The AdvFS file system has had a bittersweet history. When introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1990s for DEC’s Unix flavor (which would eventually become Tru64 UNIX), AdvFS was one of the most capable—if not the most capable—Unix file systems in existence.

As a 1999 Illuminata research note by my colleague Jonathan Eunice said: “Tru64 UNIX has the features one expects of a top-drawer enterprise Unix: multiprocessing, multithreading, disk volume management, a journaling file system, multi-path I/O, extensive TCP/IP networking, and conformance with a range of de jure and de facto standards. Its AdvFS filesystem, 64-bit and large memory support, and Memory Channel cluster interconnect provide a tour de force in high-scale system design.” (See also this 1996 Unix scorecard.)

However, Tru64—along with the Alpha processor on which it ran—was one of the casualties when HP purchased Compaq (which had earlier absorbed DEC). AdvFS itself seemingly got a reprieve when HP decided to port it to HP-UX along with its associated, and equally well-regarded, TruCluster clustering environment. However, in 2004, HP killed the delayed project and went with the third-party Veritas Storage Foundation instead.

Today, AdvFS gets yet another life as HP makes the source code for AdvFS available to the Open Source community. Specifically, according to the press release, “HP will contribute the code as a reference implementation of an enterprise Linux file system under the terms of General Public License Version 2 for compatibility with the Linux kernel, as well as provide design documentation, test suites and engineering resources.”

That’s a fair bit of history I know. However, I thought at least a little context was necessary before diving under the covers.

What’s being contributed? As HP says, the source code for AdvFS and related resources. This includes both the original “mature” version for Tru64 and the version for the worked-on port to HP-UX, which included some improvements and updates. HP describes the latter as a “feature complete port.” However, I take that as meaning that 90 percent of the development work is done, so that only “the other 90 percent” of development, test, QA, tuning, and so forth is left to do. (After all, if it were almost ready to go into production, presumably HP would have completed the project rather than gone the Veritas route.)

What’s not being contributed? This announcement strictly concerns the Tru64 file system; it does not include TruCluster—which builds atop Tru64, but is a separate product.

When will AdvFS be available as a file system for Linux? Short answer: probably never. One Wikipedia contributor amusingly opines: “anyone should be able to port it to the Linux kernel and get it into mainline.” However, the reality is that although AdvFS code may assist with and its design documents may inform future Open Source file system work, it’s highly unlikely that AdvFS qua AdvFS will be plopped into Linux in its current form.

What file system project(s) could make use of AdvFS? In the relatively near-term, ext4 is the next new file system that we’re likely to see widely deployed on Linux. It’s a largely incremental enhancement to the ubiquitous ext3 that focuses on larger file and file system sizes as well as various performance tweaks. Versions of ext4 are starting to appear in community releases such as Fedora 9. HP, among many others, has been involved in ext4 development, but AdvFS itself won’t have a big impact here. Rather, it’s Btrfs (pronounced “butter f s”) with which HP is looking to hookup AdvFS.

What is Btrfs? In general terms, think of Btrfs as a “next generation file system,” which is to say one that moves beyond the administration and availability models used by current file systems. Although the specifics are quite different, Sun’s ZFS is another example. From its project page on kernel.org: “Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone.”

What’s HP’s interest? HP has contributed to a wide range of Open Source projects over time, but this goes beyond generic community goodness. Oracle kicked off Btrfs but is apparently interested in moving it beyond being just “an Oracle filesystem project.” As for HP, AdvFS (and TruCluster) were long part-and-parcel of a close development relationship with Oracle involving database clustering. It’s pretty clear to me that Oracle wanted more companies involved with Btrfs development; AdvFS was a highly relevant technological bauble for HP to bring as a housewarming present for one of its most important partners.

Bottom line: Especially given the great success that its ProLiant and BladeSystem lines have been enjoying, HP has a vested interest in the continued success of Linux and its ability to scale to larger and larger workloads. A lot of that growth is about rapidly growing data, so a next generation file system is going to be needed at some point. Btrfs per se is speculative, with production deployments even in the 2011 or 2012 timeframe seeming optimistic given the slow cadence of file system roll outs. (It’s customers’ data we’re talking about here, after all. Sun took a good couple of years to start seriously rolling out ZFS even after it was nominally “ready.”) But making AdvFS resources available gives Open Source developers the opportunity for useful insights into how a sophisticated production file system should work. Especially to the degree that AdvFS wins some points with a major partner, it’s a nice way to leverage some IP that would otherwise mostly go to waste.

