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The Green Inaugural Ball is one of many balls not officially associated with the inauguration, but that is celebrating Obama's presidency. As the name implies, it focuses on green technologies. Among its sponsors is Discovery's Planet Green.
The ball itself is green in numerous ways, but for IT folks, the most intriguing element is that the ball's Web site's hosting company claims that hosting the site has no carbon footprint. AISO.net powers its entire data center with solar power and uses a variety of green techniques for building its data center and network.
The actual hardware doing the hosting is quite green as well --- the IBM Blade Center with IBM blades. The chassis itself is an IBM Blade Center E, and the servers are IBM AMD-powered two-socket LS21 blades. The servers use 60% less energy and generate 50% less heat than typical servers with comparable power.
What does this kind of "extreme green" Web hosting have to do with you? Plenty, according to Alex Yost, IBM Vice President for the Blade Center line.
"The same kind of 'extreme green' technology can be used by small and medium-sized companies, and by enterprises as well," he said in an interview. "IBM has a variety of tools and technologies to help companies get similar green benefits. We can take an extreme green implementation and show how it can help companies of any size."
Climate
Sponsor List
I am very confused at why some of the companies listed chose to sponsor this ball. For example, why is Penguin Ice involved in this event. It is pure greenwashing for a company that bottles water thousands of miles awaay from DC to sponsor such an event. We as a society should push back on these sort of spinsters - how are they offsetting their carbon footprint from transportation of their products? The guests themselves should have pushed back hardest - did they?
We thought the Ball was a
We thought the Ball was a great time and a great way to make a statement about the importance of working harder towards cleaning up our collective home. It seems that this is important to each of the sponsors too -- or why else would they be there. For me, I know I'd rather drink bottled water that is from our neighbor to the north than one shipped accross the ocean to get to my table.
AISO needs help
Even for a small, family-owned business that does not offer 24-hr support and the owner does much of the customer service, AISO is understaffed and/or undertrained in server administration.
If you buy into a dedicated plan with them, you should be fine, assuming you can manage your own server. Everyone else, beware.
AISO's Eco-I plan is bound to be useless for most applications these days, as it comes with no database support. The Eco-II plan gets you one database. On both there is no facility for handling multiple domains or changing them--even parked domains that are registered elsewhere and merely pointed to AISO's nameservers. The server control panel does not include support for the database (if you have one) and resembles the MediaTemple interface reduced to three mostly useless items.
If you install a PHP/mySQL application at AISO that needs to be able to create and write to its own files, it will not work. (Apache and PHP ownership issue)
AISO's concept and model is unparalleled, but they need to get a mastery of basic hosting services.
Some of their resellers may be more useful at this time. The one I tried was not. While there was more control, it was too much--an far too cumbersome Plesk panel--and the same problems with group permissions occurred) Worse, all their servers went down for long periods two days in a row.