Who Says Its Not Easy Being Green?

Ten months ago we finally moved into a brand new building here at Thomas Jefferson School of Law.  This is a building that had been in planning and construction for years.  A building that by design and in practice was to set a tone for a commitment to environmental responsibility. This commitment can be seen from the Gold LEED status of the construction project to the reduction printer waste to the banning of space heaters in offices.

And the big solar array on our roof. (more on that below…)

As for my part in all of this, I had to consider how to ensure that IT was a part of the commitment to sustainability as well.  This isn’t always easy, PCs and servers by their nature are typically power hungry and full of toxins and heavy metals that are recycled frequently.  They also add to the cost of heating and cooling of the building over all.

To meet this challenge we virtualized our entire environment and managed to drop from 35 old school physical servers to only 4 and a storage array.  As for desktops, we eliminated 99% of them and now run over 250 virtual Windows 7 desktops on 4 servers. That’s means we reduced the number of machines from nearly 300 to 8 plus attached storage. All of this equipment now lives in a hot aisle containment system monitored and powered by an APC power management system. (and as an aside, when the power went out in all of San Diego county, we didn’t skip a beat)

What’s cool about this besides the fact that its just plain cool is that we can measure our impact on the environment in energy savings and in the fact that we recycle less equipment and do so less frequently.

Back to the solar array.  I just ran some sample numbers yesterday and it would appear that if we add up all of the power consumed by all of the servers, network switches, storage, security equipment, WAPs and phones throughout the building it is essentially a wash when compared to what we generate on the roof.

Talk about being green.

Who You Calling Chicken?

Squares

Humans: The Weakest Link in Computer Security

Ain’t that the truth.  Watching various hacker/cracker/mayhem groups posting large amounts of personal data over the last few months it is interesting to note how we humans are at fault.  The number of passwords released as a result of the data collected during these “hacks” continues to demonstrate that most people fail to follow any kind of strong password policy either personally or at work.

The most common passwords include ‘password’ and ’12345678′.  Even sysadmins have been caught using simple passwords.

Since removing humans from the equation is next to impossible, researchers have created a test scenario that uses PCs that supposedly behave like human beings in order to expose problematic human behavior that weaken security.  The Economist has an article describing the research a group of cybersecurity experts led by Jim Blythe of the University of Southern California are working on currently.

San Diego Magazine / COX Tech Exec Award 2011

In May of 2011 I was honored with a much unexpected award from San Diego Magazine and COX Business.  Each year COX honors innovative technology executives and directors in the San Diego area.  In 2011 I was selected for the Exemplary Award as a result of the great work we did turning Thomas Jefferson School of Law into the most high tech law school in the country.

Attached is short story on the event.

It was a terrific honor and a wonderful event.  I look forward to going as a guest in the future!

Dark Alley

Chicago at night.

Chicago Hot Rod Garage

Chicago at night.

Chicago at Night

Dark alley.

Educational Technologists Should Know Better

Good information presented in an unreadable graphic format. An unfortunate distraction from otherwise good content.

Big Antenna

I like downtown Milwaukee.