Carter Lusher of SageCircle has compiled a great page of posts offering tips for vendor AR organizations dealing with analysts. It’s a useful resource for everyone concerned; I concur with most of the suggestions and advice. In this post, I’m going to drill down into one specific aspect: the briefing.

Topic of interest. As I’ve written about previously, I get lots of email—mostly from PR firms—wanting to brief me on topics that are well outside my coverage area or that are—how shall I put this nicely?—trivial. Adding fuel to the fire, these requests are often framed as a “story pitch,” further cementing the suspicion that the sender is essentially clueless about what I do for a living. So, please, make the briefing request about something worthwhile or you’re wasting both of our time. By “worthwhile” here, I mean to me, my practice, and my clients—not just to the vendor. (And please use email, not the phone, unless you’re a client following up on something with a short fuse.)

Not every briefing needs to be an hour long. An hour has sort of evolved as the de facto briefing length. It’s a nice round number and, short of an interactive discussion with a lot of in-depth feedback as we might provide for a vendor client prior to a product launch, is plenty of time to cover most topics to adequate depth. However, in our experience, 30 minutes is also sufficient a lot of the time. If we’re already well-familiar with your company, we don’t need a lot of stage-setting background. Conversely, if you’re a new startup, it often makes sense to have a quick level-set to start; that way we can arrange a follow-on with the right people (from both our end and yours) if we want to drill down. We’ve largely moved to 30 minutes as the default briefing length, especially for non-clients.

You’re sending a presentation, not sniping an eBay auction. All too often these days, presentations get sent out 15 minutes, 5 minutes, or 30 seconds prior to the scheduled start of the briefing. The result is that we often spend—aka “waste”—the first five minutes of everyone’s time chit-chatting while the presentation bounces around the pipes of the Internet. “I just sent it off” is most often paired with the annoying “Did you get it yet?” Even when it does get through quickly, last minute is a problem. For one thing, we like to flip through the presentation in advance. This often lets us identify topics to discuss in detail, and areas that we can comfortably pass over quickly. The other problem is that, shocking as it may seem, we’re not always tethered to a broadband connection at our desks. I’ve taken more than one briefing off-site where I simply had no way to retrieve a presentation sent at the last minute.

WebEx Begone. There’s perhaps one thing worse than Death By PowerPoint. And that’s Death by WebEx (and its ilk). While these online conferencing tools have their place in limited circumstances (software demos for example), in general, the less I see them, the better. Just a few of the associated issues: people often spend the first few minutes of the presentation downloading or debugging some software problem; some software requires the use of Internet Explorer and, therefore, Windows; and, per the previous, I’m not always at a broadband-connected computer. It’s also my experience that these tools tend to discourage interactivity and encourage a plod-on-at-all-costs style of presenting. (And don’t get me started on briefings in Second Life.)

Clear embargos and NDAs. At Illuminata, we’re very serious about respecting vendors’ confidences. However, you have to do your part by telling us specifically what is NDA and what is not. Good practices include: “This presentation is under embargo until next Tuesday at 9am EDT” or “This presentation is public except for the roadmap slide marked confidential.” Blanket NDAs with non-specific expiries are Bad Practice. They are a particular problem with events that blend lots of information that is clearly not confidential—stuff easily found on the company’s Web site or via Google—with genuinely proprietary information. Worse, the implicit message often seems to be that the vendor will let us write about things that paint them in a good light, but not otherwise. Worse than Bad Practice, that’s Bad Mojo.

Appropriate depth and topic. In general, vendors probably don’t tailor presentation content sufficiently for different audiences: analysts, press, customers, sales force, and so forth. However, even within those communities there can be considerable differences that get overlooked when plowing through a day’s worth of back-to-back briefings. I’m sympathetic; I’ve been there and it’s easy to go into automatic mode. But the reality is that some topics are fairly specialized and some analysts are going to be looking for the big picture implications; for others, you can take the background as read and head straight for the details. Backup slides and a flexible presentation approach are one good way of handling this.

This isn’t a complete list but does hit some of the practices that make us grumble (repeatedly) and that, more to the point, tend to make the considerable time that all of us put into briefings less productive than it could otherwise be.

I spent the past couple of days at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Good-sized crowd—over 1,500 and more than Red Hat expected I gather. The two major topics that I found most interesting at the event were Real-Time Linux and embedded KVM-based virtualization. I’ll cover Real-Time in a future post; here’s my take on Red Hat’s KVM announcement.

