Little Miss Enviro Geek : Clean Technology

Some personal news...

biwirth — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Hello Dear Blog Readers,

(hmmm....that kinda sounds like the beginning of one of those SPAM emails)

I wanted to let you all know I am moving on from Microsoft and shall no longer be blogging here. I'll be moving an archive of these posts to my website http://www.greenitstrategy.com and shall continue blogging there on Green IT.

So what will I be doing now?

Well, I have decided to take some time off, write a book and maybe look into starting my own business. Regardless, you can always catch me through my website and please do feel free to visit me there.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me with their Green IT questions over the past two years and gave me feedback. I really appreciate your support and good luck with your own Green IT initiatives.

Kind Regards,

Bianca AKA Little Miss Enviro Geek

Microsoft releases Dynamics Environmental Dashboard

biwirth — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:00:00 GMT

On 9th February Microsoft launched the Dynamics AX Environmental Dashboard. The dashboard enables mid-sized organizations to track their energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (out of the box) in an effort to help identify opportunities to cut costs and lessen their environmental impact from within their existing ERP solution. It allows companies to seamlessly capture and measure key environmental indicators as part of their everyday business processes.

The key features include:

Feature	Description
Shared data	Increase visibility and improve collaboration across your organization with the ability to publish Environmental Sustainability Dashboard reports to any employee's Role Centre using Microsoft® SharePoint® Web parts. Motivate employees to act by increasing awareness of your organization's environmental impact, their role in reduction efforts, and how they can help. Access the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard using Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX.*
Custom configurations and reporting	Customize the dashboard to include information relevant to your organization, such as specific vendors, energy conservation programs, or conservation goals. Track direct and indirect energy consumption by month; identify specific contributing factors; and view the energy costs of each, such as electricity and fuel oil or heating costs.
Greenhouse gas inventory	Create and track your own greenhouse gas inventory to understand your environmental impact and how that might affect your business in a carbon market. Capture data consistently over time that is auditable, and reduce your risk of exposure to potential regulations, taxation, or increases in energy costs. View the carbon dioxide equivalent of your emissions-the dashboard automatically calculates the carbon dioxide conversions and presents the information in an easy-to-read graph.
Tracking of Environmental Performance Indicators	Automatically track the four core GRI Environmental Performance Indicators for energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, including: EN3-Direct energy consumption that is generated onsite, such as heat and power. EN4-Indirect energy consumption that is generated from another location, such as a utility. EN16-Your total direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, which combines EN3 and EN4 and converts them into carbon dioxide equivalents. EN17-Other relevant indirect greenhouse gas emissions, such as those generated from business travel, employee commuting, and waste disposal.
Integration with Microsoft SQL Server® Reporting Services	Capture environmental sustainability data in everyday business processes by viewing data immediately and tracking it over time using the dashboard, which is powered by SQL Server Reporting Services. View detailed, integrated data, such as the quantity of energy purchased from a vendor, the associated costs, and the dates of the service period

With the Business Ready Enhancement Plan for Microsoft Dynamics, the dashboard is available at no additional charge to customers using Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 (only).

There is a good demo HERE.

I mentioned that out of the box you get two metrics (energy & greenhouse gases) however a Dynamics Developer can add in other metrics they typically need to measure, such as waste, water, hazardouse substances etc.

For more info, checkout: http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/environment.mspx

New Microsoft Services for Green IT

biwirth — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:05:24 GMT

I had been speaking with a couple of the local Microsoft Consulting guys recently about their endeavours to setup services around Green IT, and then found globally we already offer a couple of services in this space:

Microsoft Architecture & Planning Services - focus on reducing costs, increasing IT control & management and reducing environmental impact through the development of a Sustainable Technology Roadmap, and assessment of server consolidation, desktop efficiency, business intelligence capability and unified communications. Check out the brochure HERE.
Sustainable IT Briefing - wherever there is a Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) there is a team who can run a one-day briefing workshop covering areas such as: how Windows technologies provide built-in energy efficiency, how to optimise resources using System Center & Virtualisation technologies, identification of opportunities to reduce carbon through unified communications, how BI can provide a platform for sustainability performance management, and how Software + Services can provide workload transference opportunities. The complete brochure is HERE.

