|
Green Tech
Continued from page: 2
Friday, October 03, 2008
ITC Green Centre in Gurgaon
Starting from the exterior of the building, there is an extensive rainwater
harvesting system. A network of underground pipes feed collected rainwater to
multiple reservoirs, which then recharge ground water. But wait - if you thought
that rainwater harvesting didn't make much of a difference, get this - the
amount of rainwater harvested by the building in a year actually exceeds the
consumption. Niranjan Khatri, GM of ITC's WelcomEnviron initiatives prefers to
call it their 'water bank account.' His reasoning being that only when water
acquires the status of money, will users realize its importance.
The Green Center focuses on multiple use of water. All water that is used in
the building goes to the sewage treatment plant. The recycled water is then used
for the cooling towers, gardening and for flushing. All fixtures are also
designed to minimize wastage of water.
All that glass you see on the building? It's special e-glass, which filters
out all the heat and noise, but not the light. The roof is coated with special
high-reflectance 'albedo' paint. These two features alone are responsible for
the building's 375-ton AC plant as opposed to the 500-ton plant that was
initially suggested. Walk into the large atrium and you immediately notice the
absence of artificial lighting. This is possible because of the large skylight
and windows surrounding the atrium. Also in the lobby is a touch-screen
terminal, listing out ITC's Green initiatives. What's nice is that even
homeowners can find tips on how to save energy and cut costs.
As Mr. Khatri further explained, an office building, built using conventional
methods is a 'sick' building. Studies have also shown that working in natural
light increases productivity and reduces lethargy. If employees fall ill
regularly or are not at their productive best, the company actually pays for it
through life cycle costs. This kind of health cost has not been quantified yet.
The Green Center however, uses special carpets and paints with low VOC (volatile
oxide compounds). CO2 sensors refresh air if needed. A more productive workforce
leads to greater profitability in the long run.
Looking at a typical office inside the building, full-length glass ensures
ample light. The electrical lights meanwhile have sensors, and will come on only
when needed. At least 10% of wood and building material used is recycled. All
additional wood must come from a certifiable sustainable forest. A sustainable
forest plants 10 trees for every one that it cuts. Every aspect has been taken
care of. Now here's a model to follow. This building really cares for the
environment.
The rooftop houses the solar power water heating system with a 4000-liter
tank. Outside, all lights are capped to prevent nigh sky pollution. This is out
of respect for nocturnal bird life and astronomers who find it difficult to view
stars because of the excessive light given out from a city.
Patni Green Knowledge Centre
Major enterprises world over are taking their initiatives towards an
eco-friendly environment. In view of that, they are adopting green architecture
for their buildings and factories. Patni Computer Systems, a leading IT and BPO
service provider, launched their first Green IT-BPO centre in Noida, called as
Patni Knowledge Centre. The centre is spread over 5 acres and incorporates green
architecture for better utilization and conservation of energy, water and
natural resources. The state of art eco-friendly facility was setup with an
investment of 175 crores and compliments the organization's green initiatives.
 |
The facility is designed and constructed as per the guidelines of LEED
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). The facility is also currently
under certification process which is jointly audited by the Indian Green
Building Council (IGBC) and US Green Building Council (USGBC). Patni has applied
for the Platinum certification for this Green centre.
