Datacenter Operations

Vice president of Eco-Responsibility is a rather new job title in the industry. What prepared you for this job?

My interest in this whole space got started early in my career building supercomputers in Cambridge [Douglas received his bachelor of science and master of science degrees in computer science and electrical engineering at MIT]. We built some of the first air-cooled supercomputers back then. Then at Sun, I was really involved in getting into low-end server business, which was a similar process -- how to take these big mainframe servers and put them in people's offices and have low-power and low-noise solutions. It's something I've been hitting over and over and it became a theme for me in my career. On the personal side, I've been looking at my kids and the world where I'm raising them and thinking about things we enjoy doing as family. I've been thinking about how we make sure our kids have a great place to live in future.
Is the VP of eco-responsibility an evangelist, a manager or an engineer?

All of them. Some people who will be reporting to me will be running specific projects. But there is certainly a lot of evangelism both inside and outside the company trying to raise awareness. At Sun, I'll help get a lot of the various businesses moving in same direction.
Eco-responsibility is a broad concept. Where do you think you will be focusing most of your attention this year?

There are two broad areas. Some of it being set by outside players, like the [Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)], and the regulatory stuff happening in Europe. They kind of have a time frame of their own. Another big priority is internally working on our short-term and long-term road map. And there are tons and tons of other things to do, like "Bike to JavaOne." [During its annual Java developers' conference JavaOne on May 16 in San Francisco, Sun will encourage local attendees to ride bicycles to the conference. A local biking coalition will offer free bicycle valet service.]
Environmentalists see virtue in an eco-friendly computing initiative, but why is it good business for Sun and for your customers?

I think it's a really similar situation to why people are buying hybrid cars today. There is money savings to be had by paying attention to energy consumption. And doing more eco-friendly things, there is a class of people to whom it's personally important to do that. Toyota is seeing customers demand eco-friendly products, and we're seeing the same thing with Sun, demanding our CoolThread processors. People are saying, "You've really hit something important for me going forward."
When and how did you realize that eco-friendly computing was going to be an important issue?

It is kind of something that has sunk in over the last four or five years, just thinking about the energy that's consumed in the data center. And then on the flip side, watching our customers use our technology to try to solve eco-friendly problems, such as designing better cars, tightening up the supply chain. It's a yin-yang situation, [IT is] part of problem but it's also part of solution.
Where is Sun strongest in its commitment to eco-responsibility?

There are a lot of programs under way. With just three days on the job, what jumps out at me is the product leadership right now with the new processors and servers and our work with AMD on x86 compatible servers.
Where is it weakest?

I think it's a Sun problem and also a bigger industry problem. There's amazingly little data available that decision makers who want to factor power into their decision-making process can really turn to. We are not doing a good job at this at Sun. Nor is anyone else. One priority is to keep pushing to work with the EPA to get visible metrics out there so we can be up front and honest about what people can do. Data and transparency drive a lot of things in this country and the world overall just getting the facts out on the table can do a lot of good.
What can you tell us about the formal metric for measuring the miles-per-gallon equivalent for servers? Why is this metric important?

It's a process that started up with leadership from Sun, the EPA and others. The goal is to give people an up-front, visible way to make tradeoffs and understand what the long-term costs are going to be for various technology choices. Today you go in and talk to people setting up data centers, there are a lot of back envelope things and an overdesigning of things for cooling just in case. This is just a way to say this company is doing better than that company (with energy consumption). [People might say] 'This technology might get me where I'm going at a lower cost for power and cooling and that stuff.' If you give people facts they can make better decisions.
What is Sun doing to make its technology run cooler and more efficiently?

A lot of it starts down at the chip and processor level, very low-level engineering. You focus on how you do computing with less power. There's no magic. It's just been the focus for awhile. Sun took a particular leadership position with the multi-threaded and multi-core space. It re-thought processor design from ground up. We're doing a similar thing with AMD, who we use in our x86 systems.
Will you be Sun's point man on the Green Grid consortium?

Yes, I will certainly be very active and we've got other folks in company involved already. I think that's going be a nice piece of technology, particularly around interacting with broader population.

