Building Green Supercomputers

Datacenters were responsible for 1.2 percent of the United States’ electricity usage in 2005, or the equivalent of five nuclear power plants. This is an increase of 100 percent from 2000.  At current growth rates, by 2020 the carbon footprint of datacenters will surpass that of the aviation industry. SiCortex is in the business of green high productivity computing (HPC), with desk side systems that draw less power than a PC, up to supercomputers that can compete with a Cray for processing speed, but which take up a single, self-contained cabinet and need only a single 3-phase plug. 

This innovative start up had been successful selling to universities, research labs and government facilities by talking technology;  they realized that their sales cycles could be easier if they could talk to lab IT managers about cost savings.  They needed a white paper that addressed the total cost of operations of running a HPC facility and explained how SiCortex and its low-power architecture could reduce lab computing costs by more than 60 percent annually.   

The interesting thing about this assignment was that many of their technical papers and data sheets contained references to business value, but the information had not been consolidated into a single document that built a business case addressing total cost of ownership; the data was there, the optics were not. 

 SiCortex is also actively working with industry groups to define a “green index” for computing and is working with experts to make the Green Computing Performance Index (GCPI) a standard for comparing energy efficiency for HPC.  In addition to price performance, SiCortex hopes to make performance-per-kWatt an essential metric for buyers.  This white paper evangelizes the need for such a performance index and is aimed at manufacturers of computer systems and components.

Helping Network Managers Sell to Business Managers

Strangeloop Networks is a start up that builds acceleration appliances that automatically optimize web applications in real time without the need to add code to the website or make infrastructure changes to the network.  Stangeloop’s appliances dramatically improve user response times, increase application performance and server throughput, and reduce bandwidth requirements.

The small marketing team lacked content development resources.  They needed better sales tools because their target customer was no longer the technical pioneer enthusiast – they were now selling to larger companies who needed business justification, and needed collaterals to help their champions (the network managers) make the business case to line of business managers. 

I wrote two white papers that highlighted how a slow website could impact business, especially for e-tailers.  The first white paper required finding data – reports, statistics and analyses – that could quantify the cost of downtime and poor response time.  To accompany the white paper, I also developed a spreadsheet that could be used as a sales tool to help customers calculate the cost of lost business opportunities and open up business level discussions.  In keeping with Strangeloop’s new strategy of selling to business managers, I also updated their web site content to emphasize business benefits rather than technology.