Blog has moved
October 5, 2009
Hi Everyone!
Considering multiple concerns of WordPress platform security we have decided to stop blogging here.
Please visit our website www.greenvaluereport.com for all news and blog posts.
Sincerely,
Green Value Report team.
Oracle 11g Release 2 – installed products and deinstallation
September 17, 2009
Oracle has definitely put a great effort redesigning its new Installer in that silver-bloody style :-) With 11g and red squares all over it.
What probably went unnoticed by their team members is that small nice button “Installed Products” simply disappeared. And our bet is they found it too late :-)
So, meet the Oracle Deinstallation tool!
Now, to see what Oracle Inventory believes you have installed:
[oracle@OUL5U3 ContentsXML]$ cat /u01/oraInventory/ContentsXML/inventory.xml
<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=”yes” ?>
<!– Copyright (c) 1999, 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved. –>
<!– Do not modify the contents of this file by hand. –>
<INVENTORY>
<VERSION_INFO>
<SAVED_WITH>11.2.0.1.0</SAVED_WITH>
<MINIMUM_VER>2.1.0.6.0</MINIMUM_VER>
</VERSION_INFO>
<HOME_LIST>
<HOME NAME=”Ora11g_gridinfrahome1″ LOC=”/u01/crs” TYPE=”O” IDX=”1″ CRS=”true”>
<NODE_LIST>
<NODE NAME=”OUL5U3″/>
<NODE NAME=”OUL5U3a”/>
</NODE_LIST>
</HOME>
</HOME_LIST>
</INVENTORY>
[oracle@OUL5U3 ContentsXML]$
As we see, there is only Grid Infrastructure home, on both cluster nodes.
How to deinstall the product? The deinstallation tool is in existing Oracle home:
[oracle@OUL5U3 deinstall]$ /u01/crs/deinstall/deinstall -checkonly -local
Checking for required files and bootstrapping …
Please wait …Location of logs /tmp/deinstall2009-09-17_08-16-51-PM/logs/
############ ORACLE DEINSTALL & DECONFIG TOOL START ############
######################## CHECK OPERATION START ########################
Install check configuration STARTChecking for existence of the Oracle home location /u01/crs
Oracle Home type selected for de-install is: CRS
Oracle Base selected for de-install is: /u01/oracle
Checking for existence of central inventory location /u01/oraInventory
Checking for existence of the Oracle Grid Infrastructure home /u01/crs
The following nodes are part of this cluster: OUL5U3,OUL5U3aInstall check configuration END
Traces log file: /tmp/deinstall2009-09-17_08-16-51-PM/logs//crsdc.log
Network Configuration check config START
Network de-configuration trace file location: /tmp/deinstall2009-09-17_08-16-51-PM/logs/netdc_check4119299232339897770.log
Specify all RAC listeners that are to be de-configured [LISTENER]:
Network Configuration check config END
Asm Check Configuration START
ASM de-configuration trace file location: /tmp/deinstall2009-09-17_08-16-51-PM/logs/asmcadc_check6956175972677375092.log
######################### CHECK OPERATION END #########################
####################### CHECK OPERATION SUMMARY #######################
Oracle Grid Infrastructure Home is: /u01/crs
The cluster node(s) on which the Oracle home exists are: (Please input nodes seperated by “,”, eg: node1,node2,…)OUL5U3,OUL5U3a
Since -local option has been specified, the Oracle home will be de-installed only on the local node, ‘OUL5U3′, and the global configuration will be removed.
Oracle Home selected for de-install is: /u01/crs
Inventory Location where the Oracle home registered is: /u01/oraInventory
Following RAC listener(s) will be de-configured: LISTENER
Option -local will not modify any ASM configuration.