Why come back to Sun? A couple of reasons. There are still a lot great people here who I knew from last time here. And I'm very upbeat on the long-term business. And third, what I really want do -- what I felt like I wanted do in the eco-responsibility space, Sun already has some momentum. It has the engineering capability to really go and tackle these kinds of problems. If you look at Dell, for example, they have got to go get processors from someone else. We design our own processors. It's a big enough company and it's got a lot of horsepower to go and do some fundamental things.
CIOs dealing with out-of-control energy costs in the data center have been talking about eco-friendly computing for some time. But this week, Sun Microsystems Inc. has taken that idea one step closer to reality with the newly created position of vice president of eco-responsibility, naming industry veteran David Douglas to the post. Douglas will head Sun's environmental initiatives across the company, including advancements in energy efficiency and cooling technology, product recycling, clean manufacturing and improvements in Sun's day-to-day operations.

Douglas, who is returning to Sun after 5 1/2 years, co-founded in 2001 ConnecTerra Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup radio frequency identification middleware company, where he served as vice president of products and strategy. In 2005 Douglas became BEA Systems Inc.'s chief architect for WebLogic after San Jose, Calif.-based BEA acquired ConnecTerra. In his first interview as VP of eco-responsibility, Douglas talks to SearchCIO.com about how serious Sun is about eco-friendly computing and when CIOs can expect energy solutions from Sun.

This is such a unique business. Where do you get the software?

The software was largely developed in-house, largely based on open source packages. We've had the luxury of being able to develop software for a business that was growing organically. That means we were able to build a prototype system. We weren't sure exactly what we wanted but had a reasonable idea. We threw together something very quick. It took us a few months.
Then what?

I think it was at about 1,000 members that we said alright -- no significant improvements will be made to the existing system. We're going to spend the next six months putting a solid foundation in place. We knew we wanted to support a large number of cities. We wanted to support thousands of vehicles, though at the time we probably had 40 cars. And what's going to happen when we have 100,000 customers and are running 24/7? We stepped back and said 'OK, what do we need to do to build something that can scale?'

Again, it was the luxury of organic growth. We had 1,000 members, and we could see could see we'd have 2,000 members in six or seven months. We had the luxury of stepping back and to spend a lot of time working on the underlying database. That was maybe six months. Then one Sunday night we switched over to the new system.
What did the new system have that the prototype didn't?

It had Oracle as the back end. It had an architecture that had a reasonable set of middleware -- where we had separation of business and data. We had a much more secure system. We had factored into that serious scalability, not just in terms of more transactions and more data -- but also from the user interface side, especially on the back office.
How did this idea get started?

We were inspired by European versions of this. Little mom-and-pop operations in Europe with quaint European ways of doing things -- 20 cars and lock boxes and little log slips you'd fill out. We looked at that and said, 'Well maybe that works because you can trust your small population of 200 or 300 people that might be using this small fleet of cars.' But we wanted to come at it with the big American approach that would allow us to go out and raise money -- because you could build a substantial business off of this.
Convenience being the key?

The reservation system had to be really easy to use. Access to the car had to be brain-dead simple, reliable and secure.

So that laid out the constraints on the system we had to build. We had to put wireless things in the cars because the cars had to be scattered all over the place. They needed the wireless component because that was the only way we could figure out how to build a secure system. How can you possibly keep track of how far people are driving if it's not automatically recorded?
Were there any early missteps?

In the early system we put out, we hadn't finished all the development of the wireless stuff, so people would go to cars and assume that everything was working like magic. But, in fact, if they had gone to any car, at any time of day, they would have been allowed access. But nobody knew that. Again, it was starting out very small, and there weren't any bad apples, so it was OK.
How are Zipcar's online reservation features unique?

It's a location-sensitive system. That is, when you go to reserve a car, the system knows where you live; it knows where you work; it knows the places you visit; where your cousin's house is, where the gym is -- all the locations you've told it about. Because of that, it knows what cars are near those locations. You tell it, 'I want to book a car tomorrow afternoon near my house.' And it will tell you, 'OK, these cars are available at the times near your house.'

It is scalable, because as we add a location -- and we're constantly doing that -- or deleting a location, it happens automatically. So we don't have to constantly tell people, 'By the way, there's a new location.' Because for people to remember all the locations, that's just crazy. But it's done in a subtle way. Every person who comes in to reserve a car gets a slightly different interface.
A key to automation is reducing human transactions. What's an example of how you've done that?

