Facebook Solar Array Demonstrates Impotence of Solar Power, Importance of Power Management

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The debate over the so-called “environmental impact” of data centers provides an easy target for environmentalists to pick on — big creepy corporations like Facebook and Apple.  While these folks sleep at night with their hot water tanks cranked to the max and half the lights in their houses still turned on, companies that run big data centers get needled for using a lot of electricity.   Yet just try to take away these people’s iPhones and Facebook games–then stand back and watch the intellectual dishonesty spill out like a broken water balloon.

The answer, of course, is solar power. Clean, silent, low-maintenance, and emissions-free.  Well, sort-of.  But Wired tells us today that solar farms aren’t efficient. Based on their figures, I decided to extrapolate a few solar farm scenarios.

Facebook’s data center is a 100-megawatt consumer, and its solar array, which spans acres and acres in the Oregon outback, puts out a mere .05 megawatts at an average energy conversion efficiency of about 14%. Apple’s planned N.C. solar farm will cost 180 acres of God’s green earth and will put out just 3.5 megawatts at typical efficiency (Apple will require at least 70 MW at their N.C. data center). Using those ratios, and keeping in mind that these are the best, most efficient solar generators on the planet, we could estimate that:

  • A typical .3 kw household would require 0.154 acre of this top-of-the-line solar technology. That would fill a typical suburban lot, and leave no room for the house. Underground housing, anybody?
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  • A typical 3.5 acre city block, containing 16 households, would require 2.5 acres of solar array. Yep–two and a half football fields. (BTW, forget about trees in that neighborhood.)
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  • New York City, some 325 square miles in size, if it were filled only with these houses, would require a solar array the size of Chicago, which weighs in at about 250 square miles.
  • The United States would require about three states the size of Texas filled only with solar farms and nothing else to fulfill its electricity needs. The distribution system for this electricity (power lines, AC turbines, etc.) would require a further two states the size of Colorado.

My conclusions:

  • Mass-market electrical consumption cannot be serviced by solar generation without regulated rationing. Most Americans would not be in love with this idea.
  • The obsession with solar energy has as much to do with politics as it does with shrinking the fossil fuel industries.
  • Data centers should concentrate, if they believe fossil and nuclear power generation are harmful to humanity, on reducing their consumption of electricity.

How Dell Will (hopefully not) Ruin Sonicwall

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Sonicwall has been both a shining star and an enigma in the I.T. world for as far back as I can recall working on their specialty product–the corporate firewall. They’re a star because their products are cheap, reliable, consistent, and performance-oriented.  They’re also a star because their reseller program has been one of the keys to their success–and it has allowed them to be considered a competitor in the true enterprise space.  They out-price Checkpoint, Fortigate, and Cisco, outsell Watchguard, and simply run circles around Microsoft Forefront.

What makes Sonicwall an enigma is their choice of Dell as acquisition suitor. (Dell is acquiring Sonicwall.) There are so many mismatches I don’t even know where to start.  While they both fit the economy pricing model, that’s about the only similarity. For starters, Dell has tried and failed on many occasions in the networking space, and persists by rebranding the Netgear form factor in switches and managed switches–which very few people buy because of their poor dependability. Sonicwall, on the other hand, dominates the low-end firewall market.

This would seem to do nothing for Dell’s two weakest product areas: enterprise networking and the high-end firewall.  Still, this seeming round-hole-square-peg situation gives us a clue as to what Dell is doing: adding revenue $200 million/year at a time.   (Dell’s revenue is somewhat higher that that…)

The other big mismatch is in support.  Dell’s foreign-based call-in engineering support is, most would agree, awful, slow, and tedious.  Requisitions for replacement parts are delivered by unreliable third parties, and this frustrating protocol for on-site service is the teeth behind Dell’s famous three-year manufacturer warranty on PCs.  Sonicwall’s support on the other hand, is reputable, quick, and stateside. So for us Americans, we see the writing on the wall. If you’re an end-user, you might not care, but as a systems engineer who has to deal with the stuff every week, sitting on hold with Pakistan gets tiresome in a hurry. Maybe Dell will learn from Sonicwall instead of forcing them to confirm with Dell’s charming, linguistically-difficult support program.

Perhaps the most difficult integration concern with this acquisition is the two companies’ attitudes towards the reseller channel. Namely, Sonicwall loves the channel and Dell just gives it lip service.  Sonicwall uses real distributors, while Dell insists on inconsistently pricing every single deal through at least three different business units who are all vying for the reseller business: PartnerDirect (horrible name, their discounts are the same as the public Dell.com store); Medium/Large business (better discounts, slow quote turnaround), and the nefariously-named, oft-referenced but mysteriously incognito “Dell Reseller Division”, whose state of existence seems to reverse from one quarter to the next.

Dell could learn a thing or two from Sonicwall by standardizing system configurations and offering them into wholesale at a price that actually compels resellers to go out and sell Dell instead of HP, whose competing products are more expensive and less serviceable, but whose products also earn more for the reseller channel.

My company is partners with all three companies I mentioned, and while dealing withDell is a huge pain, the serviceability of their equipment is unmatched by anybody on the market today. Let’s hope that they can take the positives from Sonicwall–good support, a real reseller channel, and a quality value-oriented product–and integrate them into their daily business.

Ruminations on Finally Recording First Record

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Well, check that off the bucket list.  I’ve recorded in the studio many times, both here in Cleveland and back home.  But I never walked away from the project with a commercial recording, a rock album of original music, with my name on it.   This little E.P. record (OK, it’s a CD [OK, it's an iTunes download])  has been one of my dreams for many, many years. And it’s done. And it’s awesome.

