http://www.cisco.com

WHO:
Al Gore, Nobel Laureate and former U.S. Vice President
John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco
Sue Bostrom, EVP, Chief Marketing Officer, Cisco

WHAT: Al Gore, John Chambers and Sue Bostrom will come together in a virtual unified communications environment before a live audience of technology leaders to examine the critical role that innovation can play in mitigating climate change. The virtual discussion will also be streamed live via a webcast session for general viewing. Key discussion topics will include:

• the latest observations of the effects of global warming and the impact of information technology
• how businesses can reduce greenhouse gas emissions through innovation
• how the technology industry can help create the most sustainable model for addressing global climate change

The public is invited to submit topic ideas and panel questions to: ecopanelquestions@external.cisco.com

Check this out, it does sound very cool, I was on the Cisco site checking out the specs of one of their switches for a colleague and as I was looking around found this. It sounds very interesting and it will be great to see what topics are discussed and what the panel viewpoints are on climate change and technology. It’s surprising how relatively small changes in the way you work, the way you deploy and support your IT can make a significant change to not only your energy costs as well as your operational costs. For example, switching to ‘green electricity supplies’, switching off the pcs at night, or deploying those energy efficient servers/desktops could reduce your energy costs, the carbon footprint of the IT and still provide the functionality you need for your business. I wonder if they will mention blade technology and virtualization or even grid solutions?

Some questions (these are in no order and off the top of my head):

• How do we define the carbon footprint of the IT infrastructure  -the desktop, the server, the data center as well as the SAN, networks and printers?
• Is the talk of ‘rating a data center’ a realistic thing and would it make a difference in the commercial world?
• Should companies declare their IT carbon footprint – the amount of electricity they need to power their business as part of the social responsibility in their shareholders annual report?
• How do we manage the recycling of the IT infrastructure – should we encourage less re-use and more recycling – the ‘dumping’ old pcs in developing world concern? – Should the digital divide not be addressed with energy efficiency/recycling in mind?
• What relevance does the green message represent in the HPC/Grid world – how do we realistically respond to ‘I don’t care about green, I want fast, green is a PR problem, a data center guy problem’.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 11:04 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.