The commercial possibilities associated with gathering energy consumption data continue to attract utility companies and energy management vendors. Katherine Tweed of Greentech Media drove home this point in her article on how the White House’s Green Button, a feature that allows residential and commercial...

After a brief hiatus for the “week in sustainability” round up, we’re back at it! This week, The New York Times Green Blog highlighted the unveiling of an interactive Internet-based map allowing people to see the energy use in specific neighborhoods in more than 40 American cities. According to the site...

Question. Why do data centers need to be connected to a dirty, expensive, unreliable electrical grid? Answer. They don't and they don't want to be either. Integrating a data center directly into the power plant -- what we are calling our Data Plant program --will allow a data center to pick its sustainable...

Three years ago, Microsoft adopted a broad environmental strategy that included commitments both to reduce the impact of our operations and products and to accelerate the use of information technology in addressing serious environmental issues. Our CEO sent out a company-wide email detailing our strategy...

It’s that time of year again! Microsoft’s 2012 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is just around the corner, this year in Toronto. With WPC comes the opportunity to have your company and sustainability solutions recognized with a Partner of the Year Award. The Sustainability Partner of the Year Award...

Using the download only service from MS Store could save a user up to 83% in terms of carbon emissions when compared to the more traditional fully packaged product distribution, shows a new research article from leading journal, ‘ Environmental Science & Technology ’. The article was co-authored...

Today IDG’s Computerworld named Microsoft as one of the top green IT organization as part of its annual Top Green-IT Organizations feature. Of the seventy organizations that participated in the ranking, Microsoft was ranked fourth. We’re very pleased to rank among other leading organization committed...

Today, Microsoft is announcing the transfer of our $ multi-million water treatment plant located on our data center site in Quincy, WA, to the City of Quincy. This project involves innovative agreements for promoting a long term sustainable use of a limited natural resource, water, in a desert area that...

Our friends over at OSIsoft are hosting a webinar on October 13 th focused on how organizations big and small can make better use of real-time data to achieve sustainability excellence. Businesses are recognizing the growing importance of sustainability as a way to improve performance.  From more...

Each quarter we give out an Environmental Sustainability Action Award to one of our teams or employees who has shown leadership and provides an inspiring example of how Microsoft and its employees can have a positive impact not only on the way we run our business, but also in the way our products and...

In a new report released this week by Jonathon Koomey , a consulting professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at Stanford University, electricity used by data centers worldwide increased by about 56% from 2005 to 2010, INSTEAD of doubling (as it did from 2000 to 2005). The slowing...

Today Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services team is releasing a video tour of four Microsoft data centers. The video provides an inside look at how the company has invested heavily to evolve its datacenter IT infrastructure to deliver greater scalability, reliability, efficiency, security, and sustainability...

Microsoft Corp. today announced its ITPAC datacenter technology will be utilized by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) as part of the energy efficient IT infrastructure for a new energy-neutral UN office in Nairobi. With IT often one of the most energy-intensive contributors to a building’s carbon footprint...

On Friday, March 11 th Climate One , a special project of the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, brought together Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist, and Bill Weihl, Google’s Green Energy Czar, to discuss how IT - from desktop to data center and cloud computing - are addressing...

Today we released the findings of a new study that looked at the energy and carbon emissions associated with cloud computing. Together with our partners Accenture and WSP Environment and Energy, we conducted a Lifecycle Assessment to provide a clearer picture of the environmental impact of moving certain...

Recently the Uptime Institute awarded Microsoft with its Green Enterprise IT Award for IT initiatives in our Chicago datacenter . The Chicago facility uses containers to house and run servers.  This design has led to greater efficiencies and a reduction of carbon emissions, waste and water. The...

Kevin Timmons, General Manager of Microsoft's Datacenter services, just posted a blog post on the next step in Microsoft’s datacenter evolution, which is consistent with the vision that we’d previously laid out as our Generation 4 datacenter. Our plan is to move towards pre-manufacturing every part of...

Microsoft operates some of the world’s largest datacenters, so the company takes the need for efficiency in these massive operations seriously. Recently, Data Center Dynamics magazine honored those efforts with the Datacenter Leaders Award 2009 for Innovation in the Mega Datacenter category for Microsoft...

Microsoft’s Data Center team just published a new white paper on rightsizing servers. The paper offers best practices on how GFS is lowering its total cost of ownership (of its servers) and achieving power savings for the company’s production datacenters. The paper can be found on GFS’ web site here...

Microsoft Europe has just released the latest edition of its FUTURES magazine with a special focus on Environmental Sustainability to coincide with COP15. The FUTURES magazine was created in 2007 to showcase best practices and case studies in Innovation, R&D, and highlight achievements across Europe...

Christian Belady from our Global Foundation Services team (aka. the Data Center team) has just posted a fascinating blog on the trends in the data center industry. The blog discusses a recent report from Gartner that stated that only about 50 percent of the data center industry’s IT professionals are...

Microsoft is celebrating the grand opening of our new Chicago data center today.  The 700,000 square feet  facility will help Live, Online and Cloud Computing services offerings for customers throughout North America.  In a post on the Global Foundation Services (Data Centers team) by...

Today Microsoft had a grand opening for its latest data center located in Dublin, Ireland which was built to deliver Online, Live and Cloud Services to customers throughout the world. With the demand of Cloud services such as Bing, Windows Live, and the Windows Azure platform, Microsoft is taking steps...

Christian Belady from Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services team was recently interviewed by InsideHPC's John West on this topic and can be listened to at: http://insidehpc.com/green-hpc-podcast-series/green-hpc-podcast-episode-4-stop-pampering-your-processors/ Here’s a blurb on this podcast: The use...

Microsoft recently opened Redmond Ridge 1, the company’s first purpose-built Research and Development Support (R&DS) facility designed specifically to consolidate computer labs from the main Redmond campus and house servers used in the development and testing of its software products. Servers in...