A log of this session will be written to: ‘/tmp/deinstall2009-09-17_08-16-51-PM/logs/deinstall_deconfig2009-09-17_08-18-37-PM.out’
Any error messages from this session will be written to: ‘/tmp/deinstall2009-09-17_08-16-51-PM/logs/deinstall_deconfig2009-09-17_08-18-37-PM.err’############# ORACLE DEINSTALL & DECONFIG TOOL END #############
[oracle@OUL5U3 deinstall]$
This command will produce the information to be used in the response file to de-install the Oracle Home.
And please note: Oracle Documentation is just wrong in saying about “-home” parameter:
[oracle@OUL5U3 deinstall]$ /u01/crs/deinstall/deinstall -home /u01/crs -checkonly -local
Error: invalid argument -home.
The deinstall tool located in an Oracle home is configured to remove,
only that Oracle home. You cannot specify the -home option.
Have fun!
[oracle@OUL5U3 oraInventory]$ ls
backup install.platform logs oraInst.loc oui
ContentsXML locks oraInstaller.properties orainstRoot.sh
[oracle@OUL5U3 oraInventory]$ cd ContentsXML/
[oracle@OUL5U3 ContentsXML]$ ls
comps.xml inventory.xml libs.xml
[oracle@OUL5U3 ContentsXML]$
Tech&Tools
September 17, 2009
While developing Green Value Report system, we have been using Oracle technology extensively and almost exclusively.
Oracle products proved to be very efficient and reliable for our purposes. Naturally, we have had lots of experience with Oracle before, in average our team has 6 years of experience with Oracle products. We have people with highest Oracle certification helping us with design and support.
So, we have collected some thoughts and observations. They seem especially relevant to Startups community since we use only free Oracle products. Check our website http://greenvaluereport.com for details.
From now on we will be sharing our experience with Oracle.
Hopefully it may be interesting for you.
Sincerely,
Green Value Report team
GVRAE got AI!
September 17, 2009
It has been a long time!
Our team was extremely busy over last 2 months changing some of our “cornerstone” functionalities – Green Value Report Analytical Engine. This system (GVRAE) is used to evaluate Green House Gas emissions, mine the analytical data, search for trends and correlations and God knows what else :-), in fact it became so complicated we sometimes do not remember ourselves (of course, this was a joke).
So, what was there about GVRAE so cool that we forgot about everything for a month?
Green Value Report Core got smarter. It has became intelligent. Artificially, of course :-)
As you may know, we have been using Prolog extensively in our first releases. That is a great language and we uncovered lots of dependencies using it. In fact, almost any rule in Green Value Report was generated by Prolog.
Now it has changed. Not the internals and Carbon Emission evaluation principle – we still use same backtracking algorithm, used in modern Prolog systems. But the tool-set is new.
Green Value Report has designed and implemented its own “AI core”, which is empowering our back-end system from now on. We do not use SWI Prolog any more.
Thank you very much, SWI Prolog team! We appreciated your product and found it very useful. It was just time to move on. We needed new approaches, new platforms, new technologies, massive concurrencies. We had to “tailor” our technology for our needs – and we have done so.
Stay tuned!
Sincerely,
Green Value Report team
Geographical Location and Carbon Emissions
August 28, 2009
Just to bring to our clients and readers attention once more the fact that Green Value Report does provide an ability to group IT appliances in your Data Center by their location.
In our reports, we use two approaches to item locations:
- Logical position (group) of item
- Geographical location of appliances
“Logical” means just grouping for your own benefit, as you see it fit. Every item you select for your report is attached to one or another “Location #” and stays there on all following reports, so you may produce a totals of your Data Center items emission. You choose location numbers yourself.
“Geographical” location is real, expressed in geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude and elevation). These location positions and their names match exactly the climatography stations of U.S. National Climatic Data Center, please see “Copyright” page on our website for details.
Both locations may be linked as you wish, so you may define Location #1 as Alexander City, AL and Location #2 as Saint Bernard, AL. But this is entirely up to you, reporting is still possible when all items are linked to the same default Location #1.
This approach gives you enough flexibility to define as many geographical and logical locations as needed and to break the emission figures down by group names.
