Microsoft Releases a Set of Best Practices for Energy Efficient Data Centers

Infoworld writes on Microsoft's release of a set of best practices for Energy Efficiency Data Centers.

Microsoft will release a set of best practices for administrators running datacenters, focusing on energy-saving strategies the company is implementing in its own operations, CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday.

Those tips will covers issues such as how to pick a good site for a datacenter, how to deal with heat, and how to manage power consumption, Ballmer said during a keynote presentation at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.

The move is in response to growing concern over the release of carbon dioxide, one of the byproducts of burning fossil fuels to create electricity. In addition, power demands are ever-increasing, Ballmer said.

"If you look at non-travel power consumption in the world today ... information technology is one of the most rapidly growing power consumers on the planet," Ballmer said. "We think we have a real responsibility ... to reduce power consumption by the IT industry."

The paper can be found at this location.

Let's see if we other big datacenter operators will follow Microsoft. 

Google?

Yahoo?

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

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.

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Visual Studio 2008's saves energy with Application Performance Profiling

I've been searching for the right tool that enables energy efficient application development.  Finally, the Microsoft Visual Studio team has the feature in their 2008 release coming out soon.  Send this post on to your dev teams and architects to develop energy efficient applications.

The first feature that I want to cover is the new comparison document that we’ve introduced to help users compare profiling data from two different profiling runs. Say that you have just checked in a possible fix for a performance issue and you want to compare a new performance report to one that existed before the change to see if your change really helped. Our new comparison features make these types of questions easy to answer. Comparing two files of performance data is a very common scenario for customers, especially when dealing with regression testing, so this was a priority feature for us in this release. After all, performance data when taken in isolation, without goals to hit or old values to compare with, can be pretty hard to work with. Our goal with this new comparison work is to help customers to make better use of their performance data to achieve the performance results that they desire for their applications.

I would be remiss if I did not take a quick second here to dive a little deeper into the importance of setting performance goals for your applications. Too often developers end up in the situation of closing in on product release and realizing “my app is just way too slow.” Now, it is perfectly understandable that developers want to save performance optimization for the end of the product cycle; after all if the underlying structure is going to change greatly why waste too much time early on trying to tweak things to run as fast as possible? But the real issue with the situation above is in the generalness of the “my app is just way too slow” part. What exactly do you mean by “too slow?” What parts of the app are too slow? What type of performance do customers expect from your app? How long does it take for other similar products to do the same task? For our new comparison features to be really useful you will need to take some time before and during development to get at least basic answers to some of the questions above.

And, they've also integrated collecting perfmon data for

With the Visual Studio Profiler we wanted to give customers an easy and integrated way to collect this performance counter information and view it alongside their performance data. This was especially important to us as with this information we could help customers to analyze specific trouble areas of their program or to choose the correct profiling modes based on their performance bottleneck.

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Citrix Demonstrates Technique to Save Server Power

Citrix has released PowerSmart Utility for Citrix Presentation Servers, enabling idle servers to be turned off during

I am going to contact he Citrix team to see what they have done to create logs to record successful and unsuccessful power down events.  This log could be a simple way to monitor the power on/off events.  They have architected the solution to use one presentation server as the controller, making this the ideal place to monitor the power on/off events.

This same power on/off log would be great for Windows to monitor power management. This will be a long conversation with Microsoft and a challenge to find the right people who would be willing to do this, but it is on my list of things to do.

Appended Jan 3, 2008.

I missed the area of the Citrix FAQ.  Great thinking went into this v1 feature.

What trouble shooting support is included?

By default, some basic information such as when the tool decides to power on/off a server will be logged in the event log of the server running this tool. The servers being shutdown/power off will have the power events logged as usual. The debug tracing is flexible and can be configured to trace only the information you want and to where you want it. Various debugging tools are included to help testing individual components separately. Please see the user guide for more details.

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EDS Eight Tips to Reduce IT Environmental Impact, lack critical tip

EDS has a press release for their eight tips to reduce the Environmental Impact of IT.  Their list is good, but they miss the need for an Energy monitoring system.  If you don't put a monitoring system in place as I talk about in my TechNet Article, you'll have no idea how effective the tips that EDS suggests are in reducing your energy costs.  EDS touts their innovative thought leadership in:

To help corporations and governments kick-off the new year right, the EDS Fellows have highlighted eight ways CIOs can extend the life of existing facilities and reduce the environmental impact of computing in 2008.

The title of EDS Fellow is awarded to the company’s most innovative thought leaders in recognition of their exceptional achievements. Each Fellow has a proven track record of creating world-class solutions for clients. In addition to their academic achievements and invention history, the 24 Fellows average 25 years of industry experience and innovative technology implementations.

One of their tips on maintenance Is one where a monitoring system can help you determine when maintenance is done poorly and actually decreases your efficiency.  There are some maintenance guides who have suggested that up to 50% of maintenance is ineffective or worse causes another failure due to error.  How many of you have taken your car in for maintenance to find there is a new problem which you think has been caused by your last maintenance call?  You can't challenge the car dealer, because you can't prove your car's state before and after the maintenance event. Also, ineffective maintenance is a waste which is not environmentallly friendly. A goal should be to do the maintance which has measureable impact to your performance.

Perform Rigorous Maintenance
The fifth option is more fundamental, but also very achievable. Data center managers can improve the efficiency of their facilities by rigorous maintenance to ensure all equipment is operating at the peak of efficiency as well as modifying layout and configuration of equipment to reduce cooling requirements. These and many more efficiency steps will increase overall data center efficiency and lower the carbon footprint.

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