Making Green a Reality

This morning, I awoke to read in the San Jose Mercury News that San Jose has been recognized by the Brookings Institute as the nation’s 7th- greenest city, with sunny Honolulu at number 1 and Lexington, Kentucky at the bottom of the list. I believe, very strongly, that:
- our society’s energy consciousness and environmental awareness need to become a way of life, and
- our business community must work harder to justify the economic value proposition associated with going, doing and being “green”.

At BLADE, we’ve made it part of our daily best practices to be the most environmentally friendly network equipment vendor in the industry. We are proud to have been recognized as the first network equipment vendor named to AlwaysOn’s GoingGreen 100 list of the world’s foremost “green” companies and the pioneering leader of energy-efficient data center networking.

However, we have heard from customers, analysts, partners and technical visionaries throughout the data center world that companies will not actively consider so-called “green” technologies unless they can actually achieve demonstrable savings and realizable efficiencies across factors such as power consumption, cooling requirements, facilities space and costs and data center virtualization and consolidation. Further, we realize that packing ever-more blade servers and rack-mounted servers and storage systems into the least possible space with the tightest energy footprint is creating serious heat, power and cooling issues.

At the crossroads where data center economics and energy efficiency converge, BLADE is capturing the attention of data center managers with a concept becoming known as Rackonomics. To put it simply, this is the idea that a data center should be made up of replicated racks that have standard configurations of servers, storage and network. This matters for ongoing support and total cost of ownership. It also improves energy efficiency.

The twin inspirations of Rackonomics (see my previous post) and the “green” movement have hit the ground running at BLADE. The power profile of our Ethernet blade switch family and new top-of-rack data center-class RackSwitch and their carbon footprints are among the lowest in the industry.

In addition, BLADE products are manufactured in an environmentally responsible ISO 14001 certified manufacturing facility. We are also proud to note that all of the materials used to package this product (with the exception of the anti-static bag) contain post-consumer recycled content and are fully recyclable. Meanwhile, we are working with the industry to find an environmentally friendly substitute for the anti-static bag that will accomplish the same objective without compromising product reliability.

BLADE takes its environmental responsibilities very seriously. We not only design and manufacture “green” products, but we practice “green” policies internally and encourage our employees and customers to do the same. The future of our planet depends on it.

I am gratified that BLADE’s approach to Rackonomics and our “green” leadership is getting noticed. Recently ZDNet’s Heather Clancy observed that, “Simply put, Blade Networks has developed a truly innovative new product in the network virtualization category, one that promises to reduce power consumption through its unique cooling design.”

One thing that made Heather sit up and take notice about BLADE’s approach is something that actually is pretty simple. “One reason that Blade Networks can claim better power consumption metrics than some competitive technologies is that it has designed its technology to cool like a blade server would — with a front to back airflow,” writes Heather. “Many other switches are configured the opposite of blades, which means they would create a hot loop within the rack. Not ideal.”

Well, at BLADE, we are actually idealists when it comes to the transformative potential of Rackonomics for energy-efficient data centers combined with today’s interest in economically sensible “green” business values. However, the information technology industry’s and society as a whole’s “green” consciousness is in its infancy. As Marilyn Brown, one of the authors of the Brookings’ “green cities” report calls out, "It’s rather astonishing that this type of data has never been pulled together before.”

What the Brookings Institute’s “green cities” report will not track until its 2009 rankings are the emissions from commercial buildings, factories and transportation systems – most every one of which has a data center at the heart of its operations as a significant consumer of increasingly precious energy resources. However, the Brookings’ report does call for national renewable energy standards. We second this recommendation in terms of the increasingly urgent need for energy efficiency standards for data center infrastructure and networking gear and facilities, which contribute significantly to the carbon footprint of today’s businesses.

At a time when such data center standards are not yet clearly identified, understood or adopted – particularly when it comes to networking equipment – BLADE is committed to leading the charge towards recognized industry best practices for energy efficiency and economically-sound environmental value as realized through Rackonomics.

Our entire team at BLADE welcomes your input about how we can make our products and services even more responsive to your concerns about power consumption, energy efficiency and the environmental impact of today’s and tomorrow’s data centers. If you would like to reach BLADE’s Chief Green Officer André Luthard with any ideas, recommendations or guidance, please click on this link to send him an email.