If you are based in Australia, we don't have an MTC unfortunately however there are a couple of us here (including me) who can run a Green IT session for you as part of an Executive Briefing in our Sydney-based Executive Briefing Centre (EBC). If you are interested in this, contact your local Account Manager and ask them if you can setup an executive briefing with Green IT as one of the topics (there are lots of other topics we can cover in these types of sessions as well - we have a catalogue to choose from).

Also, a quickun' today: Microsoft Australia has recently launched their Environment site - check it out at www.microsoft.com/australia/environment.

Great new whitepaper: Power In, Dollars Out: How to Stem the Flow in the Data Center

biwirth — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:11:47 GMT

First up - Happy New Year! :) I had a relaxing time (apart from the stupid oven cracking it halfway through the roast on Xmas day) and, when the mood struck me, I spent time updating my website with new features and content.

Back into the swing, in early December the Windows Server Performance <guys/girls/whatever> released a great new whitepaper with quite a lot of detail around optimisation of servers, as well as publishing their test results.

Some of the best practices covered include:

Shut down idle machines during off-peak times.
Opt for 2.5-inch instead of 3.5-inch disk drives.
Use low-revolutions-per-minute (RPM) disk drives where it is possible.
Select power-efficient processors and memory.
Install variable-speed fans and efficient power supplies in servers to reduce waste.
Use remote-controlled power strips to completely eliminate electricity flow to "powered-off" servers.
Ensure that Windows Server 2008 is configured to use the Balanced power policy.
Tune processor power management parameters to increase efficiency by up to 10 percent.
Consolidate workloads or combine server roles on idle and underutilized servers where it is possible.
Turn off hardware-based power management
Deploy the latest service packs and Windows Server releases.
Remove or shut down unnecessary roles, applications, and devices.

The 'shut down idle machines during off-peak times' section references a good article by Dave Ohara which provides some more practical suggestions for how you actually achieve this. However I do question the viability of turning off servers when they are not in use in **some** environments:

Issue number 1: I know that some of my customers have trouble even identifying what applications are running on certain servers and what the subsequent business impact would be if there were turned off. This sounds highly unlikely and slightly dark ages to some IT departments but I know from talking to others this is the case, especially on older hardware and OS' that 'just keep running in the corner'. This is not to say I condone not knowing what servers do - just pointing out that turning off idle machines is a more complex analysis process upfront for some.
Issue number 2: in regards to actually identifying some servers that don't need to be running at certain times of the day - I think this may be a nirvana situation in some less-than-leading-edge environments. Probably the 'easier-target' scenario I could see this working in is where you have a bank of servers, which Dave rightly points out - something like a Citrix farm in which each server may generally be configured identically and en masse (which would provide capability even at reduced performance until a new server(s) came up from being turned off, if that was necessary).

The whitepaper starts to get really meaty towards the middle of the document, covering some great detail on areas such as efficiency analysis, ACPI (C-States, P-States, T-States), interrupts, timers and test results for removing components to measure their power draw. A few good points:

Even when powered off, the test server consumed 27 watts - you might often hear a similar story along the lines of 'unplug your mobile phone because it draws power even when turned off at the point but is still plugged in'.
In the tests Memory consumed 54% of the total system power. Newer RAM consumes less power due to modern energy efficiencies.
Using 2.5" disks instead of 3.5" disks doesn't impact performance but does consume 50% less power.

Anyway before I give away the storyline, I'll let you go read the paper yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/powermgmt/Svr_Pwr_ITAdmin.mspx

Also check out a related blog post by the team who wrote this whitepaper, focusing on tuning power processor performance: http://blogs.technet.com/winserverperformance/.

