I wanted to let you know about the latest issue of the Architecture Journal, released over the holidays.

The theme of Issue 18 is Green Computing, a topic on the minds of many CIOs and architects today. These articles provide down to earth articles and information that help highlight how the Microsoft platform saves customers money through optimising for energy efficiency.  Articles in this issue include datacenter infrastructure design and cooling, a green maturity model, application and consolidation patterns for green IT, and an overview of MSR’s project genome. 

Here is a quick summary of topics covered.....

Physical. The Genome research project, described in “Wireless Sensor Network for Data Center Monitoring”, uses heat distribution data from a wireless sensor network to optimize data center design and server provisioning in order to avoid overcooling the entire data center.
Operating Platform. Hardware resources are often allocated based on a worst-case scenario that may happen with a low frequency. As a result, complete farms may be as much as 90 percent underutilized.
Sustainable Intelligence. An Energy Usage Profile (EUP) is an essential tool for measuring energy consumption in various domains such as hardware, operating systems, users, and applications.
Application Development. Green computing discussions today tend to focus on the platform, hardware, and data centers. However, application inefficiencies, such as suboptimal algorithms and inefficient usage of shared resources causing contentions, are originators of higher CPU usage and, therefore, energy consumption.
The Cloud. Insofar as this these models [cloud computing] consolidate organizations, consumption has the potential to be remarkably reduced as the Internet scale data centers in which services are hosted can make efficient use of shared resources (servers, storage, cooling mechanisms, and so forth).

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Next issue (#19) will be on Windows Azure, looking in depth at what the new platform means to the architect audience in time for MIX09.