By linking different logical locations (for instance, Location #1 and Location #2) to the same city, you may logically distribute your items in different Data Centers in the same city and so on.
Sincerely,
Green Value Report team
In our reports, we use two approaches to item locations:
|
“Logical” means just grouping for your own benefit, as you see it fit. Every item you select for your report is attached to one or another “Location #” and stays there on all following reports, so you may produce a totals of your Data Centre items emission. You choose location numbers yourself. “Geographical” location is real, expressed in geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude and elevation). These location positions and their names match exactly the climatography stations of U.S. National Climatic Data Center, please see “Copyright” page for details. Both locations may be linked as you wish, so you may define Location #1 as Alexander City, AL and Location #2 as Saint Bernard, AL. But this is entirely up to you, reporting is still possible when all items are linked to the same default Location #1. |
Free Cooling and List of US cities
August 7, 2009
We are in final stages of our “Location” pluggable calculation module’s pre-production testing.
This module brings into consideration the average temperatures and other data to clarify the number of “free cooling” days over the year. Also the location of Data Centre does influence amount of energy spend for humidification of the air.
Using this data we may “feed” additional information into our pluggable calculation module for Air Conditioning and identify emissions and required CRAC system more precisely.
We got amazed to find that there are 25150 cities in the US. To get them into a database may be a small challenge, so we decided to prepare simple SQL script and share it with people, who is not familiar with Oracle SQL*Loader and External tables.
Please drop us a line if you need that SQL script, it runs series of sequential INSERT statements to populate the table with US cities. It is running Ok on almost any database and may be useful for someone to save time. Of course, it is inefficient way of doing the load – but is simple and does the job just for once.
Oracle APEX and Display Points
July 30, 2009
While using Oracle APEX for the reporting or displaying of web-content with multiple regions, one may get quite quickly into a position when all existing display points are used and this is limiting your design choices.
There are couple of solutions for this inconvenience, some of them are too depressing to implement, others are good, so we would like to share the single approach we use a lot.
On our reporting page we used to have individual regions for the tables and charts. To align them we have created separate template for reporting page alone, slicing it into table cells as required (Oracle APEX prefers to use tables rather than “div”s for page layout). But this left us without spare display points (referred to as #REGION_POSITION_0X# in APEX page template).
To overcome this limitation, we have re-approached our template for reporting page and placed all the table-chart region pairs into the same Display Point (for example, “Before Footer”). This freed up many region positions for the rest of the elements.
We also wanted to present the table report and the chart in single region. To achieve this, we have created two new Report Region Templates (for instance, Region Table Header and Region Table Footer). It may be done via “Shared Components” – “Templates”. Both of those templates end up building single region, but only when used together. Basically, those templates represent top and bottom part of single table and are used to format the region on the page.
Now all that has to be done is placing the Table into “Region Table Header” User Interface template, followed by the chart in ” Region Table Footer”. Once rendered, both the table and the chart will be included in single region on the page, side-by-side, sharing the same Display Point as well.
We found this as the best way for our purposes, may be it can help you.
Please visit our Report page to see our approach.
Sincerely,
Green Value Report team
“Ramen profitable” (C) paulgraham.com
July 28, 2009
YES! :-)
Thank you very-very much, our Valuable Customers!
We can not express how much we appreciate your support.
Money, of course, every cent of them – that saved us from shutting down.
But money is not only thing we want to thank you for. We do thank you for your support, Mr and Ms Customer!
You did not know how much we wanted every your click … thanks for that! We do appreciate, and even more than you can imagine.
Cheers! Toning we are drinking to all our Valuable Customers. We may afford it now :-) … sometimes … well, just once … but still … YES and THANK YOU! :-)
Sincerely,
Green Value Report team.
Oracle Corporation UK Ltd has recently launched “Sustainable Performance Management” research initiative to find out that almost 95% of respondents rely on spreadsheets to collect and present sustainability data.
What a surprise!
We know that as of today there are at least 5 very good competing software systems, not based on Excel to produce their results. Why they are still not in wide use?
