So we all know in the hosting field that power is a huge factor.

In 2006 according to the EPA in the US, datacentres used 61 billion Kilowatt hours (KWH) which is the equivalent to 5.8 million households!

Growing to 100Bilion KWH by 2011. This is 10 new power stations!

I thought I would share some resources on energy efficiency best practices from Microsoft Data Centres as simply cannot continue to just use more power but be more efficient with the power we have:

http://www.microsoft.com/environment/our_commitment/articles/datacenter_bp.aspx

5 quick steps to improving your power usage.

  • Find servers doing REALLY nothing
  • Right size your (new) hardware
  • Consolidate underutilized servers
  • Use free server virtualization
  • Optimize & fine-tune your server OS

How?

  • Check out System Operations Manager 2007 for benchmarking server utilisation.
  • Right hardware – overspec'd power supplies waste at least 10% energy (www.apc.com/wp/?wp=127)
  • Capacity planning with System Centre Capacity Planning tool.
  • Consolidate through scalability improvements – Windows server 2008 and 64 bit hardware.
  • Consolidate through Virtualisation - Hyper-V and Planning and Assessment toolkit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx
    • Leverage System Centre Virtual Machine Manager to manage your virtualisation platform.
  • Leverage the OS energy features
    • Processor power management represents is an awesome tool available today for managing power usage. Lots of granularity built into Windows Server 2008.