Lost and Found. People are always leaving things in the cars, cell phones, BlackBerrys, gloves, their Prada sunglasses. And people are always finding that stuff. We used to get lots of calls for that. I lost my cell phone! I found a cell phone! What the heck, we're getting lots of lost-and-found calls! This is starting to cost us real money, and what the heck are we supposed to do? So we had a policy -- if you find something, leave it in the glove box.

Then we put in place a big, simple, lost-and-found system for members to report the items online. You can report an item lost or found only in one of the cars you've used in the past 30 days. You go to the Lost and Found, and the only cars you can see -- in terms of what you want to report -- are the cars you've used.
Then it's like a match?

If you've found something, you can report it found. If you've lost something you can look at what's been reported found in the cars you've used. And that takes us out of the loop. The member then has to book a car for the hour. Booking it is the only way you can guarantee the car will be there. The number of calls went down to next to nothing.
What about things like snow removal or street cleaning? Does that make your job tougher?

We don't put cars on streets that are going to be hit by street sweeping, because operationally you'd be sending out the flying monkeys to move the cars. You've got to simplify.

Now, as the business evolves, the system changes. In Boston, we recently had a partnership with IKEA where we wrapped a half-dozen cars with IKEA advertising. That allows us to offer the cars to members for a discount. We wanted those cars used mostly for short trips, and so did IKEA, so we said, OK, the pricing will only have the discounted hourly rate -- and not the daily rate. It's a good deal.

What did it mean for IT?

We had to put into the system enough messaging up front to prevent two things: One, when the members got their billing they weren't really disappointed, because they booked it for 48 hours and ended up paying an hourly rate -- and two, that when they got to the car they didn't say, 'What the hell is this? This is not a Zipcar.' We took photos of the individual cars. We made sure that you could see on your reservation what you were going to get and we put in one intermediate step telling customers to be careful, that car can only be rented for an hourly rate.

It was a complete success. I don't think there has been a single complaint.
Roy Russell is vice president and No. 1 IT guy at Zipcar, a Cambridge, Mass.-based short-term rental car company that is six years old and profitable with annual revenues of $15 million. Talk about managing traffic. Russell has to make sure 50,000 registered members can share 900 cars in 28 cities across the country using wireless access cards. Today's technology provides Zipcar's competitive edge. Here Russell talks about the early Zipcar days, as well as his new lost-and-found service.

How many of you went into Office Depot?

Me, the chief of police, one of my guys and three other cops. We actually fought with looters while we were there. It was wild. It was wild. It really was.
Tell us what got you there.

At this point we knew there was one Internet connection working, even though it was three inches away from water -- and we had emergency power. So we had literally one outlet and one Internet cord. One hot jack. So there's that Vonage account but we don't have a soft phone. So it's like, what do you do? And we thought well, we can just go to get the routers. You just think very linearly. Very mechanically. And if I was not a believer, by the way, in Maslow's hierarchy before this, I am clearly a believer now. That concept says 'The first thing is whether or not I'm fed. If I'm still hungry, all I can think about is food. And then once I got food, then I can think about whether I'm hot or cold and all these other things.' That's the way it felt.

And so the reason we looked at the Vonage thing -- we had this one Internet connection. We had a laptop with about one hour's worth of power. So we go out there and we say 'Where's the nearest retailer of Vonage equipment? Office Depot. Hey, OK, there's one on St. Charles.' And we go there. And there's all these looters in there -- and they took all the high-end stuff, the laptops and all that -- all the fun stuff. But they left all the geeky stuff. So eventually we still needed a major Cisco router, which we ended up ripping out of the back office.
And the police chief did that for you?

He did do that -- with his bare hands! This is an extreme set of circumstances where you see things that would never happen in any other scenario. When would anybody forcibly remove a Cisco router from a rack by sheer force? It would never happen in any other scenario. But there it was. We got two screws out; we were using butter knives because we didn't have tools. We couldn't get the other two screws out. And the chief is a big man. He just said, 'Move aside.' He said 'You need this right here?' And he didn't know what it was. And we said 'Yeah we need that,' the Cisco router, and he just ripped it out. I've never seen anything like that.

I hate to be dramatic, but one of those cops who was with us -- he ended up shooting himself in the head. People don't realize...but it was really Wild West down here. It really was.
Did you evacuate your family?

