I recently came across a nice showcase of e-learning shorts from award-winning Irish animation company Igloo Animations. Igloo aren’t just about – e-learning – they’ve a wide range of animation experience, including advertising and television.
I like their ‘Sustainability’ short, which freely available on youtube.
You can also check out a short about Ireland’s NAMA – the National Assets Management Agency.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and Microsoft announced the signing of a partnership agreement to promote development and foster regional cooperation in Africa by leveraging information and communication technology (ICT).
A press release showed that the signing, presided over by the United Nations Under-Secretary General and Executive Secretary of ECA, Mr. Abdoulie Janneh and the Microsoft Africa Chairman (Middle East & Africa), Dr. Cheick Modibo Diarra, took place at the UNECA headquarters in Addis Ababa as a pre-event to the 14th African Union Summit of Heads of State and Government with the theme “Information and Communication technologies in Africa: challenges and prospects for development”.
Through the public-private partnership, UNECA and Microsoft will employ their respective expertise in a number of areas including: access to software and technical support; local software development; capacity building in ICT for socio-economic development; and supporting the development of Africa’s e-government programmes through enhanced use of ICT.
Partnership programmes will support and align closely with the work of UNECA’s Information Technology Centre for Africa (ITCA) to raise awareness and commitment in the use of ICT as a driver of economic opportunities in Africa. Microsoft will assist in technology infrastructure planning for the ITCA and provide curriculum and certification to ITCA trainers so that they can in turn teach ICT skills. The partners will use a “train the trainer” approach to ensure the long-term sustainability and scalability of the centre.
During the ceremony Mr. Abdoulie Janneh emphasized that:
“Technology is a powerful tool to help drive investment competitiveness and growth on the African continent. Through this partnership, we aim to strengthen Africa’s access to ICT tools to build modern economies”.
The partnership will also include collaboration on issues relating to safeguarding intellectual property, security of information systems and networks and minimizing the impact of attacks on citizens and critical infrastructures.
Dr. Cheick Modibo Diarra affirmed that:
“Microsoft is committed to helping provide creative thinking and innovative solutions in areas where the necessary resources and capabilities are often lacking. Our partnership will allow us to use ICT to support UNECA’s broad mandate and apply the potential ICT has in supporting economic development in Africa”.
The collaboration further broadens Microsoft’ overall commitment to Africa and its partnerships with other major international organizations – including the African Union, African Development Bank, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). Microsoft first began operations in Sub-Saharan African in 1992 and has expanded to 13 offices in 9 countries, with more than 600 employees and over 17,000 commercial partners across the region.
It’s encouraging that many of the conversations we are having at the moment in relation to IT and sustainability are moving beyond power management in the data centre. It is not that optimising the use of central IT isn’t important, but it really is only one way to drive an organisation’s environmental agenda. And even before we get to main question of how technology can enable more eco-friendly working practices, there is another place we can look to for operational IT power savings – the desktop.
When looking in this direction, though, I have noticed that there is a tendency to apply the same kind of thinking that is used on the server side of the equation. Fair enough, accelerating hardware refresh to introduce more power efficient kit into the equation reflects a similar game to that being played in the data centre, but with the carbon cost of manufacture/disposal taken into account, the net gains are hard to establish. In the data centre of course, hardware modernisation is augmented by consolidation and virtualisation to drive up average server utilisation and thus improve energy efficiency.
Virtualisation is a different game on the desktop, however. Sure, some will go down the route of running virtual PCs on the server and accessing them through thin client configurations, but it will be a long time before this is the norm. The reality is that most organisations will remain wed to their fat clients for the foreseeable future, so we need to think of the energy question a bit differently. Essentially, the challenge boils down to optimising the power consumption of desktop machines that typically idle for the majority of time they are switched on.
In order to deal with this problem, we need to think less about utilisation and inherent power efficiency of hardware and software, and more about controlling the state of machines in terms of their sleep/wake cycle. In practice, a configuration exhibiting a high degree of runtime energy efficiency, but has no active policy to transition to a low power state when idle will consume considerably more power than a less efficient machine whose state is properly managed.
This something that Microsoft makes a big point of when talking about Vista in the green context, and indeed early adopters with large Vista estates corroborate Microsoft’s claims that Vista’s enhanced manageability translates directly to power savings. The problem is, however, that Windows XP isn’t going away in a hurry, so what about all of those organisations who are interested in desktop power management but will be maintaining older versions of the operating system for some time to come?
Well the one approach that is generally acknowledged not to work that well is to educate, encourage or threaten users in an attempt to get them to keep their power configuration set in accordance with environmental policy, and/or to manually shut down their PCs or put them to sleep when they are not in use. IT managers relying on this kind of user discipline are probably not going to see the results they were hoping for unless they’re working for a totally green-tinted organisation.
Fortunately, third party solutions exist that can help to enable/enforce centralised power management – a couple of examples being Verdiem and 1E. Using such technology, you can not only cure PC insomnia from a policy enforcement perspective, but also allow real-time remote control of power state so machines can be woken up for backup or software distribution purposes then put to sleep again afterwards. So, if you are serious about saving energy across a large XP estate, the options are there.
Something I haven’t had time to look into is whether similar solutions exist for alternative desktops – namely Mac OS X and Linux. Apple kit is certainly not renowned for its enterprise management friendliness, but perhaps ‘right on’ Mac users aren’t so much of a problem as they are of course more environmentally aware. As for Linux, I would be interested in any views, recommendations or experiences.
Meanwhile, it would be great to see a bit more awareness raising from Microsoft on the availability of solutions to centrally manage power consumption by Windows XP, rather than automatically seguéing from this discussion into a Vista upgrade pitch.
