The Power of Software

Introduction Now that we have introduced you to the concept of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and provided a mechanism to calculate this value, I wanted to talk about an idea that may be considered extreme. But just as the extreme nature of Formula...

When you hear the phrase “green IT”, you know that the word virtualization will usually appear shortly afterwards. Virtualization provides the ability to consolidate your IT infrastructure from several physical computers (each of which has a basic power...

With the amount of computer power in your homes many of you could run a small nation and probably do, although it's likely to be virtual. You're still probably not as extreme as the president of our division, Bob Muglia, and his home data center . But...

When you’re up against deadlines to turn in a software project, you probably are focused on ensuring that you meet the functionality requirements set out in the design specification. If you have enough time, you might consider trying to maximize performance...

Welcome to The Power of Software blog, a new undertaking by the patterns & practices team. As you may know, our traditional focus has been on building guidance that helps software architects and developers successfully design and build applications...

This short series of articles describes how Microsoft uses Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), an industry standard metric for the efficiency of a datacenter. Being able to measure and monitor the effective power consumption of a datacenter in terms of the...

This second article explains why energy efficiency is vitally important in today's economic climate. Figure 1 shows a graph of the annual amortized cost of a 1U server plotted against datacenter infrastructure costs and power costs. In 2001, the sum...

This third and final article describes how you can start adopting PUE in your datacenter, and how Microsoft has benefited from its long-term use of the PUE metric. If you do not have anything to adjust that can change your PUE value, you will not be...

On July 8, 2008, 150 attendees joined in at the Microsoft-hosted National Data Center Energy Efficiency Strategy Workshop . The sidebar opposite summarizes the overall aims of this workshop. During the workshop, I delivered a presentation on “Incenting...

And now for something a little different. So far we have focused on the energy costs of datacenters, but since patterns & practices is a development team, we obviously have a lot of team members that have, shall we say, a little hardware at home as...

Introduction Christian’s previous post talks about altering user behavior by changing chargeback models. I would like to thank Christian for his efforts to raise awareness about this new approach to charging for data center services. I believe that...

How often do you get the opportunity to make a difference to the fate of a living organism that towers over you? And how often have you saved the life of a living entity that weighs in at several tons? Recently, a manager in Microsoft’s Data Center Services...