CNET News.com’s Andrew Donoghue has more details, but basically Red Hat is releasing—into beta test—a small (< 64 MB) standalone hypervisor based on the KVM project. The idea is that users (or system makers) will be able to load this hypervisor into a flash memory device. A system then booting off this device will go straight into the hypervisor and be ready to start creating virtual machines and loading guest operating systems without any further preparation.

Red Hat’s been a fan of KVM for a while. There are a couple of major reasons for this: one business, one technical. Both involve Xen, the Open Source hypervisor project that underpins most server virtualization on Linux today.

The business reason is that, while Red Hat contributes to and works on Xen, competitors are far more associated with the project. Novell, the owners of the only other major enterprise Linux distribution, ran especially hard with Xen early on. And Citrix—not a direct competitor but certainly a major virtualization player—bought XenSource, the commercial entity formed by Xen’s creators.

From a technical perspective, Red Hat’s issue is that it’s hard to keep Xen and the Linux kernel in sync. Xen’s a standalone hypervisor layer but it has deeply invasive hooks into the Linux kernel and, therefore, keeping the two working together takes a lot of development and testing effort. It’s a bit reminiscent of how new versions of the VERITAS filesystem had to be carefully matched to new versions of Solaris or HP-UX.

By contrast, KVM is kernel-based. This means that it is actually part and parcel of the Linux kernel rather than a quasi-independent piece of software.

Red Hat’s embedded KVM hypervisor is actually a stripped down version of Fedora, Red Hat’s community version of Linux. Why not Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Well, for one thing, getting things down to a reasonable size means taking lots of components not needed for a hypervisor out of the distribution. A minimalist RHEL wouldn’t be RHEL. Furthermore, Fedora incorporates kernel changes faster than RHEL, which speeds up support for new hardware and the like.

It’s worth noting here that a standalone hypervisor is an operating system that also incorporates a virtual machine monitor in some way and a means to manage virtual machines. It differs from a conventional operating system in what it doesn’t do; it doesn’t provide the interfaces required by programs to run.

However, in addition to supporting programs running on top of it, Linux also offers a wide breadth of hardware support, sophisticated memory management, scheduling and the like. Thus, kernel-based virtualization effectively gets a lot of capabilities for “free” that otherwise have to be developed for and added to an independently-developed standalone hypervisor.

Although Red Hat will continue to work on and contribute to Xen, KVM is clearly its strategic direction. Using an API (application programming interface) called libvirt, Red Hat plans to abstract low-level virtualization so that the choice of hypervisor is transparent to largely transparent to management software.

KVM is arguably late to the virtualization game. However the interest that it’s garnering—and its adoption by a heavy hitter like Red Hat—is just another indication that we’re fundamentally still in the early days of a virtualized world.

At last month’s EMC World, Chairman, President, and CEO Joe Tucci stood before an audience of thousands and proclaimed SSD as the next big storage disruptor. Shortly thereafter, I heard a Sun executive predict that by 2010, SSD would dominate the storage industry—or something like that.

I guess I’m a bit jaded. When I was in mainframe leasing, decades ago, I tried to remarket an SSD array that sat idling at the other end of a 3081 channel on some big company’s machine room floor. While it was blazingly fast, it went nowhere, even at a bargain-basement price. That was back in the day when EMC sold SSD.

EMC might have died if it weren’t for a product that integrated RAID disk with SSD and used the SSD part of the system as disk cache. Users glommed onto Symmetrix. SSD? Eh. EMC soon dropped that line.

OK, so this is now SSD’s time and place, right? Flash memory can be made machine-room reliable through some new algorithm magic. We should be thinking of work done for dollar paid, as opposed to comparing price/performance curves. I get that. But, do users? That’s the big SSD question mark.

I was on a conference call with a group of storage administrators recently and happened to mention that I had spent most of the day studying this next iteration of SSD. I mentioned that I thought it looked pretty interesting this time around. That comment was greeted with dead silence. All the compelling value proposition statements in the world won’t move SSD off the dime unless users know what to do with it, and are comfortable doing it.

Personally, I think that if SSD is Tier Zero in a tiered storage strategy, then the biggest loser is tape, because users don’t really need another storage tier. They just need more performance.

It’s a bit of a goofy antic, but the folks at the Mozilla Foundation are trying to “set a Guinness World Record” for most software downloads in 24 hours. There isn’t, AFAIK, any such existing record, so the idea is to create one. And today (June 17, 2008) is the day. All that’s missing is a countdown clock—first to count down to when Firefox 3 can be downloaded, and then to pace the downloaders through the 24 hours of furious downloading. Did I mention goofy antic?