The reason is quite simple – Sustainability reporting does not require carbon emission calculators or flashy looking webpages showing the carbon emission from individual’s electricity use.
What is required now is Business Intelligence and Analysis, applied to Carbon emission domain. The software, providing such services, has to be “smart” and able to recognise the trends and dependencies. We are talking here about BI and DM in their classical application.
And this is exactly what Green Value Report is doing – providing Business Intelligence to the Green World.
We have some more interesting fresh ideas, so please stay tuned! :-)
Sincerely,
Green Value Report team
There are multiple types of Carbon emission sources in a modern data centre. Over last couple of years, it was taken as a fact that Green House Gas emission in server rooms originates from the electricity, consumed by IT equipment and falls under Scope 2 of Green House Gas Protocol.
Recently US Environment Protection Agency has stressed that there is a strong “need for vendor neutral technology benchmarks for most classes of equipment” to identify the real situation with carbon emission in data centres. This is what Green Value Report does with its Green Value Report Analytical Engine (GVRAE) – it quantifies the carbon emission from IT equipment in vendor neutral way.
During the efficiency analysis, GVRAE uses widely accepted in IT industry metrics, as well as its own criteria to quantify Business operation’s sustainability and its environmental impact.
From April 2009, Green Value Report has collected enough emission profiling data to identify some trends, which are listed below. These trends are important to account for Sustainability analysis of the complete Business, since they represent large part of emission potential and are often overlooked by available calculation tools.
One of the most important trends observed was related to Precision Air-conditioning systems being responsible for up to 70% of overall carbon emission in modern data centre. This observation should shift the balance in IT industry towards the sharing and co-location of servers and storage appliances, as well as decentralisation of computational power resources in smaller local pools.
As a second observation, Green Value Report has identified the High-End Storage Arrays as most carbon efficient devices in whole Enterprise IT products line. This is explained by high utilisation and sharing ratios of that equipment, together with its high efficiency, virtualisation and modular architecture.
Next trend is presented by large proportion of carbon emission from end of life electronic waste of IT equipment, which is constantly growing. The unexpected outcome to observe was large amount of e-waste, produced by utilisation of relatively simple and energy efficient consumer IT items, like personal computers, printers and phones. These items do not produce significant GHG emission during their lifetime, if used properly by the company. Considering this fact it seems very reasonable to minimise end-of-life emission from office computers by using diskless virtual workstations. In the environments where high performance workstations are necessary it is possible to share them between the users and switch them off when unused.
In US EPA reports it was stated that carbon emission from data centres has risen more than two times over six years and is accountable for 38% of national volume. This emission growth ratio has to be changed or at least slowed down.
One possible solution to GHG emission reduction includes IT operation decentralisation, followed by creation of balanced “computational pools” and sharing them among businesses on geographical location basis. This is similar to Grid and Cloud computing approaches but may be rolled out for single business and does not require such intensively linked infrastructure.
However, there is a challenge to identify which appliances are responsible for most of carbon emission in single location and to decide on viable relocation options.
To simplify the decision process on IT hardware decentralisation Green Value Report has included in its report the ability to group items dynamically into logical entities – Locations – and to report on predicted emission profile changes in real time. This approach allows business owners to estimate how the changes in their IT infrastructure will impact company’s sustainability.
Green Value Report performed series of tests when emission from the same set of IT equipment got evaluated for two scenarios: in single data centre and when distributed between four locations. In one case it was possible to achieve 40% of GHG emission reduction just by optimising IT appliances co-location and sharing. In this case relocation of computer hardware between different offices has led to data centre decentralisation, allowing retiring of one precision air-conditioning unit and using existing building comfort air conditioning in three of four locations.
Green Value Report continues to put the efforts into bottom-up Data Centre emission evaluation approach, constantly improving its GVRAE Business Intelligence system to reflect the real Data Centre position in terms of sustainability. Please visit our website’s “Report” section to receive customised report for your company.
