Sustainable It Ecosystem: Enabling City Scale Infrastructures

Continued population growth coupled with increased per capita consumption will soon require the creation of a new generation of cities in emerging economies and around the globe. But unlike the previous generation, "City 2.0" will be driven by a growing desire for on-demand, just-in-time access to critical resources at affordable costs. Coupled with the increased risks that physical growth places on the carrying capacity of the biosphere, we cannot expect to meet the future needs of society simply by extending the existing infrastructures.

Instead, in this talk, I propose that the necessary transformation be enabled by a global IT ecosystem made up of billions of service-oriented client devices and thousands of data centers. The IT ecosystem, with data centers at its core, and pervasive measurement at the edges, will need to be seamlessly integrated into future communities to enable need-based provisioning of critical resources. Such a transformation of the IT ecosystem necessitates addressing sustainability from a cradle-to-cradle perspective ? minimizing the available energy needed for extraction, manufacturing, waste mitigation, transportation, operation and reclamation. This lifecycle based engineering and management will result in achieving a reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) that will serve the billions.