The Power of Software

The Data Center in Your Home

2009-06-09T02:01:43Z

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, that’s no excuse for not thinking about the energy efficiency of your equipment. See Ade’s blog entry on thinking like a data center engineer. http://www.ademiller.com/blogs/tech/2009/05/how-green-is-your-pc-estimating-power-usage-effectiveness/...(read more)

Little and Large

2009-06-08T23:13:00Z

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 overhead) onto virtual computers running on significantly fewer host computers. The increase in power consumption for each virtual computer you run on the host is considerably less than the power overhead for each replaced physical computer. At this...(read more)

Old Oak Tree Saved by the Hands of Fate?

2008-12-09T02:07:00Z

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 group got to experience that feeling. But can you identify who it is? Microsoft recently announced the grand opening of the San Antonio data center. This state-of-the-art data center will eventually hold tens of thousands of containerized servers...(read more)

Intense Computing or In Tents Computing?

2008-09-19T23:55:00Z

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 One technology eventually ends up in a Ford Focus (and, as I discovered while commuting to campus the other day, so does the driver!), maybe what we are discussing could one day be a feature of a data center near you. The Challenge—Achieving the Power...(read more)

Building a Green Windows Home Server

2008-09-09T01:39:00Z

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 well. Ade Miller, our development manager, has an interesting series of posts on his blog describing his foray into building an energy efficient Windows Home Server to back up his other PCs, serve music, and act as a print server. You can read the...(read more)

Charging Customers for Power Usage in Microsoft Data Centers

2008-08-28T23:47:00Z

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 implementing chargeback models based on power usage will encourage customers to consider power efficiency more seriously and reduce our overall impact on the environment. I would like to illustrate this point by using the analogy of getting a first car...(read more)

Changing Data Center Behavior Based on Chargeback Metrics

2008-08-01T00:46:00Z

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 the Right Behaviors in the Data Center.” If you want to see my presentation, you can review the content at http://www.energetics.com/datacenters08/pdfs/Belady_Microsoft.pdf . And if you would like to see the response from industry observers, check...(read more)

Part 3—"What's Your PUE Strategy?"

2008-07-08T01:50:00Z

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 able to take action. However, it is surprising just what you can do to improve your PUE, as you will see when we look at some results Microsoft has achieved. Implementing PUE Strategies Examples of best practices you can use to improve PUE are listed...(read more)

Part 2—"Why is Energy Efficiency Important?"

2008-06-27T21:45:00Z

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 of infrastructure and energy costs was equal to the cost of a 1U server. In 2004, the infrastructure cost alone was equal to the cost of the server. In 2008, just the energy cost was equal to the cost of a server. These energy costs are numbers that all...(read more)

Microsoft’s PUE Experience—Years of Experience, Reams of Data

2008-06-20T22:37:00Z

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 computing power it contains provides a way to ensure that you make best use of resources while minimizing your environmental footprint. This first article introduces PUE and looks at the issues that it can help you to resolve. Part 1—"What Color is...(read more)

Welcome

2008-06-20T00:34:00Z

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 blog is a slight departure from that. We’re exploring ideas relating to Green IT and the ways we, as a company, can use energy more efficiently. Some currently planned subjects include ways to save energy through the use of software and ways...(read more)