Entries tagged with green - TechNet Edge

Leveraging Software to Reduce Energy Consumption

Microsoft IT Showcase — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Faced with data center capacity limitations, soaring server use and increased energy consumption, Microsoft IT (MS IT) organized for and developed an Environmental Sustainability (ES) plan. Aimed at reducing the environmental impact of Microsoft, the ES plan inlcudes the strategy of using software to reduce the energy consumption of software-driven devices.

Streamlined PC Procurement Improves Productivity While Controlling Costs

Microsoft IT Showcase — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:29:00 GMT

Do you manage a PC procurement system? Learn how Microsoft IT closely manages the PC configurations available to its employees. Specific computer procurement guidelines allow Microsoft employees to easily purchase supported PCs. In turn, providing a limited set of supported PC configurations enables the corporation to improve application compatibility, hardware compatibility and provide an improved user experience.

Realizing the ROI of Microsoft Virtualization Solutions and How to Start

yung — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:01:00 GMT

Ref: Microsoft virtualization cost saving whitepaper, the ROI tool and training

The referenced whitepaper presents case studies of Microsoft customers including:

	Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center	Costco Wholesale Corp
	Saint Raphael Healthcare System	Slough Borough Council
	Saxo Bank	WorleyParsons
	TALX	AspenTech
	HotSchedules	Banverket ICT
	Slough Borough Council	Maxol
	MaximumASP	Mantrac
	Kentucky Department of Education	Hostbasket
	Banque de Luxembourg	The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
	California State University	Jackson Energy Authority
	Kent School District	Bouygues Construction
	Volusia County Schools	Mamut

and examines how virtualization technology simplifies their IT infrastructure, streamlines IT processes, and ultimately reduces the total cost of ownership. Also included is information based on Microsoft's experience as below:

In my view, strategies in general to relatively quickly reduce IT infrastructure and support costs with virtualization solutions are, not in a particular order, to:

To transition existing IT into a hybrid environment mixed with physical and virtualized computing resources, server virtualization (i.e. server consolidation) often is where it starts. Running multiple instances in a single physical machine is not a new concept and many of us have already experienced with some host virtualization solutions like Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

To realize what your organization can benefit from Microsoft virtualization solutions,

Download the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator to identify your best candidates for server consolidation.
Determine the reductions you can achieve in kilowatts, money and CO2 emissions with the Microsoft HyperGreen Tool.
Use the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Calculator to estimate your return on investment in Microsoft virtualization tools.

Essentially, first identify your best candidates for server consolidation with this free downloadable tool, Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Solution Accelerator. With its agent-less inventory, performance data gathering, and auto-generated proposal and report generation capabilities, MAP lets you conduct network-wide readiness assessments so you can quickly and efficiently determine the right servers to target for Hyper-V. After determined how many servers to consolidate, you can use the free Microsoft HyperGreen Tool to figure out how much energy you’ll save and the environmental impact of those savings. Simply plug in the number of servers you are going to consolidate, and HyperGreen generates a report detailing your reductions in kilowatts, money and CO2 emissions. And use the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool to estimate your return on investment in Microsoft virtualization solutions, including server, desktop and management. As our customers have shown, the results can be transformational.

TechNet Radio: Green IT (Part 2 of 2): Virtualization

Eric Ostrowski — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:56:00 GMT

We continue our conversation on green IT with Microsoft environmental technologist Mark Aggar. In this episode, we focus on virtualization. Find out how you can use virtualization in your IT environment to cut costs and save energy. We also cover the December 2008 Microsoft Security Bulletins.

datacenter 4.0

Adam Bomb — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

By now, hopefully most people have seen Mike Manos' blog post on our next generation of datacenters, and seen the concept video of what the new datacenters will look like.
After I saw the video, I had a lot of questions about how this all works - I mean, what if it snows? How do I know my data is secure? With all your equipment in an environmentally sealed container, what do you do when a piece of equipment inside the container fails?
I was able to sit down with Christian Belady and David Gauthier, two of the architects behind the modular data center vision, to ask them some of these questions. They answered all these and more, including their thoughts on some of the other initiatives that are coming out in the industry. good stuff!

update: David and Christian have started a blog at http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters

tear the roof off the datacenter

Adam Bomb — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:32:00 GMT

apparently, if you're air cooling your datacenter, having a roof just gets in the way. Mike Manos (who've we had on Edge in the past) recently published a post on his blog about the vision his team is working on for future datacenter design, and they also released a concept video of what these new centers look like.
this is cool stuff, and really changes perception on what it takes to deploy a datacenter.
It looks like others have noticed Mike's post, and have already chimed in with their thoughts.

