Geek In Disguise

Celebrating Earth Day, our GFS team published their Top 10 Business Practices for Environmentally Sustainable Data Centers – quite a mouthful that and though there is some cynicism around this topic, the paper they’ve published has some real nuggets in here around things like optimising the hardware used – not just tweaking the registry and stuff, but working with OEM’s to create hardware that removes waste such as unused memory slots. I guess when you’re deploying thousands of server this all adds up financially and creates a bigger surface area for errors. Maybe these data center server designs will start to show up on Dell.com and other places.

With the enthusiasm for cloud computing these days, data centers are getting a lot of attention by association and rightly so. These things are HUGE information factories and use huge amounts of energy. Though Green issues have slipped off the agenda a little with the economic climate they’ll always be important so this is interesting stuff and as we come of the economic slump, Green will leap back to the forefront I’m sure.

Microsoft Global Foundation Services team runs these huge data centers and have committed to share best practices back with customers, partners and the industry at large. Here’s the Top 10 list from that team

1. Provide incentives that support your primary goals.
2. Focus on effective resource utilization.
3. Use virtualization to improve server utilization and increase operational efficiency.
4. Drive quality up through compliance.
5. Embrace change management.
6. Invest in understanding your application workload and behaviour.
7. Right-size your server platforms to meet your application requirements.
8. Evaluate and test servers for performance, power, and total cost of ownership.
9. Converge on as small a number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) as you can.
10. Take advantage of competitive bids from multiple vendors to foster innovation and reduce costs.

You can get the detail behind this from  on their new Global Foundation Services website. I have to confess I was surprised not to see more around human behaviour on the list but then I went and read the paper and #1 is very interesting as it’s all about driving data center manager behaviour on efficiency as much as (or more than) efficiency. Compensating your staff on getting to a PUE of 1.2 (vs current of 1.53) is a great way to drive the change. As mentioned in the paper, one data center manager drove power improvements of 22 percent within three years in one of Microsoft’s older facilities. I hope he got a big bonus :)

Beyond this list there is a tonne of stuff we do in the design of our data centers to make them more green such as using recycled water and renewable energy sources and hopefully we’ll see our team share more and more of that on their new site. It’s long overdue for me.