Data Center

Architecture in the Mist

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Recently, a friend asked me to explain fog computing. Is it different than cloud computing? The term Cloud in an architectural diagram, as originally used, meant “it doesn’t matter where the computing is”, i.e., the term Cloud meant vague and undefined. As happens so often, a few big data center operators (you know their names) re-defined it to mean “in our far-away high-up location”. This definition supports their marketing but restricts the original purpose of the term. Fog is taking back the cloud...
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Big Data, Buildings, and the Internet of Things

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Big Data is the hot new buzz-phrase for something that buildings system integrators have long struggled with. Last Thursday (3/29), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched its public initiative on big data for government, the Big Data Research and Development Initiative.

The purpose of big data is to support analytics, that is the massive...

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Smart Operations are a necessary part of Smart Energy. Maybe GBXML is, too.

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It is easy to think we are playing the end game, but we are really working on the early stages of smart energy.

Smart grids may end at the edges of the grid, they may know no bounds, i.e., ZigBee and SEP, or they may end at the meter. Beyond the meter may be a collection of dumb systems, a minimal collection of defined systems with defined responses, or a micro-grid with its own economy, and own dynamics. I think that every node...

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Data centers are just the start of unsustainable IT

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Lots of people consider data centers, those great energy sucking heat producing resource hogs. Data centers have become the PR battlegrounds for corporate sustainability. Heads of large corporations have been known to charter jets to inspect operations of data centers and declare their interest in reducing carbon footprints. This is somewhat overwrought; that flight may have a larger carbon footprint that savings for a year. Such posturing is well known; today, I am writing of IT’s unsustainable interactions with basic building operations.
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