The facility has a climate responsive architecture, and also features over
50% green area and the use of natural light. The facility is designed in a
manner that 75% of the area can get sunlight, and thus, reducing the consumption
of electricity. The design also lets 95% of the occupants to get access to
outside views. In addition, it's a zero discharge building, which is possible by
100% recycling of the sewage. Also for water conservation, the facility
incorporates rain water harvesting system, whereby even the pavements have been
designed in manner to let the water seep into the ground. Solar water heating
system and drip water irrigation is used so that energy and water can be
conserved. Even the materials used for the building's interiors have low
volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, also eco-friendly recyclable
materials have been used to the maximum -be it the glass or the aluminum
required for the facility. There are CO2 sensors placed along the
air-conditioning vents to monitor the air quality inside the building. Whenever
the CO2 level increases at a particular place, which can happen due to more
occupants gathering at a place, the fresh air is pumped into the area to
maintain healthy air quality. Also the lighting system inside the building is
based on motion detection. So the area gets lighted up only when people move
into a department or room, thus reducing electricity wastage. The design of
building is as such that natural light is available at most of the areas,
thereby again reducing on power consumption as there would be less amount of
artificial lighting required during daytime.Thus, Patni Knowledge Centre is an
initiative that minimizes adverse environmental impact as the building is
designed to use less amount of energy and water compared to conventional
buildings and also creates less waste.
Clouds! Wherever you look
Cloud computing has emerged as a big enabler for green computing. It's still
in its early days and the adaptation is yet to become widespread, but we can
foresee a future where Cloud computing would become a mainstream computing
platform to save deployment and environmental hazards. But before we go further
and discuss how Cloud computing could be a great enabler for green computing,
let's first understand what is Cloud computing.
If you understand what is a Grid and what is Grid Computing, then
understanding Cloud becomes pretty easy. But if you don't, then here is a recap
of Grid. Grid is essentially a Cluster of computers which are loosely coupled
with each other, by loosely coupled we mean whose interconnect is either not
100% available or the latency of the interconnect is high if you compare it
against an HPC. But the prime job of a grid is to share a distributed job load
and process it aggregately.
We have talked about Grids many times and every time we have taken the same
example to explain it, and that is the SETI@Home (a.k.a Search for extra
terrestrial intelligence at Home), where the data captured by the SETI radio
telescope is distributed across the globe to millions of home PCs so that the
job can utilize the PC's free processing time and process the data and send it
back. This is a very easy and good example to understand a Grid in action. To
make the example more topical, the LHC (Large Hardon Collider) project is also
going to use a similar grid to distribute the data captured by the mammoth
machine across the world to get it processed on the free processing power of
millions of user PCs.
Now, as we have gone through a quick recap of a Grid, let's understand what a
Cloud is. Ok, the simplest example. Deploy any virtualization architecture on
top of your grid and you get a Cloud. But in this case the grid nodes are not so
loosely coupled, and managed inside a datacenter. What's the benefit? The main
benefit is that as you have aggregated and consolidated all our computing
resources under one single grid platform and you have deployed a virtualization
platform on top of it, it becomes very easy to cut a slice of the grid into a
desired configuration and provide it to the user as and when required.
So, let's suppose I have a pool of 400 processing cores and 800 GB of RAM in
my Grid, I can pull out a virtual slice of let's say 16 cores and 16 GB of RAM
at any point of time and provide it to a user who requires it. Once the work is
done or if the resources are not utilized at a particular point, the resources
goes and merges back to the all mighty Cloud and is utilized for some other
purpose.
The Green Cloud
Now the question is where and how the concept of Green fits into Cloud? To
understand that, first of all you have to understand how virtualization helps in
consolidation and as a result saves power, space and resources. Once you
understand that you can easily see the benefits of Cloud. We could achieve x
amount efficacy in terms of our resource utilization if you use virtualization
on a single server, just imagine how many times of x we would be able to achieve
if we virtualize our complete cluster. Technically we would be able to utilize
100% of our resource all the time and hence would be able to achieve a much
higher degree of consolidation. And as a result we would save more space, more
power and more money. Even if you use Cloud computing as a client and don't
want to deploy your own Cloud for consolidation. Then also you are saving nature
as you are reutilizing pre-existing resources on some huge datacenters instead
of deploying your own datacenter for the same task.
 |
|
Cloudstatus dashboard shows health status of
cloud computing services such as Amazon web services, Google App Engine etc.
