The Strongest Force in Technology May Come From Congress

The forces that have shaped technology since the September that Never Ended have been many. Some of the stronger forces have resulted from legislation (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley), but none will have been stronger, if enacted, than the Cap and Trade program President Obama proposed in his budget. Executive Summary: in a few years, energy in any form is going to become expensive on a scale that will put the summer of '08 to shame.

Rejoice! We now have real economic pressures to support Green Technology initiatives!

Green is the new black. Almost any technology that reduces energy consumption is suddenly going to be extremely attractive to IT departments everywhere. Sun Microsystems, it's time to spin up marketing for the Sun Ray! ClearCube, your day has come! All of those kernel-level power-saving tweaks in Linux suddenly have a purpose!

Since I'm in "wild prediction" mode, here's a few more:

Physical location of Data Centers may soon become a serious concern. Let's face it, hot places surrounded by lots of coal-burning power plants are likely to suffer. Data Centers in Texas will be under particular stress since generation capacity is already strained and future plans are largely based on increasing use of coal (mostly brought in from Montana and Wyoming) and, well, Texas is hot. Telecommuting might begin to make sense. If gasoline prices sustain the levels reached during the summer of '08, employers are going to be under some serious pressure to allow telecommuting for certain job functions. This possibility depends largely on secure, low-power remote access methods and ample bandwidth to the curb. Development frameworks, ultra-high-level languages, and abstraction layers may become too costly to be practical. If power prices get to the point that somebody cares about the cost of CPU cycles again, we may need to focus more on run-time efficiency than on extravagant development models. AC/DC conversion will be centralized in Data Centers. Instead of having redundant, inefficient power supplies with failure-prone fans stuffed into server chassis, low-voltage DC power will be piped into racks. As an added benefit, white noise levels will drop below the threshold of pain. The expected life of hardware will increase to compensate for higher costs. Chip fabrication is a notoriously power-hungry process. Higher energy prices translate into higher component costs, and to compensate, computer equipment is going to have to become a durable good with a life of more than 3 years.

If your organization has yet to start an energy management program, now is the time. If you need assistance, or if you simply don't know where to start, drop me a line.