Tag Archive for 'cix'

Fast food lies

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/11/2007
in Community Interest
. 12 Comments

I saw fellow CIX director Adam Beecher’s post on fast food, the ads and the reality last night and it reminded me that I had taken similar photos in Supermacs Hueston Station, a couple of months back and never uploaded them.

I dug them out and uploaded them - big difference between the promise and what is delivered, isn’t there?

The promiseThe reality

This always reminds me of the Michael Douglas character in the movie Falling Down!

Shouldn’t they be done for false advertising?

CIX open day

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/11/2007
in cix, cork and data centre
. 0 Comments

Cork Internet eXchange (aka CIX) are having an Open Day on the morning of November 29th at 10am.

This will be your final opportunity to have a gander around the innards of a data centre in the making. After the 29th, ducts will be closed and off-limits areas will be off-limits!

If you are interested in having a look, drop me a mail so we have an idea of numbers (tom@tomrafteryit.net).

See you there.

[Disclosure - I am a director of CIX]

UPDATE - edited to correct my email address - thanks James

See if this doesn’t terrify you

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/10/2007
in video
. 5 Comments

I have always wanted to fly. And I have no fear of heights - hence I have climbed the CIX mast numerous times (with appropriate safety gear!).

However, just watching these guys in wingsuits scares the hell out of me! I don’t think I’d ever raise the nerve to do that.

via Chris Abraham

Embeddable Google maps

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/8/2007
in cix and geo
. 3 Comments

According to this post on the Google Maps blog site, it is now possible to embed Google Maps on your own site in the same way you can embed YouTube videos.

The image below is of the industrial park where we are building the CIX data centre

View Larger Map

Video interviewed by Loic

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/7/2007
in Web 2.0, cix and climate change
. 1 Comment

Loic Le Meur, France’s best known blogger and organiser of the Le Web conference interviewed me recently by Skype Video.

Previously I had panned Loic very publicly for the way he handled the Le Web conference last year. Loic starts this video by asking how he can do better this year. Soliciting people’s opinions is a great start Loic. Loic finished by asking me to be on the advisory board of this year’s Le Web. I’m now on the advisory board of the Le Web conference, the Web 2.0 Expo in Berin and I’m chair of the organising committeeit@cork annual Business in Technology conference. Phew!

For the majority of the interview (from 06:30 onwards) we talked about CIX, how to make data centres carbon neutral (while at the same time facilitating bringing more wind energy onto the national grid!) and the energy efficiency strategies we have designed into the CIX data centre.

I’m going to be printing out the screen grab from this video and using it to scare away the neighbours kids!

Using I.T. to add green power to the network

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2007
in Global Warming, carbon neutrality, cix and climate change
. 6 Comments

The problem with wind power is that its production is variable and difficult to predict. From the perspective of a power supply company, such a supplier is unreliable and likely to de-stabilise the power network.

For instance, at 2am in Ireland, when the demand for electricity is near its lowest, if a 40mph wind is blowing across the country, wind can be supplying up to 30% of the demand. However, if the wind picks up to 50mph, the wind farms shut down to protect their mechanisms and suddenly you lose 30% of your supply! The electricity supply companies have to scramble to bring power stations online to meet the sudden fall off.

In CIX, we have come up with a strategy for Data Centre’s to act as a flywheel for electricity supply companies. This will allow the supply companies to greatly increase the amount of green energy they buy. And if the Data Centre’s are burning biodiesel then you are in a win-win situation .

It seems we are not alone in our thinking - Google, no-less, has come up with a similar strategy using cars! Yes cars. You’d think that with all their data centres they’d use them in the way we propose but they have decided to go the ‘vehicle to grid’ route for now.

Google’s strategy is modify hybrid cars so that they can consume power from the grid. These new ‘plug-in hybrids’ achieve 70-100mpg.

These plug-in hybrids take power from the grid overnight at times of low demand, say. Then the batteries in these cars, which store electricity, can ’sell’ electricity back to the grid at times of high demand.

Check out the Google video on this to see what I mean:

A cute idea but one which would have to achieve massive scale before making a difference, I suspect.

Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!