few years our clients have been demanding more from hosting and so to meet this need we were very keen to bring on a new cutting edge datacentre that could keep up with their requirements. The new Hemel site suited this, not only because it was a new building designed with high density servers in mind, but also as the site was located outside of London and far away from the main datacentres most people are familiar with. This gives companies high levels of resilience should something happen in London but close enough (less than 0.3 ms) to replicate live data.

With technology around the globe generating more CO2 than passenger jets it is interesting on how our demand for faster and cheaper electronics will impact our goal to reduce global emissions. I also assume this fact doesn’t take into account the emissions in creating the product in the first place and the early disposal. Remember most planes will see service for 30-years or so and nearly all of it is recycled meaning it’s only true emission is the fuel.

New technology such as virtualisation will help as people reduce the number of servers they have by allowing more than one server run on a physical box. However people forget that this is only because servers are much more powerful and because of this consume a greater amount of energy to run and cool it. Datacentres alone contribute hugely to global electricity demands and with new datacentres going up across the world to cope with the expected demand in ‘software as a service’ I can’t see there being any quick fix.

It would be only a PR exercise to create a ‘green’ datacentre as the power requirements are such that current renewable sources would be unable to keep up. Nuclear in my mind is the only possible viable option if technology is not going to have a seriously negative impact. Also what about bringing in legislation that the car industry has to deal with? This could ensure that the life of a laptop, for example, is from the day of manufacture to the day of disposal and not how quickly it can open a spreadsheet. Apple have started I believe with their latest range of laptops, I do hope that the rest of the industry takes note.

I recently completed an article on Microsoft’s new datacentre in Ireland and the impact on the IT industry as a whole.

http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2008/12/30/virtualisation-and-hosted-applications-microsofts-perspective/1/

Will be good business for us!