Microsoft Green IT blogger - IT Pro experience, B.S. in Environmental Science, and certified Environmental Auditor

April 23, 2008 Dave Ohara

Part of the fun writing my blog is connecting with people who have interest in the Green Data Center. One of the interesting people out there is the Microsoft blogger Little Miss Enviro Geek. Her blog has only 7 entries, but given her background of being an IT Pro, a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science, and being a certified Environmental Auditor in June 2008, she has the right experience.

It's Earth Day, and Microsoft have a great new website so you can love it up with the trees...
So its Earth Day today - what does this mean and what is Microsoft doing to celebrate?

Quite simply, Wikipedia says Earth Day is "...intended to inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth's environment". The earth is affected by everything we do and we are affected by everything on earth in some way - so a day to recognise this justified I think! :)

Microsoft launched a new website today to celebrate: http://www.microsoft.com/environment/ it looks fantastic. Find out here things like:

How is Microsoft committed to the environment;

What are the business solutions from Microsoft that you can implement - quite cool here is the Dynamics Dashboard for tracking energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions http://www.microsoft.com/environment/business_solutions/articles/dynamics_ax.aspx - LOVE IT!

Find out ways to help the environment, through PC energy savings and cool tools;

Watch a video on best practices for Data Centre management;

Check Microsoft Environmental news;

Research the latest Software Showcase from Microsoft Partners.

This is excellent information to help you, my fellow geeks, develop strategies around 'green' or environmentally sustainable IT - think about including environmental information as part of your next business case to help get it up to executive management sign-off - they are all thinking about Corporate Social Responsibility (environment being just one area under CSR) and this might be the tipping point you need to get your dream Unified Communications infrastructure or Windows 2008 Hypervisor environment! ;-)

Attendees comment on Mike Manos 's keynote at Data Center World

April 1, 2008 Dave Ohara

OK, one more post on Mike Manos's keynote from an attendee. Seemed worthwhile as it gives a different perspective than datacenterknowledge and searchdatacenter.

The Michael Manos keynote this morning at Data Center World was inspiring. Michael doesn't read off of note cards and you can tell that he not only knows this material inside and out, but that he is passionate about it. I gained a number of things from this talk -- including him mentioning that their new Chicago facility will have upwards of 200 shipping containers pieced together like the RV campsites like I have talked about in previous posts.
Here are my notes from his talk:

Microsoft challenges: 15x growth on servers, 9x growth on egress, 15x growth on power, 3x growth on number of data centers.

30% of the audience had active prograMicrosoft to monitor and measure power in their data center

Next to nobody in the audience knew what their carbon emissions were for their data center

Sustainability regulation 'is' coming ; not if, but when

How many are working on green programs? 30% (audience)

Industry challenges/minefields:

sustainability reporting & efficiency reporting

data center inventory globally becoming a challenge

increasing power densities at the rack level

power costs

green-washing

expertise shortage

organizational structures

increasing capital cost barriers

innovation hoarding

heterogeneity versus homogeneity mindsets.

And the post goes into more detail and pretty much covers everything Mike presented.

John Rath good notetaking.

AFCOM interview with Microsoft's Mike Manos and Christian Belady

April 1, 2008 Dave Ohara

Searchdatacenter.com reports from AFCOM with a dual interview with Microsoft's Mike Manos and Christian Belady, titled Microsoft spills the beans on its data center strategy at AFCOM.

On Tuesday, April 1, Microsoft Senior Director of Data Center Services Michael Manos delivered the keynote presentation at AFCOM's Data Center World conference. The company has opened its kimono in non-Redmond fashion -- sharing its insights on data center operations with anyone who's interested. We spoke with Manos and Microsoft Principal Power and Cooling Architect Christian Belady about Microsoft's experience with a rapidly expanding data center footprint, the problems the company has faced and challenges for the industry ahead.

What does Microsoft have to offer the AFCOM attendee?
Michael Manos: Most of the presentation focuses on two things. One is to talk about the challenges we've faced at Microsoft. But more importantly, we're going to talk about what everyone at this conference is going to face over the next two to three years and, to a large degree, show how Microsoft has solved these problems.

How much of the secret sauce of operating your data centers can you give away without losing the competitive advantage?
Manos: What's competitive advantage, and what's the right thing to do? You see people solving the same problems in different ways over and over. There is not a key driver or direction to the industry because we are solving the same problem 30 other people just solved. We have to share the findings that each of us is coming up with in order to make an impact on the industry at large.
Christian Belady: The industry is very fragmented. There is a loss of efficiency opportunities. If we share and others share, we start having a converged vision of what should be in the future.

Speaking of convergence, it seems like the message has taken hold in terms of infrastructure efficiency metrics like power usage effectiveness. Lots of data centers now work to make the power-and-cooling infrastructure as efficient as possible. But when will we get to the next step: measuring useful work? For example, what is the usefulness of an "efficient" server that runs an application twice a month?
Manos: I think it's coming. Some [of our] product groups have started to make the transition. You can't get there without effective monitoring in place. Also, exposure of that information to the developers is key. Most developers never think about energy, but we have a program that charges our developers for the energy they use. Measuring and exposing that internal chargeback brings focus to the product groups. You can't get there unless you can effectively measure what you're doing and expose it.
Belady: We're looking at using containers inside our future data centers. One of the things we like about them is we can take a bunch of servers and look at the output of that box and look at the power it draws. At the end of the day, we can determine, "What is the IT productivity of that unit? How many search queries were executed per box? How many emails sent or stored?" You can get into some really interesting metrics. A lot of people say you can't look at the productivity of a data center, but if you compartmentalize it -- not as small as the server level, but at some chunk in between -- you can measure productivity.