Evironmental Sustainability at Microsoft with Francois Ajenstat

Adam Bomb — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:29:00 GMT

Last month at the Connections conference, I was able to grab a few minutes with Francois Ajenstat after he finished delivering a keynote on some of the initiatives that companies should be working on: reducing the energy consumed by technology, managing your environmental footprint, and managing business practices.
He gives us a little background on what each of these mean - and tells you how to put $50 back in your pocket right now for each PC you manage.

TechNet Radio: Green IT Part 1 of 2

Eric Ostrowski — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:54:00 GMT

Green IT has been a popular buzzword lately, but what does it really mean? What does it take to get your organization to ‘Go Green’? We talk with Microsoft Environmental Technologist Mark Aggar to find out.

Green S+S Dynamic Live IT ‐ Stop Climate Change Now???!!!

Giovanni Marchetti — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:53:00 GMT

“Green IT” is a catch‐all name for a series of initiatives, all aiming ultimately to save money with
the excuse of (or by means of) reducing energy consumption by datacenters, hence their
“carbon footprint”. I can think of several questions to understand how “green” we are. As for
the answers, I need time to find them.

1. What and where do you measure?
OEMs typically expose power consumption data via their management cards (where they are
available), but those data are limited to the server in question. As its workload varies, its
consumption will vary. Also, there is a “minimum” power consumption needed to keep the
server running. Although this has decreased significantly in modern machines with ACPI, power
stepping circuitry, it is still a pretty high percentage of the theoretical maximum. Switches,
racks and “environmental” systems (lights, a/c) also consume power, but few of them actually
have a way to tell how much. So, where do we measure and how do we aggregate and analyze
the measurements?

2. Have you got the appropriate hardware for the job?
For instance, blades have become very popular because of their reduced footprint. Most of
their power is allocated to the CPUs (obviously, as their is little else on the blade). For CPUintensive
applications, that is not a problem. If you also want to run data‐intensive applications,
you will likely have to store those data elsewhere, maybe on some sort of SAN. Storage systems
typically have no way of knowing what kind of application uses the data and when, hence they
keep their disks spinning all the time. From a power utilization point of view, in this case it is
more efficient to keep the data local to the system, hence a blade may not be the best solution.

3. Is your software making optimal use of such hardware?
Your workload can be optimally distributed on the hardware to minimize power consumption
and make best use of what is available. Let us suppose that you have a memory‐intensive
application on a NUMA (e.g. Opteron) machine. For best performance, you will try and allocate
1 thread of such application per CPU socket, thus optimizing the use of available memory
bandwidth. This leaves the other cores on those sockets idle. On Windows today you cannot
turn them off; active power management (processor power states, if enabled in the bios, are
supported by server 2008) will slow them down.

4. Further reading
This list of questions is definitely not exhaustive. As I look for answers, more will probably come
to mind and I’ll make a new “feature of the week” out of it. In the meanwhile, feel free to send
me your comments.
Here are a few pointers that may help inform a discussion:

- Lewis Curtis’s blog

- Little Miss Enviro-Geek

- The Green Datacenter Blog

- Microsoft’s Environment web page

- IBM Green Datacenter paper

- Green Computing Paper

- The Green Grid

Mike Manos on Data Centers

Adam Bomb — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Every time I talk with Mike, I come away with a new appreciation for what it means to manage a big data center. I used to think a 20,000 machine installation was big, but Mike can add that many servers in a month. Mike's been busy on the conference circuit lately talking about green datacenters, and he's been vocal about the recent move Microsoft made to container-based data centers. In our Chicago facility, a truck drives up and drops off a 40' shipping container, preloaded with 2000 servers. The container is plugged in to Ethernet, power, and cooling and is ready to power on and go. Mike has a nice animated tour of the facility that he shows around the 10 minute mark. He also talks about the challenges of measuring efficiency in the data center and deciding when is the right time to virtualize workloads. You can keep up with Mike's adventures in data center on his blog.

How much power does your PC consume?

Adam Bomb — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

So how much power do your PCs draw? And how do you figure that out?
Those were the questions that I asked Grant after he recently updated the machines in some of the classrooms he manages. His problem was even more complex: He needed stronger/better/faster machines, but he was at capacity on his circuits, so he needed to do it without increasing power draw.
In this video, Grant walks us through some of his methodology in measuring and benchmarking power consumption on a few machines, and shares the results with us.
It leads to some interesting conclusions, and some good food for thought for anyone trying to make energy conscious decisions around PC purchases.

Doing IT Green

Adam Bomb — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:10:00 GMT

IT Forum in Barcelona included a panel of industry representatives sharing their thoughts on 'going green' in the datacenter. I managed to catch up with a couple of these guys, Nigel Bridgeman of HP and Michael Manos from Microsoft to ask them about the panel and what their respective companies are doing to make data centers more environmentally sustainable.
This is a topic I've really started to become passionate about, and I'm curious to hear what you think - would more features on Green Computing be interesting to you? What are you doing to make your own computing more environmentally friendly?