Virtual Ization

We're talking about being green, here. Not even environmental green. I'm talking Gordon Gekko green, fucking Scrooge McDuck green. I said fucking. It's appropriate.

I mean, yeah, we'll say environmental green, because it's that, too. And environmental green is awesome. It certainly makes us more excited than the other type of green. We're a school, and heck, we have to teach kids to be responsible citizens. We're concerned about power consumption, we're concerned about chemical waste, we're concerned about powering iPhones with stationary bikes. We like that stuff. But seriously, did you see the numbers over a three year period? It's green. The other kind.

Our CFO only sees 2008-9 budget savings. And herein lies the problem. We have sold this as environmentally sound to ourselves. It is. We have sold this as moving into 21st century. Or the 22nd. Or whatever. To our constituents. We have hawked our goods until our throats were dry to everyone who will listen. Vendors, other schools, teachers, our wives. We want it bad. We want a challenge that will save us money, save us power and give us that little extra boost in efficiency, man hours, whatever. We want it so bad, we figured out how to finance it in our own budget, with no special money, no donors, no board appeals. And then, the economy tanks. Bond rates rise. Investments fall. So we have to look at the other green. Not the man hours green - which we need so badly. Not the efficiency green - no one outside our department really knows what it is we do, anyway. We have to boil this almost universally beneficial project down to numbers. Pivot tables. Graphs.

We know we have to do this. Number crunching. It's not a total surprise - well, not being able to spend our own budget is a total surprise, but the rest...eh, par for the course. But listen, schools should do this. All of them. Every single school that has a server should do this. Server software is free. Processors are under-utilized. Cooling is expensive. Hardware is expensive. Maintaining it is expensive. Your sysadmin's time is probably very expensive. If you don't have a sysadmin and you do everything yourself, you damn well know how expensive your life is. And if you don't, you should probably look into another field.

Information is cheap, and if your sysadmin can read, you should at least try.

You.

Do it for us. We may not get to.