Enjoy the theme music to go with the blog post: Endless Sacrifice - Dream Theater; Songdust & Delerium - I Mother Earth; King of Terrors - Symphony X :-)

Microsoft's Generation 4 Data Centers...and a bit of a divergence on supply chain green IT...

biwirth — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:56:00 GMT

So even though I am a Green IT freak I don't generally talk much about data centers - the main reason is because my background isn't in data centers - it is true I am an infrastructure person (not a developer) but I generally prefer to work on the business interpretation & high level systems architecture side of things than get down and dirty with server room designs and cooling efficiencies. This kind of makes me something of a traitor in some Green IT circles :)

So rather than talk un-credibly about data center design, I thought I'd point you to a great post by Mike Manos, head honcho for Microsoft's worldwide data centers, who has announced a very detailed plan of our Generation 4 data centers. The "eco" bits to watch out for in this post include:

Non-critical/geo redundant hardware needing lower (or no) infrastructure requirements i.e. cooling, UPS, chillers
Achievement of excellent PUE (power usage effectiveness) levels
Elimination of water

One of the other areas that Mike mentions in his post is the reduced environmental cost due to not having to build with concrete - Mike asks in the post how much carbon goes into making concrete? And the answer is about 5% of the world's total carbon emissions come from concrete! It mainly comes from portland cement (one of the major components of concrete which is produced through a highly energy intensive process) however there are companies innovating in this space to replace portland cement with a polymer and normal aggregate from other industries that consider it waste (e.g. slag from the iron industry) - if you're interested in this, check out e-crete. Gosh aren't I a little font of irrelevant knowledge.

There are also two other good links to visit while you trek the data center hike:

A good video posted to Soapbox which provides a simulation of gen 4 data center concept.
Christian Belady, power & cooling architect, and David Gauthier, data center architect, from Microsoft also posted a followup on Mike's announcement, outlining the infrastructure components and efficiencies from the plan Mike announced.

There is a hidden environmental impact that may not be immediately obvious from this data center design. Its one of the elements in a cradle to cradle scenario: when you account for carbon (or any other environmental element), you (try to) account for the entire lifecycle of a product (EPEAT is one standard which helps from an IT perspective to show you the impact of certified vendor's hardware overall lifecycle).

Back on the data centers, from a carbon perspective, the shipping of bulk loads versus shipping many small racks or individual servers is something that sometimes isn't thought about. However considering transport is one of the largest generators of carbon emissions (energy of course being the other major generator), you can reduce your own data center's carbon impact by buying and shipping in bulk - even if its not at the lofty levels of Microsoft containers.

I was at the Green Business conference in Melbourne last week and one of the freight companies, Linfox, talked about the fact that their trucks run empty about 30% of the time. This means their trucks are generating 30% extra carbon for no good reason. As such if IT could more efficiently plan and utilise the freighting schedules and ship in bulk rather than individual lots, the overall supply chain carbon will be reduced.

There is the question of course of where the data center components are being shipped from and to. One element here is asking suppliers to provide their own carbon impact statement for the hardware that you purchase for your data center. And that is probably no where near as easy as it sounds for a supplier - one good example is HP:

HP ship over 1 million products a day
Most of the assembly is performed in Asia while the largest proportion of sales are in Europe & America
They estimate over 2million tonnes of CO2e are generated annually from the supply chain, most of which are from international air freight and 25% from road transport/parcel freight (1/2 million tonnes). They aren't certain because there are so many suppliers they can't possibly drill down level after level of suppliers to gain an accurate figure.

However we will see an increase in the future in the requirement to measure the environmental impact of the entire supply chain, not just our own backyards. From my perspective this can't be achieved without partnership and collaboration of the involved parties.

As an example, what could be achieved if a hardware vendor and their shipping company enabled you to view their scheduled shipments, automatically correlate truck capacity to your order, and allow you to schedule your equipment to be delivered by both the lowest carbon method and at the lowest possible carbon impact (e.g. in a truck that normally would be empty)? Think of it like being able to pick your seat on an airplane flight - if there is capacity and that seat is free you can have it. Then add the element of automatic carbon calculation based on various factors like distance and shipping method (e.g. rail, truck), and put it in a nice GUI where you are able to easily pick and compare and you have a system that enables greater end-user control of carbon management from the supply chain (and not just for IT purposes).

I can't wait until some of these really intelligent, federated systems come into place in the future...yeah I've told you a million times before: I am geek...and totally proud of it.

Hey BTW: if I don't post to you again before Xmas, have a great one and an excellent new year!

References:

HP's Stats on Supply Chain carbon: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/gcreport/energy/logistics.html

Snapshot: New article on power management for compliance & reducing your business' footprint

biwirth — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:01:28 GMT

QUICK SNAPSHOT: TechNet this month have released a new article on power management: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd252731.aspx. And TechNet UK have released an article titled "Going Green" - download it here: http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/technet/fy08planning/TechNetSeptemberIssue.pdf.

Also for all sustainable computing articles, go to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc462910.aspx.

Unified Communications: How we saved 160 staff-hours & 4 tonnes of carbon

biwirth — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:11:00 GMT

Need to start reducing travel and slashing operational costs? Got a Green IT strategy but need some further business case info? Wanting to build a UC business case?

This month we have published a great case study on how Microsoft Australia ran a trial on changing the delivery model of our monthly manager meeting, which 130 people attend from across Australia. Instead of having all those people travel to the meeting, Microsoft utilised Roundtable devices in meeting rooms across Australia. It is quite a good overview on how the meeting was approached, how they setup the room, some recommended best practices on how to handle the human aspects of future meetings and what the dollar and environmental benefits were. The three graphs below from the paper show the estimated productivity, Co2 & travel dollar savings:

Estimated Productivity Savings

These savings were based on 160 staff-hours being saved through a reduction in travel.

Estimated Carbon Savings

Estimated T&E Savings

The travel and entertainment savings above show an estimated $18k saving in cold hard cash across Australia.

In this calculation, what isn't considered are the soft costs - always a hard one to quantify! But just to get the ball rolling, one of these soft benefits is the time given back to staff as a result of not having to travel i.e. facilitating a work-life balance: for example: think about how much more time these staff get to spend with their families by not staying overnight in hotels.

Check out the full paper here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd126738.aspx

The sociology of UC

One of the interesting aspects of this mini-study, was the fact that they organised (for the first meeting) to have an IT specialist and a training co-coordinator on hand to ensure the setup was correct and any issues could be resolved ASAP.

One of our UC specialists here in Australia, Sandra, is a big supporter of the sociology aspects of UC. Whenever we visit customers together there are a couple of recurring themes we discuss with customers. One of those is when you are planning a UC deployment, realise that realistically not all meetings will or can be changed to video conferences. If you are starting out with Live Meeting and Roundtable, Sandra suggests selecting:

"A Group of people that need to work together (always the best as it is about mapping to not just the way a team meets but the way they do 1:1 discussions and leverage resources whilst in front of a customer or citizen to resolve issues with colleagues in and out of your organisation) OR
A particular team meeting (weekly team or project update meeting) OR
An Event (perhaps someone has to fly in for a conference to do a presentation)
...OR a combination of all"

Below are the example business process and metrics Sandra uses when developing PoCs for customers around UC:

Business Process	Process Description	Sample Metrics
*Access to Experts*	End Users need solutions or answers and often the solution requires expertise or contextual knowledge which has to be made available at the point of need. The expertise may often not be available locally but the information needs to be readily available.	Improved Productivity Faster Project Completion Shorten Sales cycle time
*Remote Meeting And Collaboration*	Conducting meetings with team members working out of another location or from home.	Reduce Travel Reduce Co2 Enhance Staff Engagement Faster Project Completion
*Staff Learning and Development*	Staff training in outlying areas is expensive and logistically difficult. Sending managers and trainers out to remote branches or getting remote staff together at a central facility for training is challenging and expensive.	Reduce Training Costs Improve Staff Engagement
*Flexible Workforce - Access to Mail and Enterprise VOIP*	Anywhere access to Mail and Communications through better access to key infrastructure remotely.	Improve ability to retain employees Reduce Telephony costs
*IT Project: Exchange Consolidation with Unified Messaging*	An organisations email system today is still fundamental to the way many people communicate. A system that is faster, more reliable and cheaper to run is still core to the Unified Communications strategy.	Improve Availability and business Continuity Reduce the cost of compliance

For more detailed UC blogging, also check out: Johann Kruse, Aussie UC Guru: http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse

And if you are interested in User Groups in Oz, check out:

Melbourne UCG: http://melbuc.org

Sydney UCG: http://sydneyuc.org

Get the Facts on Green IT

biwirth — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:36:58 GMT

I thought while I was sitting here in my pyjamas eating breakfast this morning I'd post a little facts blog (yes I have no life - or rather my life is so full of stuff I don't have time to blog any other time - so in pyjamas it is). Below are the top 5 facts per topic area - this great list was recently put together by our E&S team in corp...

The Products:

1. Windows Vista: According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) customers can save about $50 each year for every desktop computer equipped with the new software. Used widely, new power management tools in the Vista operating system could shave $500 million off the nation's energy bill and eliminate 3 million tons of global warming pollution.

2. Windows Server 2008: 10% more efficient on the same workload than previous versions

3. Virtualization: Virtualization can reduce energy use by up to 90%

4. Unified Communications: According to Forrester, UC can reduce travel from 10-30%

5. MS Data Centers: current data centers are 50% more efficient than those built 3 years ago.

Microsoft themselves:

1. Commuting: With this expansion of the Connectors, estimates suggest that Microsoft will eliminate annually 6,730,020 employee car miles and 6,387,550 pounds (or 3,194 tons) of carbon emissions.

2. Microsoft reduced its waste by 50% by moving to compostables. Microsoft becomes first US corporate campus to achieve Green Restaurant Certification for its cafeterias

3. New Microsoft buildings consume greater than 20 percent less energy than existing traditional buildings

4. Through the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher programs, Microsoft provides low-cost software licenses to help extend the life of over 500,000 computers per year

5. Microsoft is a board member of Climate Savers Computing Initiative along with World Wildlife Fund, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and other software and IT companies, is committed to reducing the IT industry's carbon footprint by over 50 million tons a year

Our Customers:

1. Volvo: "Volvo IT estimates that just the Microsoft collaboration products alone save enough travel to eliminate 900 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions per month, and use of those tools is gradually increasing.

2. Continental: saved $65/PC/Year or 2Milliion a year by deploying vista with System Center

3. City of Porto: the city saved 504 reams of paper (11 trees per year) by moving their paper based cabinet meetings online.

4. The City of Miami can "expect to save $80,000 in power costs in the first year, with that number increasing to $190,000 by year four. Not only will this save us money, but it also will enable the city to do its part to reduce the impact on the environment-with the resulting power savings equivalent to a 355-ton reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the first year alone."

5. Kentucky Department of Education: Reduce its physical server holdings by 60 percent (approximately 120 servers); Reduce data center space by 50 percent ;Reduce power usage by 25 percent

The Market:

1. The overall market for green IT services will peak at $4.8 billion in 2013, according to a new Forrester report, The Dawn of Green IT Services. It's a $500 million market for 2008, InfoWorld reports, but Forrester expects that spending on green IT services among enterprise users will grow by 60 percent annually over the next five years.

2. Servers typically run at far below their capacity and on average only utilize 5 to 15 percent of the actual CPU capabilities

3. A recent PC Pro Labs study, showed that 25% leave their computers running all weekend and 65% running a screen saver rather than sleep.

4. Energy costs are expected to be over 50% of an IT budget for a typical data center

5. According to The Climate Group in their Smart 2020 report, transformation in the way people and businesses use technology could reduce annual man-made global emissions by 15% by 2020 and deliver energy efficiency savings to global businesses of over $800 billion.

For more information, go to www.microsoft.com/environment.

Key Site for Microsoft Green IT Resources

biwirth — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:39:20 GMT

On 28th October, our US business published the following in the Chicago Tribune...an interesting synopsis of our environmental efforts in Microsoft.

But one key pointer: don't go to the link at the bottom of the page to check out our technologies and how they meet or align to green IT - go instead to: www.microsoft.com/environment - lots of great whitepapers, links to TechNet articles, info on greening data centers and great downloads.

Windows Server 2008: Power Management Tuning

biwirth — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:31:50 GMT

While researching my talk for TechEd tomorrow, I came across a good Windows Server 2008 Performance Tuning whitepaper. There was a small section on power management which provided a good overview of how it works in Windows Server 2008. Essentially, where Windows Server 2003 didn't have a power savings plan implemented by default, Windows Server 2008 has the 'Balanced' plan which saves about 10% energy on baseline Windows Server 2003.

"High performance and low power usage are often conflicting goals, but by carefully selecting server components you can determine the correct balance between them. Table 3 contains guidelines for power characteristics and capabilities of server hardware components.

Table 3. Server Hardware Power Savings Recommendations

Component	Recommendation
Processors	Higher frequencies in a specific processor family cause increased power consumption when the processors are under heavy load. Also, processor families usually include low-power versions. Newer generations of processors expose more power states for the Windows power management algorithms, which enables better power management at all levels of performance.
Memory (RAM)	Memory consumes an increasing part of system power. Many factors affect the power consumption of a memory "stick" such as memory technology, error correction code (ECC), frequency, capacity, density, and number of ranks. Therefore, it is best to compare expected power consumption ratings before purchasing large quantities of memory. Low-power ("green") memory is now available, but a performance or monetary trade-off must be considered. If paging is required, then the power cost of the paging disks should also be considered.
Disks	Higher RPM means increased power consumption. Also, new 2.5-inch drives consume less than half the power of older 3.5-inch drives. More information about the power cost for different RAID configurations is found in "Performance Tuning for Storage Subsystem" later in this guide.
Network and storage adapters	Some adapters decrease power consumption during idle periods. This becomes a more important consideration for 10-Gb networking and high-bandwidth storage links.

The default power plan for Windows Server 2008 is Balanced, which tries to keep performance high while it saves power whenever possible. The other predefined plans are Low Power and High Performance, both of which are heavily weighted to different goals. But server BIOS settings can prevent Windows from accomplishing any of these goals, so make sure that you check whether power management by the operating system or by the hardware is a BIOS option. Windows Server performance lab tests show that Windows power management works very well when it is compared to hardware-managed power management on enterprise servers, so the operating system-managed setting is preferred. However, the most important guideline is to make sure that the BIOS settings on a specific server are well understood so that the administrator knows if the Windows power setting controls (including the High Performance plan) are actually usable."

It also provides tips on choosing RAID systems if you want to balance cost, capacity and power; as well as how power access affects RAID.

You can download the entire document HERE.

Q: how much better for the environment is it to put a computer into standby?

biwirth — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:18:07 GMT

A customer who is currently developing their Green IT policy asked me a similar question recently - and its a great question! So here was my response...

Energy Star compliant monitors need to meet 15 watts or less per hour in sleep/low power mode. They have some good stats on their website about how powering down or low power modes affect computing equipment:

Computers: A well-designed ENERGY STAR qualified computer will not lose its network connection, which could lead to a loss of data, while in the low-power or sleep mode. Most of the computers that are being manufactured today include a capability to sleep intelligently on a network.
Monitors: Only after the machine has been used 20 to 30 years will switching it on and off five times or more a day increase the frequency of faults in power transistors in the control and deflection parts.
Screen Savers: Despite common belief, a screen saver does not save energy. In fact, more often than not, a screen saver will not only draw power for the monitor but will also keep the CPU from shutting down.

So to do an example calculation: if you calculate 15 watts per hour across 1000 monitors = (0.015 kilowatts * 1000 monitors) = 15 kilowatts an hour. This is equivalent to 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

You can do the same calculations on the actual computer box - the Energy Star requirement is for consumption of <30 watts per hour in sleep mode. So for 1000 computers it is 20kg of CO2. Add them together & every hour 1000 computers with 1000 monitors are in low power/sleep mode, you are effectively emitting 30kg of carbon.

The equivalent of 30kg of carbon in every-day terms is approximately equal to using 15 litres of petrol in your car.

A few more resources:

This website is good for equivalency calculations: http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html
Next year (TBC) the Australian government will be introducing new standards which ALL computer/monitor manufacturers will be required to meet i.e. a set limits on how many watts a computer & monitor consumes in sleep mode. So while Energy Star is currently optional, the government will soon make it mandatory.
The Microsoft environment website has lots of general environmental solutions information: www.microsoft.com/environment
Energy Star has developed a Desired Configuration Management (DCM) Pack for System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to help you identify which computers comply with Energy Star requirements: http://www.microsoft.com/environment/campaign_energy_star.aspx. System Center also allows you to use Wake On LAN (WoL) capability to wake up sleeping computers so they can be patched.
This whitepaper helps you calculate energy savings using Windows Vista: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/powermgmt/VistaEnergyConserv.mspx#top

Announcement: Green IT session @ TechEd Australia

biwirth — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:38:00 GMT

If you are attending TechEd Australia this year, come in and see my session on “Understanding Environmental Sustainability with Microsoft”

The session will be on 3^rd September from 10:15-11:45am.

Brief Description: Ever wanted to know where Microsoft stands on the whole "Green IT" topic? Attend this broad technology session to understand how Microsoft perceives Green IT & what Microsoft technologies techies can use to 'become greener'. Bianca will cover both general and specific actions you can take and illustrate with examples in use by Microsoft today, both at Tech.Ed and in everyday use.

I'll be covering topics ranging such as Windows Server 2008, HyperV & Vista Power Management, using SCCM 2007 to configure power savings, thin versus thick, data centre efficiency and what Microsoft does in this space.

I’d love to meet you and have a chat around your initiatives in this space... J

Talking Green IT @ DigiGirlz in North Carolina

biwirth — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:28:00 GMT

Today I presented on “Environmentally Sustainable IT” at the Microsoft DigiGirlz camp...two months ago I had no idea that Microsoft even ran this type of conference!

DigiGirlz is essentially a high tech camp for high school girls in the US and Sweden. I presented at the Charlotte, North Carolina event to about 110 students over 4 sessions. It was pretty cool - we never had anything like this for girls in high school when I was there (which was not that long ago – luckily one of the girls pointed out 30 is not old – phew!).

Anyway, I started off telling the audience about how I got into IT (fell into it), then explained some of the environmental issues IT is faced with today. The top 10 below are adapted from the book ‘Green to Gold’ by Esty & Winston:

Then I went on to talk about Waste Management:

- Over 130 million computers are being sold around the world today. Where the hell are these old computers going? Check out www.ban.org to view some pics on where the are going! Hardware manufacture initiatives on modular computers (for easier recycling) and recycling programs (like Microsoft MAR) help avoid these outcomes.

- The manufacture of a single computers takes the following resources (see http://www.unu.edu/zef/publications-d/flyer.pdf):

o 240kg / 528 pounds fossil fuels – more than 10 times the weight of the computer

o 22kg / 48.4 pounds chemicals

o 1500kg / 3300 pounds water

Massive!

I’ll talk about the rest of my presentation in future posts...or check out my session at Microsoft TechEd Australia this year... J

So at the start of this presentation I prepared myself for the fact that most of these 15/16/17 year old girls are not going to care about Green IT – but I told myself that if I encourage just 1 girl to be interested, then it would have been worthwhile – I am definitely an optimist J And it happened! In the last session of the day, one of the girls came up to me and asked why I do Green IT (she was concerned recently watching the whaling and polar bear issues). I told her about growing up on a farm and wanting to be a Park Ranger but not getting the marks from school (ahhh...slight rebel!). But I saw it physically ‘click’ with her when I told her I wrote a petition at school, went around the community to collect signatures for a local recycling program and sent it to my local council. She thought it was a fantastic idea for her own school and I hope she pursues it. As I have said in a previous post, I think sometimes the smallest wins are the best...

Microsoft Research: Spin server disks down to save energy

biwirth — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:49:00 GMT

As part of ongoing research into the energy efficiency of data centers, Microsoft Research (MSR) have released a paper discussing the results of testing disk subsystems usage and potential to 'spin down' disks when they are not being used. In the past there was an assumption disks couldn't be spun down due to continuous use, however MSR found during their week long trial on 36 volumes in their data center there were "significant" periods of idle time.

Their solution to helping reduce energy used by disks, up to 45-60%, was to enable functionality called "write off-loading" - this allows write requests on spun-down disks to be temporarily redirected to alternative persistent storage (such as NVRAM or flash).

A few interesting facts from their paper:

enterprise storage sub-systems don't have advanced power management capabilities (because it is inherently difficult) and they consume approximately 10w when idle;
write off-loading is a block level, transparent process;
the key challenge was consistency - "Each write request to any volume can be off-loaded to one of several other locations depending on a number of criteria, including the power state and the current load on the destination. This per-operation load balancing improves performance, but it means that successive writes of the same logical block could be offloaded to different destinations. It is imperative that the consistency of the original volume is maintained even in the presence of failures. We achieve this by persisting sufficient metadata with each off-loaded write to reconstruct the latest version of each block after a failure."
They tested two types of off-loading: machine level off-load (writes are offloaded to a "logger" on the same server) and rack level off-load (writes are offloaded to any "logger" in the rack) and found the latter to utilise the least energy (55% of the baseline).

Check out the complete paper outlining the details of the tests and associated research here: http://research.microsoft.com/camsys/paper-final.pdf

My take on TechNet Article: "10 keys to becoming an environmental leader"

biwirth — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:10:00 GMT

There has been a great TechNet article posted by Michael Walsh and Eliza Walsh on the top 10 focus areas to becoming a leader on environment and sustainability issues. Below is an overview of my perspective on their focus areas...

#1 - Be familiar with environmental issues and #10 - Remain Current. There are any number of great publications you can subscribe to, and lots of different events and courses you could attend and they are increasing all the time. There are plenty of places you can look including energy standards websites, environmental group websites, "Green IT" news websites, Corporate Management Associations etc etc. On my website, I usually post a number of these events and links to great websites if they are relevant to environmentally sustainable IT issues.

#2 - Objectively assess your company. As well as the suggestions from Michael and Eliza, you may want to engage a professional environment consulting business, who is well aware of the environmental standards businesses should perform to. There are international standards as well which you can baseline against, both from a pure business environmental perspective (e.g. ISO14001 – Environmental Management Systems) or from an Environmentally Sustainable IT perspective (e.g. The Green Grid develops metrics for baselining your data centre power usage).

#3 - Envision where you want to be and when and # 4 - Develop a vision and strategy. One of the areas that is lightly touched on in this section of the article is the importance of feedback. However for a business’ environmental strategy I would strongly recommend more than just feedback after a strategy has been laid out. Involving your employees directly in both planning and execution is crucial to their acceptance of any potential changes. As an example, when Microsoft Australia embarked on their environmental program, they set in place a leadership team who became the core sponsors, including the Microsoft Australia GM, Tracey Fellows. Then they called for anyone willing to put their hand up to become part of the various action teams. These teams would be brainstorming ideas and developing the high level strategy and action plans. And this approach meant people across our business, from many different departments, were directly influencing the program’s goals and outcomes. Our Environment and Sustainability Director was put in charge of all the teams and she and the executive sponsor team assigned team leaders, from the volunteer pool. The team leaders then ran sessions over the course of the program to gather, summarise and present the strategy back to the executive sponsor team. It was an approach that worked really well and generated fantastic discussion and many different but valuable views on our environmental strategy.

#5 – Evangelise the business imperative. Having setup these great teams of passionate and knowledgeable people, Microsoft Australia not only had 1 person evangelising environmental responsibility, but whole teams of people distributed throughout the company. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one. The environmental evangelism continues at MS Australia.

#6 – Manage your messaging. I think Microsoft may sometimes be perceived as not doing as much in the environmental space as some of the other technology companies. I know that’s what I thought when I first joined MS last year. And I was pleasantly surprised to find we do a tonne of stuff that never gets recognised – like how MCS recently developed a crucial environmental management application for one of our government customers. They used Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide a single customer view and Microsoft SQL Server to provide comprehensive reporting. And the impressive user interface and service oriented architecture was built on the newest .NET technologies of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). I think those quiet achievements are sometimes so much better than the ones shouted from the rooftops. J

#7 – Enable management through measurement and #8 – Analyze and report environment impact. If there is something that Microsoft technologies can enable then it’s this. I personally think this is one of the best areas where technology can play a role to environmental sustainability. Rock on reporting! One of the coolest solutions I have seen in this space from Microsoft is our Dynamics Environment Dashboard.

#9 – Be a thought leader. The best thing I could recommend here is to look at Michael and Eliza’s roles and think about which one you want to be. Then get out there and talk to people, join groups, volunteer your time with environmental organisations, RSS everything on “Green IT” and write your own stuff. Since I first got involved in environmental science two of the best things I have done were to develop my own website and become an advisory board member for a non-profit organisation. They both push me to keep learning new things and help me consolidate my knowledge about how IT and the environment can work better together. I can’t know everything and neither can you, but reading and writing about the environment and technology will help you develop your own theories and standards on what works and what doesn’t for your company.