Upfront
UPFRONT FROM PAGE 4 centers from 20 to two, is considered a corporate the waves, don’t just snap
meeting. The goal of which meant reducing and socially responsible or get cut by a dropped
the consortium, which floor space from 200,000 initiative, The Green Grid anchor, as suggested by
formed a year ago and square feet to 45,000 membersalsoweresureto local government and
nowboasts150members, square feet and cutting emphasize an important telecom authorities in
is advancing energy effi- power consumption and benefit of going green— Alexandria, Egypt.
ciency in the data center. carbon dioxide emis- theamountofmoneycom- Sure, ship anchors
John Tuccillo, a direc- sions by half. panies can save by reduc- dropped approximately
Crocetti told the audi- ing energy bills. 8 and 12 kilometers out
ence at the conference —Scott Ferguson in the Mediterranean
that he had to near Alexandria (Hello?!
look beyond Nobody sets anchor that
just the serv- Anchors away— far out) just happened to
ers to see hit these cables exactly
how energy- way away right and, boom, sever
efficient the was off the storage them? Then, two days
microproc- Ibeat in early February, later, the exact same thing
e s s o r s covering the mysterious happens 32 kilometers
w e r e Internet cable outages offshore in the Persian
that his in the Mediterranean Gulf?Andmorecutshave
company Sea and Persian Gulf. since been reported.
was using. S o m e a u t h o r i t i e s How stupid do these
C r o c e t t i suspect foul play, since “authorities” think we
said that he’s the cuts are fairly deep are?
hoping in the underwater and the In fact, no one—not
tor of the nonprofit future to look at more cables require powerful Interpol, not the FBI, not
Green Grid, opened the energy-efficient storage tools to damage. Media the telecom consortium
two-day conference with equipment that uses that licenses
a reminder to members solid-state drives instead the cables—has
that there is still a great of traditional hard disk been able to
deal of work to be done in drives that need more find out who the
spreading the message of power. culprits are.
green IT. He added that this re- I n t h e
“Let us share with the quired getting down into m e a n t i m e ,
industry where we are system innards, at least F L A G Te l e -
on a couple of fronts,” when it came to dealing com, owner and
Tuccillo said. “We want with vendors. operator of several
to solicit feedback from “We needed to acquire thousand miles of
the industry, engage in new partners,” Crocetti fiber-optic cable in the
the strength that is this said. “I dealt mostly with Middle East, is busily
organization and move platform manufacturers. laying new undersea
forward. Essentially, we I dealt with Dell, IBM cable to replace the lines
have to get connected to and Sun [Microsystems]. representatives at AT&T, that were cut.
efficient IT.” I never dealt with com- Sprint Nextel and Inter- —Chris Preimesberger
Renato Crocetti, a ponent manufacturers, pol all told eWeek that
corporate vice president so I found myself turn- the outages look very at payroll and human ing to component manu- suspicious but offered no Super esources services com- facturers, and I needed other observations. disappointment
pany ADP, detailed his them to understand that These ultra-heavy-duty
efforts in the last three we needed to change the fiber-optic cables, located ’m not a huge football y e a r s t o r e d u c e t h e game.” hundreds—sometimes Ifan, mostly because I
number of ADP’s data While talking green thousands—offeetunder [CONTINUED ON PAGE 8]