But I am thankful that it’s done, that the release party has come and gone, and that I can refocus my energies on things that I’ve needed to work on more: my I.T. consulting company, my teenagers, and my messy house.  It is very easy to underestimate the time and commitment necessary for an artist to record, produce, promote, and perform an album.  Every minute spent tweaking a vocal track or tuning a session instrument is a minute spent not doing something else, after all.

Those interested in the recording can check it out at http://www.poutband.com.

Wind Efficiency Vs. Gas&Oil: What I’ve Learned

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As a business owner, I define high-efficiency as the ability to get things done with either the highest operating margin or the lowest operating loss.  With this in mind, and considering the amount of philanthropic hubbub surrounding wind power and the equal-in-volume guilt talk surrounding the use of fossil fuels, I decided to get to the bottom of the efficiency question.

Because for me, the debate begins and ends with three points:

- No fossil energy source appears to be in short supply.  According to reputed agricultural economists, the supply of crude in the U.S. is somewhere near 180 billion barrels, with more not discovered. At our present rate of consumption, that’s a sufficient supply for nearly 40 years, assuming no non-domestic sources were to be used during that time period.

- The ultimate decision point for energy production isn’t energy diversity, or even the environment (read the excellent current thinking on “carbon-in-carbon-out“), but the ability of energy to be harnessed at a low cost in human effort and a likewise low cost in human damage.  Diversity, on the other hand, is a false rationale for wind because it attempts to apply a social-science paradigm to a non-social process, while the environmental impact of fossil fuels is a false rationale because it isn’t fully understood, and environmental impact (large electromagnetic fields, noise, and visual impacts) of wind turbines and transmission systems is largely ignored and improperly dismissed as harmless.

- Fossil fuels, most notably natural methane and propane gasses, are institutionally mislabeled as nonrenewable, despite the natural occurrences of what many scientists agree are in fact, spontaneously-sustainable natural deposits and man-made sustainable gas tactics such as biogas. I would prefer the industry to begin referring to gas as semi-renewable until a better understanding of its supply system is developed.  The most notable example of propaganda covering potential gas renewability is the CNG (compressed natural gas) movement.  I have dealt personally with those invested heavily in this budding industry, and they agree that the estimates as to a tight natural gas supply (10 years or less) are blowhard figures motivated more by “science-for-political-gain” than by any form of truth.  These guys wouldn’t be investing so heavily in CNG if they thought they’d be out of business in 10 years.

Ted – Why Don’t You Blog VoIP Any More?

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1. Divorce made me realize I needed more time with people.  Writing takes away face time, and as shrewd as that is, it’s true.

2. My business took off. 6 employees now. Microsoft partner. Digium partner. The list goes on.  Time commitment issues again.

3. My tweeners became teenagers.  More driving around, more emotional guidance, more interaction with them daily.  They have become awesome musicians!

4. I started a band in Cleveland called pOUT (pronounced “pout”), which has, in the span of about one year, become one of the top 10 club bands in the rock capital.  Time commitment.

5. I realized that, despite my preoccupation with converged business communication, the bulk of my real earning potential was in general I.T. consulting and networking, because I live in Cleveland and not San Jose or Boston.

6. Still getting plenty of VoIP press despite having been relatively disengaged from the VoIP crowd for nearly two years now.  I was the coverboy for ChannelPro SMB last month for their VoIP feature.

7. My vocational obsessions only last a few years, it seems.

An Update from Signal to Noise

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Friends, it’s been forever since I blogged, and, as a writer born and bread, that’s a pretty tough reality with which to live.  So here’s an update, if brief.

Best Technology, my general I.T. consulting firm, now has six employees, and has grown like a weed since late 2008.  In fact, I’m heading down to Miami tomorrow to consider a new business opportunity that represents a strategic significance to Best Technology–virtualization infrastructure and private cloud computing.

I look forward to giving you another update soon, and miss everybody in the blogosphere with whom I’ve lost touch over the last 18 months.

On Thankfulness

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Yesterday, I received word from a client that a very special business acquaintence of mine had passed away.  He was the publisher of the local newspaper here in Elyria, Ohio, and a man for whom I’ve had an immense respect since I met him. He was a generous, gracious, and quiet guy, and I’ve not met a single person who had a bad thing to say about him.  I am thankful to have known him.

This passing really has me thinking about life and its pursuits, and the varying degrees to which we pursue meaning in life. What is our life’s purpose?  And how do we achieve it, personally, professionally, and spiritually? How do we define purpose, and how can we work humbly and thankfully like my associate?

Before I wrote my books and began working as a technology consultant for small businesses, I went through a very difficult period of unemployment and financial insecurity.  It was during this time that I realized that I must rely upon myself–not my family, or my friends, or the government–for success.  To me, part of success in life is independence from the graces of other people, or the ability to avoid subjugation.  To some degree, I have achieved this.

The other thing I figured out is that you’ve got to have fun.  You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing, whether it’s work, play, or chores.  And if you don’t automatically enjoy these things, you’ve got to have a good attitude–to try to get something out of them even if they’re mundane or difficult tasks.  Maybe that’s why I joined a dance band.  Do I like dance music?  No.  Do I like dancing?  No.   But I love when people dance ot the music I play.  See how that interplay works?

Finally, I decided to stop separating my spiritual life from my social life.  If the people in the church have a problem because I drink beer when I play in my (gasp) secular dance band, then they can be consoled by my non-church friends who think Christians are a-holes (many are, sadly).  In good company (me), both groups can get along, and maybe even understand each other.

I’m thankful for this learning experience.  I’m thankful that I’ve taken some lumps when it comes to being humbled. The biggest single thing I’ve learned is that I’m not happy in my work unless I’m helping other people succeed. .. and it was a failure to others succeed that got me unemployed in the first place.