I've heard rumors, Google is contemplating its data center disclosure given Microsoft's big moves. Wouldn't it be great if we had Google and Microsoft competing to show who has the most efficient data centers and who is greener?

Google chose the path of being an electric company with its renewable energy initiative. Microsoft took a different path and chose to help people immediately save energy in their data centers. Who chose the greener path? Let's see what Mike Manos presents at his next keynote at the Uptime Institute's Symposium 2008.

# of employees in FedEx and UPS Data Centers less than Google, How Efficient is Google's Infrastructure

February 4, 2008 Dave Ohara

My post on # of employees in Google and its competitors data centers has been popular.

Keeping up with the idea I found an article about FedEx's # of employees 100

Meanwhile, FedEx could land soon. The company’s back-up center won’t mean a tremendous number of jobs, possibly 100 or so. But the jobs for these centers pay above average median income in the range of $70,000-$80,000 a year.

And UPS's # of employees 125

Windward is somewhat of a mixed-use facility – about 125 people (support personnel) work at the data center. The increase in chilled water temperatures has not affected human comfort in any way.

There have been articles about how efficient Googles' infrastructure is, but if you make the leap of faith that Google really does have 200 data center employees, then how efficient is their infrastructure?

IT management at Google is decentralized. The company has neither a CIO nor CTO, but it's brimming with senior-level engineers and other technologists. They include Bill Coughran, VP of engineering for systems infrastructure, who oversees the distributing computing programs that power Google's online applications, and Eustace, who's responsible for product R&D. Sergey Brin isn't just Google's co-founder--his day-to-day job is president of technology. Merrill, brought in as senior director of IS three years ago, now is responsible for internal engineering and worldwide support.

He then takes a jab at CIOs--which he describes as a title used by "old-world companies"--at other companies. "Most people in my job try to control. 'Here are the three things you can buy.'" Merrill explains. "I try to control as a little as I possibly can but make it easy to work within parameters that I know how to work with."

Especially when you consider how many data centers they have in the US. It is tough for many of us to believe in the 200 #, but Google needs to keep that # out there to protect their tax breaks.

HP's Consolidation Project runs into Organizational Issues, needs CEO Support

January 29, 2008 Dave Ohara

WSJ writes an article about Taming Technology Sprawl and how consolidation is HP's main method to save energy and costs.

Consolidation is a strategic tenet of H-P Chief Executive Mark Hurd, who has trimmed costs and improved operations since he was named to the post in early 2005. Mr. Hurd's goal for the IT project: Cut the percentage of annual revenue spent on IT by more than half. In 2005, Mr. Hurd says, H-P spent $4.2 billion -- about 5% of 2005 revenue -- to maintain its IT systems; he wants that to drop to 2% by the end of this year.

They ran into typical issues like underestimating the # of computer programs and not allocating a large enough budget as a result. But, the bigger problem they ran into is vice presidents who didn't want to take orders from the CIO.

In H-P's case, obstacles surfaced as early as December 2005. At the time, several vice presidents "really dug in" and resisted, says Mr. Mott. Some units said, "'We're not going to give you a cost-benefit analysis (for why we use the IT we have). We're just going to tell you what product we want,' " the chief information officer says.

In the end HP needed support from their Board and CEO to make the project continue.

To address such issues, Messrs. Hurd and Mott got a mandate supporting the project from H-P's board. Mr. Mott says he also learned the importance of telling employees about the consequences of not cooperating. He told difficult executives that doing a cost-benefit analysis of their IT use "isn't really a choice," and, backed by Mr. Hurd, threatened some with termination. "Saying 'this is a policy and if you don't follow it you'll be in violation' was a powerful thing," Mr. Mott says.

"There are going to be booby traps all along the way if you have a culture like we do at H-P," Mr. Hurd cautioned the chief information officers, adding that the solution is to get management support from the top. "Getting the CEO lined up is hard, and that's the key person," he said.

This is a good lesson to learn for a big Green/Energy saving project in your data center like a consolidation project. Without support from your executive staff, the VPs and other business unit owners are going to be one of your top organizational issues in going Green. As soon as you start talking about PUE, and equipment efficiencies executives will wonder why you are bothering them with the details. At the core of any green program is change. And change will be resisted by organizations who don't see the downside of not supporting the change. Don't bother the execs with the technical details, focus on the issues of instituting changes required to support a Green Data Center. List those changes that need to be supported, and get the support from your management.

Note: part of the inspiration for this post is a question from a friend who wants to discuss Green Data Centers at an executive conference. We're stuck in that the details appeal to CIO and his staff, but without the buy-in from the CEO too many projects will fail as business units resist the changes required to go Green.