In the meanwhile, one thing they do have is a nice map showing how many people in each country have solemnly pledged to download the software today. This image taken at just after 9am local time (EDT). Click image for larger version, or here for current status.

While there are always important caveats to any self-selected survey, the relative proportions are an interesting rough cut at where the avid browsers are.

I’m just wrapping up at the Microsoft STB (Server and Tools Business) Analyst Summit at TechEd down in hot and stormy Orlando this week. It was a generally good event—always good to get an overall strategy pulse and spend a fair bit of time chatting one-on-one—if a bit redundant with the other two Microsoft events I’ve attended in the recent past, the Microsoft Management Summit and MIX08.

Unsurprisingly, one of the areas Microsoft hit on hard at this event was virtualization—especially its upcoming Hyper-V hypervisor for Windows Server 2008. However, also on display were its various other virtualization flavors, including the application virtualization that came from its Softricity acquisition. (I’ll be delving into Microsoft’s virtualization strategy in depth in an upcoming report, complementing recent reports on the corresponding strategies at Citrix and VMware.)

Today, though, I’m going to keep things at a higher level. Coming out of this Microsoft event and the others I’ve attended, I have two broad observations about the company’s strategy—each of which represents a considerable strength and opportunity. But, simultaneously, also holds within them key challenges for Microsoft going forward. Let’s take the points one at a time.

Better together but more monolithic.

The first observation is that Microsoft does a mostly admirable job of portfolio-level design that results in a suite of products that integrate with and cross-support each other. SharePoint works closely with Exchange and other Microsoft products. Visual Studio and Expression Studio present two different views of the same code for developers and designers respectively. Microsoft technologies such as Active Directory permeate its products. No company’s suite of software truly works together “seamlessly”—no matter what the marketing literature says—but Microsoft comes closer together than anyone with comparable breadth.

The flip side of this togetherness, though, is that Microsoft products then tend to play less well with the other children than is the norm. Microsoft has improved in this regard in recent years (how could it not?), but any number of proprietary protocols and undocumented interfaces make plugging and playing with a Microsoft environment far more difficult than with products that use more standardized approaches.

Embrace the cloud—as a means to extend licensed software.

Microsoft claims to embrace software in the cloud. It points to the massive amount of code pushed out by Windows Update, to online platforms like Virtual Earth, to Xbox LIVE, to 50,000 Microsoft servers returning search results. In absolute terms, Microsoft is already doing a great deal with cloud computing in its various forms. Indeed, based solely on the quantity of bits that it’s pushing around for network-based computing, there’s an argument to be made that Microsoft is already a big player in this space. At the least, if one listens to speeches by Ray Ozzie and other Microsoft execs, it’s clear that Microsoft is well-tuned into the notion that more and more software is going to be delivered from the network.

At the same time, Microsoft is also clearly determined to approach cloud computing in a largely non-disruptive way. Most of Microsoft’s cloud-related products and initiatives are adjuncts and complements to traditional licensed software, not a replacement for it. Thus, we have teaming features for Microsoft Office, online extensions for Exchange, and hosted offerings for a number of their standard licensed products. Thus, Microsoft is primarily focused on either increasing the value of their licensed software using the network or in simply offering alternative ways to consume the same bits. It’s not nearly as interested in radically changing the economics or use models associated with its existing, and very lucrative, business.

Which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Earlier this week, I noted that book publishers and authors had, so far, been largely protected from the mass copying that has helped to undermine the music recording industry’s profits. The reason is simple. You can’t copy dead-tree books for minimal effort and cost the way you can CDs or MP3s. But, with e-books finally seemingly establishing a bona fide foothold with Amazon’s Kindle, that’s going to start changing.

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman notes this trend in “Bits, Bands and Books” together with a corollary that Esther Dyson predicted in 1994:

that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

This, of course, is what a lot of folks—whether as a way to justify music piracy or otherwise—have been saying for years about the business model for music. It’s (supposedly) OK if you can’t sell a lot of CDs (or iTunes downloads) any longer. Krugman notes that, according to a recent Rolling Stone article: “Downloads are steadily undermining record sales — but today’s rock bands, the magazine reports, are finding other sources of income. Even if record sales are modest, bands can convert airplay and YouTube views into financial success indirectly, making money through ‘publishing, touring, merchandising and licensing’.”

