[I recently received a fascinating e-mail from Rogier Spoor at SURFnet on an exciting initiative they have undertaken to pilot a green cloud service for Dutch universities using a lightpath connection to Iceland.
The Netherlands and Australia are probably the two most likely countries to suffer from the deleterious effects of global warming (For more details please see (http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/green-it-overview-jan-6-2011) so it is good to see young engineers and researchers thinking about their nation’s future. As I have blogged about several times optical networks and green clouds located at sites in the world that use carbon free energy could be one of the major applications of future R&E networks. With his permission here is some extracts from Rogier’s e-mail
--BSA]
Dear Bill,
About half a year ago we spoke about cloud opportunities and the
option to start a community based cloud which should offer IAAS services
to the research and educational community. I just have read your blog
and discovered that Internet2 is working on such a topic as well. That's
interesting to know!
Hereby I'll give you a short status update about our progress.
Our initial idea was to startup a IAAS cloud that would be based on the
overcapacity of servers in existing university datacenters. However
after talking to some universities we didn't get any commitment to move
onto this path.
So we changed plans, and are now investigating how institutions could
have resources in the Netherlands (brokered or federated IaaS cloud
services via SURFnet), or have them available via other commercial cloud
offerings outside the Netherlands. For that we're collaborating with
GreenQloud at the moment: a company based in Iceland with a focus on
doing their operations "Truely Green" as they call it. Energy and
cooling are available with a much smaller footprint, and we think there
are many applications that are suitable to run outside our country.
(Also think about desktops, and experimental machines from students.)
GreenQloud and SURFnet try to make this cloud easily available by having
logins via our SURFfederatie, and allow people to work in groups that
can span our universities as well.
[..]
We're also working on a lightpath between the Netherlands and Iceland.
This will make it possible for a Dutch university, to connect to their
own VM's in Iceland as if their are running in their own LAN (and ip-space).
Our work in this IAAS community cloud area is officially only for pilot
purposes. I expect there is a positive business case in which we can
broker IAAS cloud services from existing market parties, preferably as
green as possible.
[..]
.
cheers,
Rogier Spoor
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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles
Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview
Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.
Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37
Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG
High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP
Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g
How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd