The Power of Software

The Data Center in Your Home

Power of Software — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:01:43 GMT

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,...(read more)

Little and Large

Power of Software — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:13:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Old Oak Tree Saved by the Hands of Fate?

Power of Software — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 02:07:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Intense Computing or In Tents Computing?

Power of Software — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:55:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Building a Green Windows Home Server

Power of Software — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:39:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Charging Customers for Power Usage in Microsoft Data Centers

Power of Software — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:47:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Changing Data Center Behavior Based on Chargeback Metrics

Power of Software — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:46:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Part 3—"What's Your PUE Strategy?"

Power of Software — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:50:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Part 2—"Why is Energy Efficiency Important?"

Power of Software — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:45:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Power of Software — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:37:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Welcome

Power of Software — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:34:00 GMT

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....(read more)