I’m a bit skeptical that selling tchotchkes, tickets, and “extras” in one form or another is really a practical substitute for selling the music itself in the general case. But let’s leave that go for the time being. It’s been endlessly debated and isn’t going to be resolved here. What seems to me even more problematic is the suggestion that there has to be viable alternative models for creative content that becomes de facto free in the general case. For example, Krugman goes on to write:

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.

And here, I’m deeply, deeply skeptical. At least with music, there are a variety of revenue-generating activities that are a natural outgrowth of the primary creative product. Most musicians do live performances in any case. The only question is how much money they can make by doing so.

But writers? Sure, some well-known authors make engaging speakers. Geoffrey Moore (Author of Crossing the Chasm and Dealing with Darwin) is one I’ve heard fairly recently. J.K. Rowling just spoke at Harvard’s commencement. But just because someone is a writer—even a best-selling one—doesn’t make them a good speaker. Indeed, some of the best writers are reclusive and would shudder at the thought of having to make a living by public speaking.

Yes, business models are changing. And all of us will have to adapt in various ways. But let’s not kid ourselves that advertising, live performances, or magic money trees are going to automagically pay the bills for creative content that we want to consume but don’t want to pay for.

An InfoWorld article opines that it’s “Hard to make a living in tools.” And so it is. But so it has been, for many years, and so it ever shall be.

The paradigmatic example is the decline and fall of Borland, a historically strong ISV that built its business on development tools. As a very recent example, there’s the “orderly wind-down” of Agitar’s testing business. And many, many examples in-between. I think my first “Gee, development tools seems to be a hard business in which to make your living!” discussion was with Tony Slocum of Lucid, some twenty years ago. (Its less-orderly wind-down came a few years later.)

I’ve been having this same discussion with the executives of development tools vendors, both large and small, ever since. Not much has changed. Indeed, the challenge has if anything intensified. IBM (Eclipse) and Sun Microsystems (NetBeans) have pushed much of their tools efforts into Open Source, driving the “right price” of a basic IDE toward zero, nada, zippo, free. Microsoft hasn’t quite gone that far with Visual Studio, but free downloads of its Express Editions are but a few clicks away.

To be sure, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun definitely want to up-sell you, dear corporate customer, their latest, greatest, most integrated and sophisticated offerings. IBM’s entire Rational brand is about this upsell opportunity, and all three are leading, tugging, pulling, and cajoling you into their respective runtime environments, for which they wish to be well compensated. My colleague Gordon Haff has written about the ways in which Open Source has more value within a larger vendor; I believe a corollary argument could be made for development toolsets within larger vendors.

I know this is the way of the world, though it does make me cringe for those brave commercial entities with admirable toolsets that remain independent, living outside the castle walls. Take ActiveState, CodeGear, JetBrains, and TotalView, for example. Great products all. But baby, it’s cold outside…and the forecast is for continued struggle, every day, to differentiate and prove value to a skeptical world ever more likely to expect their tools for free, or thereabouts. It’s always been hard to capture value from the development tools business, and that reality continues on.

An article by Edward Wyatt in the New York Times discussed how the Amazon Kindle e-book reader was stirring unease at the BookExpo America trade show.

But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

I’m a bit skeptical about this particular concern. From my perspective as a consumer, one of the problems that I have with e-books today is that I have to buy a $400 device and then still have to pay almost as much for the bits as for the dead tree version, even though many of the costs associated with printing, distributing, and inventorying physical books are eliminated.

That’s not to say that costs go to zero—nowhere close. And there’s a legitimate concern that buyers may naively assume that they do. An earlier post on this topic: Digital distribution isn’t free. But costs are lower—and the prices should reflect that.

What would seem a more germane concern is whether pervasive e-books lead to pervasive trading and copying. DRM, my other beef with a lot of today’s e-books, inconveniences legitimate users as much as it retards piracy. So I think we can take that off the table a solution that’s either desirable or especially effective. Today, the economics of photocopying and the restraints that time and space put on physically giving a read book to the next reader sharply limit the amount of duplication and trading that can take place.

In my view, you shouldn’t discount limits imposed by the physical world too much. While movies consume plenty of bandwidth on the Torrents, their quality and the effort it takes to download them—paired with the ready availability of modestly-priced, full quality movie rentals—means that they aren’t that attractive for a lot of people. Certainly music lends itself far better to downloads—legal and otherwise. And the apparent impact on the recording labels has been proportionately greater as well.