What happened was the chief's family and my family stayed behind at first. And my kids and my wife were still sleeping and so were his. And then he got the buzz on the radio that the levee broke. And we all had been through the slosh models and everything, so we knew this was officially the worst -case scenario. That meant 10 to 12 feet downtown in just a matter of an hour or two. Maybe a couple, three hours. Just an unreal type effect.

And so, we woke them up and we got them in the car -- and as they're driving you could see the water rising behind them. I looked at him and said, 'I totally know how the guys in the Titanic felt.' It wasn't a noble, know-you're-going-to-die thing. It was just 'You gotta get these people out.' But we had no idea what was going to happen. So in other words, I kind of made that connection. Those guys probably thought they were still going to live when they got their wives and kids off. It was just...you didn't know.
When you signed on with Mayor Nagin's administration in 2002, did you ever imagine this kind of scenario?

Last week, he looked over at me and said, 'Did you ever think that you'd ever be doing this?' He must have said that a half dozen times. And I'm like, 'No.' I was acting mayor, for instance , for five days. Actually two stints, for five days and another four days, when he was away.

So, as acting mayor, you're usually just kind of sitting back doing paperwork. This wasn't like that. It sounds terrible...I was telling my wife; she asked 'What was the first thing you had to decide for the city?' I said 'Well, I sat down and said, 'OK, guys what's the major problem today?' Problem one: corpses are clogging up the sewer and water drains. Well, who in the hell ever prepares for that? There's no degree in that. We have snipers shooting at the helicopters. What do you want to do about that? Just incredible stuff for a tech guy.
A lot of your work now has to do with land lots. Is that data still available? Did you lose data?

It was kind of a point of honor for us. The Web site and all the data -- actually the Web site stayed up even when the tornado went over things. We did not lose any of that data. It's just that the data is 70% irrelevant now. I can go and see the assessed value of a house is $200,000. Well, that house probably isn't worth $20,000 right now. So we've really moved more into kind of being less about the back office. We had to kind of and move away from that because it's not really relevant -- and move into pictometry and getting satellite photos and being much more about that. That's one thing -- in the midst of this tragedy you're getting a lot of things that never would have happened before. Right now, (one thing we're working on) -- and it's going to the point of one of the major things that we're going to announce here -- is Internet voting. Once again, if I told you, 'Hey, we're going to do Internet voting for real, in a real election, and you're going vote and use kiosks', you'd think I was smoking something.

But I have to do that now. Because what am I going to do? Open poll stations where there's three people in an entire city block? So out of this tragedy you're getting an opportunity to do a lot of common sense things. And without that pushback of people saying 'Hey, look, the old system works. Well, no, it doesn't. It's gone. The old system is completely gone.
Do you have practical plans for Internet voting in place?

We do. So for us, at least 95% of our population isn't here. And we've already postponed one set of elections, kind of indefinitely. The model that we're looking to the most is, for instance, the airport check-in kiosks. Where data's not just secure -- it's also not going to a central area. So there's nobody who can manipulate the data. We're going to keep it, if you will. That data is going to be sitting on those kiosk machines in a secure way that only the secretary of state will be able to do anything with it. It's not going to one big database in the sky. To prevent any kind of abuse it's going to be a level of authentication that's equal or superior to what you do now. Those are the kinds of things that we're doing.
You have the resources to get that going and actually target it for an election that's on the books?

Yeah, because it's necessary. It's not a gee-whiz plaything kind of thing. It's a real issue of how we get democracy to continue here.

Check out SearchCIO.com tomorrow for Day 2, where Meffert drills down into emergency IT operations.
In the days following Hurricane Katrina, it was New Orleans CIO Greg Meffert's task to establish telephone communications between Air Force One and Mayor Ray Nagin. Cell phone towers had toppled and phone lines were dead. By luck, a member of Meffert's IT staff had established a Vonage account prior to the storm and accessed his Internet phone account once power returned. In order to set up a communications headquarters for the city, though, Meffert had to raid an abandoned Office Depot store and deploy more brawn than brains. With rescue efforts behind him, and still operating from a hotel ballroom, Meffert is planning an ambitious Internet voting system for displaced New Orleans residents to use during the next citywide elections. Here he talks with SearchCIO.com about surviving Hurricane Katrina -- and trying to bring New Orleans back to life.

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