Piper Cole's Weblog

It's Time to Think Differently... I was at a Business and the Environment Programme (British) last week and came away with a strong belief: We need to use less energy, it's expensive and in many cases a diminishing resource. That's easy to say, but harder to do. But what if there were some easy fixes to start with—not the whole solution, but a good start—something you can do. How much energy do you think your PC uses, the PCs in your department, in your organization. Would you like to cut that by about 80% without losing functionality...and save money, save on maintenance and not have to upgrade every 3 years? Having all your data and computing power on your own PC is a really comfortable model...until you think about security: what if your laptop is stolen; maintenance: what happens when your PC crashes and do you have time to upgrade every PC; utilization: do you get full use of your computing resources 24/7. Think about how you use the network today: you used to have to go into a bank and withdraw the cash you needed until the next time you were at the bank, then carry it around and risk losing it. Now you carry a piece of plastic (an ATM card) and get only the amount of cash you need now, because the network makes it easy and makes these resources available any where you are. You can apply a similar principal to computing: stop hoarding data and computing resources on your desktop and free yourself to access them anytime from anywhere. Leave the maintenance and security to the professionals and get more utility out of less resources because your using those resources more efficiently. Doing this at Sun we saved $24M a year in energy costs alone. It doesn't mean doing less, it means doing more with less, by doing it differently.