A lot of the dynamics associated with creating, producing, distributing, and purchasing books are considerably different than those of music than those of movies. Electronic distribution creates possibilities. Impulse purchases from the living room and ready availability of the longest, “long tail” work are just two.

But, at the same time, the cost of putting toner powder on a page of paper and the time associated with putting all those pages on a copier glass will no longer be a defense in a world where “If it can be copied, it will be copied” often seems to rule.

It’s hard not to have heard the growing crescendo of “green IT!” over the past eighteen months. Every first-tier OEM has trotted out an “Eco-friendly” or “Green” imitative, and is now rolling into a second or third generation pitch. See, e.g., IBM Project Big Green, with its obligatory claim of a $1B investment, or Sun’s Eco Responsibility. Gartner has endorsed Green IT as this year’s Top Strategic Technology. Secondary OEMs are now starting to pitch their me-too! versions—a sure sign the theme has “jumped the shark.” Everyone’s talking about their deep Green credentials—about how they’ve been Green long before Green was Cool. (For the full tug-the-heartstrings, three-tissues-required treatment, get the full Corporate Social Responsibility pitch).

So, just window dressing? Is Green just the next Buzzword That Shall Be Prominently Featured in Every Presentation, Product Description, and Conversation? Consider this: data de-duplication, DBMS compression features, duplex printers, small form factor disk drives, multi-core CPUs, blade servers, mainframes, server virtualization, thin clients, IM,video-conferencing, cycle-stealing grid middleware, datacenter orchestration platforms, rotational UPSs, water cooling, SOA, and SaaS are just a few of the things that have been green-washed and presented as essential enablers of a Green future. Sheesh!

IdaRose Sylvester’s “Is green just a fad—again?” hits it nicely: [emphasis added]

…green is everywhere. But it’s different. It’s not about regulatory reform, sustainability, technology, or any of the core issues behind minimizing ecological impacts from modern living. It’s simply about being green, an amorphous, ill-defined concept few know how to support in practice. Ironically, the need for being green, giving the energy crisis, global climate change, and skyrocketing food prices, is a real issue. But our saturation around the concept might yet lead to burnout and apathy, yet again.

This nails the problem:

1. There is a real value in, and need for, the reduced energy expenditure and reduced environmental harm that often fall under the Green label.
2. A lot of the talk, pitches, initiatives, and group-hug homilies are risible blather.
3. The blah blah factor in (2) makes it hard to focus on the real issues in (1). This promotes cynicism, making real understanding and progress more difficult.

When it comes to Green, it’s damnably hard to separate the ore from the tailings. The proliferation of vendor claims (“we’re 19% greener than those other guys!”) doesn’t help much. Needless to say, the “other guys” have a countering PowerPoint deck that “proves” they’re the ones who are more efficient—by 31%. Take that! Then there’s the Green Grid, Climate Savers, Green Technology Alliance, EPA’s Green Power Partnership, et cetera—a bewildering array of organizations that have formed up, all hoping to be the rallying point for eco initiatives. The problem with these kinds of so-called “green” messages is that they don’t address a real problem in a meaningful way.

Nevertheless, a recent Forrester survey suggests enterprises are taking Green on-board. But note carefully the top reason: Saving money. That’s nice and all, but having a positive environmental impact—that is, the core virtue of Green—is essentially a beneficial side-effect. I saw similar results at the recent Blade System Insight event in Tucson, where I moderated a panel on datacenter power and cooling. We polled the audience (largely CIOs, datacenter directors, and their reports) about their top concerns. Answer: Cost. Capacity. Space. In that order. Eco-friendliness was on that list too, dead last. No one—not one person—voted for it as a top concern. Admirable honesty.

Sure, everyone wants to be warm, fuzzy, good to the environment, kind to children and animals, upright, decent, and giving—but not all of those can be your top priority. Why not? Survey says: It’s not their job. Asked how many actually had responsibility for the power bill related to IT, a smattering of hands went up. Generously, 5% of the audience. Energy consumption just isn’t usually IT’s direct concern. With mega- and HPC datacenters, absolutely—power is a highly constrained resource that must be carefully planned for. But in most enterprises? Not so much. Hard to optimize something for which you’re not even responsible!

So: Saving money good. Concern for the environment good. Yeah! for RoHS and lead-free products. Yeah! for reuse and recycling. Yeah! for efficiency and understanding one’s eco-footprint. But Greenie marketectures, Green self-promotion, and Corporate Social Responsibility tearjerkers? Boo! Lame, boring, me-too. All this Green-washing, Green-touting, and Green for its own sake has gotten old really fast.