It also offers a plugin to developers, with which they can monitor their own
application in the cloud through cloudstatus portal |
Now let's see some of the Cloud computing offerings from different vendors
which you can use to reduce the size of your datacenter.
Intel, Yahoo, HP Research Test Bed
This one of the major recent developments in Cloud computing, IT biggies HP,
Intel and Yahoo have collaborated together to provide an open source muti-data
center research test bed. This global computing research bed will be made
available free of cost to researchers doing research related to Cloud computing.
What are the current trends in Cloud
computing? How is AppLabs related to Cloud computing?
The current trends in Cloud computing are more in an investigation and
proof-of-concept stages by the enterprises. As Cloud computing provides
unique challenges, AppLabs is well placed with the extensive background in
both functional and non-functional testing across all platforms and
technologies.
 |
Rajesh Patil, AVP, BFSI,
AppLab |
How does AppLabs test performance and security of the Cloud computing
solutions? What are the most common tests you perform on the Cloud?
Independent validation organizations like us play a key role in establishing
and maintaining the credibility of the providers as well as protect the
interests of the consumers. As we move to linking to the 'Cloud', there are
aspects of quality that include both functional and non-functional. Ensuring
the Cloud works as expected would be the domain for functional testing. The
non-functional testing would include Security, Performance, Availability,
Certification etc to ensure the end user experience is not compromised in
any way.
- Security and Privacy-ability for the provider to effectively
provide both Security and Information Privacy. This is very important in
Financial and Healthcare related application and data.
- Availability-clear compliance with the specified Service Level
Agreements on the availability and uptime on the environment.
- Migration-an ability to migrate in and out. The key is the ease by
which this can be done.
- Regulatory compliance-ensure the provider does and keep in compliance
with the requisite regulatory needs.
- Standards compliance-ensure the provider supports and complies with
industrycomputing standards. Any deviations would increase the dependence
on a specific vendor and would impact the ability to migrate or move.
When choosing a cloud computing solution, what standards and
compliances an Enterprise should look for? What advice you would like to
give to enterprises going for Cloud-based solutions?
Cloud computing standards are evolving. An enterprise should look at the
standards being developed and supported by the key technology vendors. There
is a risk of the standards being introduced by a specific vendor which will
address any short term issues, but will be detrimental in the long run. Key
is to be able to influence open standards adoption. For compliance, there
are industries where this is quite critical-like financial and health care.
Specific compliance requirements related to customer data, privacy,
security, and regulatory needs should be addressed. |
Expected to be available to researchers by the end of the year, test bed
initially will be hosted at six locations and hardware for this Cloud will be
provided by HP with Intel processors and according their press release, it will
have 1000 to 4000 cores at every location. Test beds will mostly run Apache
Hadoop which is an open source distributed computing project of and other
similar distributed computing software such as Pig which is a parallel
programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.
PaaS making waves
Platform as a Service(PaaS) or on demand platform until now were major used
by developers who were building applications which will run on the Cloud or use
Cloud in some form or another. But now these on demand platforms are also being
used for commercial purposes by companies. To give an example popular Live
blogging company ScribbleLive runs entirely on GoGrid Cloud. GoGrid one of major
player in Cloud computing with Google and Amazon with its EC2 and S3. We talked
about EC2 in our last Cloud computing story, since then one major development in
EC2 has been introduction of persistent storage called Amazon Elastic Block
Store (EBS). With EBS, users can now create volumes from 1GB to 1TB and attach
it with an amazon EC2 instance. EBS is largely meant for applications which
require a file system or a data base or a raw block level storage when running
the application in Amazon EC2.
