With the temperatures climbing above 30 degrees Celcius (86 degree Fahrenheit), I guess it is safe to declare that the summer is here. After an unsually long and cold winter – at least here in the Northern Europe – many people were ready to proclaim that global warming was just a fad. Yours truly included, largely because I like cars with big engines as much as the next guy… But the weather being what it is, I guess it would be fair to say that labelling this phenomenom as a fad may have been somewhat premature. At least here in Finland, we’re hitting new record temperatures almost on daily basis.

In an article published by Financial Times today, the governments of Germany, the United Kingdom and France we’re calling for 30% CO2 emissions cut by 2020 in the European Union, instead of an earlier target of 20%. Apparently, the economic slowdown of 2008 – 2009 has done a great job in reducing the CO2 emissions, providing room for the higher cut target without impacting the investments required to get the job done. Whoever said nothing good comes out of a recession!

Since we’re talking about the three largest European economies here, the increased target for cuts is likely to impact all sectors of the industry here in the European Union, including information and communications technology. In fact, one of main the main reasons for the sudden change of heart was that Europe is now afraid it will be left behind of Asians as far as green technologies are concerned. The Chinese have invested some $40 billion into green technologies last year whereas Europeans were lagging some $10 billion behind.

Having introduced our first virtualization-ready software appliance already in late 2006 – co-incidentally about the same time as Al Gore came out with the blockbuster Inconvenient Truth – I always thought virtualizing applications and network services made perfect sense from both the ecological and the business perspective. After all, not only would this improve the energy efficiency and ecological footprint of Data Centres through more efficient use of CPU resources, but also reduce the emissions associated with logistics of traditional hardware-based appliances because software appliances can be electronically distributed without consuming too much kerosene in the process. Honestly said, it took a while before my little theory started to gain traction.

But since 2009 or so, we have seen an increasing number of green computing initiatives where enterprises and other organizations are migrating network services – including DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI) – into virtualized computing environments. And in most cases, this really isn’t done so much to save the Mother Earth but rather to save the Green Stuff known as money. Then again, with the exception of perhaps the most callous tree-huggers, I think most of us are really happy if enterprises and public entities can save money while becoming more energy efficient, without having to be thrown back to medieval times. Even if the whole climate change phenomenom was not caused by man, there really are no good reasons for wasting resources, them being scarce and all.

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Enough on the serious stuff.

To experiment with viral marketing and all things cool about web 2.0, we decided to contract a Finnish start-up called IR Visual Works to produce a Youtube video incorpating a well-know movie scene and DDI. The video is a remake of one of the best known scenes in The Silence of the Lambs – an academy award winner – and has been adjusted to the world of network admins and DDI.

To view the remake, just click the YouTube icon below.