GoGrid
As we mentioned earlier GoGrid is one of major commercial players in Cloud
computing. Currently in its public beta allows users to scale servers within
minutes. At present it lets you deploy server images of windows 2008, windows
2003, Cent OS and versions of Redhat enterprise Linux. It allows users to manage
servers through its multi-server hosting server control panel and users can add
or delete servers according to their needs. Every account in GoGrid is given a
public and private VLAN and users also have the option to use a Load Balancer
which is powered by F5 load balancer. Coming to billing, it follows two main
models one is Pre-Paid plans and second is Pay-As-You-Go-Plan. Just to give you
a small idea it charges $0.19 per Server RAM hour and $0.50/GB for outboud data
transfer in starting Pay-as-you-go-pricing plan. More plans and details can be
found at www.gogrid.com
Google App Engine
Currently in its preview release, Google App Engine is a treat for developers.
It allows developers to run their web applications on Google infrastructure
Cloud. Developers can built application online Application Environment of Google
App Engine or create them offline through its SDK which is available for
download. Each application can use 500 MB of storage and with page views upto
5000 per month. You can try out Goolge App Engine at http://code.google.com /appengine/.
Citrix Cloud Center
This came in just when we were finishing the story. Citrix has announced a whole
new product family for Cloud service providers under Citrix Cloud center
solution (C3). The solution has four main components namely Platform, Delivery,
Bridge, and Orchestration. On the platform part solution comes with Citrix Xen
Server Cloud edition. According to its press release Cloud edition of Xen Server
comes with an new consumption based pricing model, which caters to the needs of
service providers who charge customers as per the resource usage. For the
delivery part, C3 uses Citrix NetScaler for delivering resources from the Cloud
to users. Citrix claims NetScaler can reduce server requirements in large Cloud
centers by offloading protocol and transaction processing from backend server
pool . Bridge component is powered with Citrix WANScaler and lastly the
orchestration component contains Citrix Workflow Studio.
| NetPC
This one is for those, who always say Cloud computing is for large
enterprises. A company called Novatium haslaunched a Nova Net PC which is
basically a thin client PC for SMBs and homes. Novatium has tied up with
various ISPs, e.g. in Delhi with MTNL and a small Cloud is hosted, in
Mauritius with Mauritius telecom to offer netPC. For operating system net PC
gives options of Windows, Linux and Solaris. NetPC currently costs about Rs
5000, however, in addition to that every month a user has to shell out 400
to 500 rupees as subscription in which it gets 30 hours of Internet access.
This is just not for Internet, even if you are using any application like MS
Office, your hours will count. |
Build your own Cloud
If you think deploying your own Cloud in your own datacenter is not simple
and requires huge amount of development, technical expertise and cost, then
think again. Today we even have simple open source solutions to deploy your own
Cloud. Next month we will take you through a step by step guide on building your
own Cloud. Watch out for that.
'In the Cloud' malware analysis
Vendors like Mcafee, Trend Micro, and F-secure are looking to use power of
Clouds to perform real time in the Cloud analysis of malware detected to provide
enhanced security. Within the Cloud malware analysis as soon as an unknown or
suspected malware is detected in the machine, Anti-virus will immediately upload
it to the Cloud and execute in a sandbox to figure out whether it is actually a
malware or not. In case the sample turns out to be a known malware, immediately
signature files of that malware will be sent to machine. For new or unknown
malware's signature files will be created, and as soon as they are available
they will be sent to all anti-virus clients connected to the client, to ensure
they are updated about new threats. Usually it takes more than 24 hours in
analyzing a malware and developing its signatures and by the time all anti-virus
clients are updated it can be a week or even more depending upon how users have
scheduled their anti-virus to update from the server. With this since anti-virus
client will be connected to Internet all the time, it can refer to Cloud for
every malicious activity it detects and new signatures are delivered to the
clients on the fly.Another advantage in the Cloud malware analysis is that
instead of keeping all signature files of known malware on the disk, only the
signatures of the viruses present in the wild can be kept. This also frees up
the hard disk space as well as bandwidth used to download all these signature
files in each and every workstation.
Anindya Roy, Hitesh Raj Bhagat, Rahul Sah, Sandeep Koul and Swapnil Arora
Page(s) 1 2 3
|
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
