Little Miss Enviro Geek : Data Center

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

TechEd: Virtualization for Sustainable Computing

biwirth — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:56:00 GMT

Yesterday I presented at TechEd Australia on Virtualization for Sustainable Computing where I took everyone who attended through the six building blocks of building a virtualized environment:

Saving Power
Eliminating Waste
Managing for High Utilisation
Power sizing Hardware
Power sizing Software
Managing for Efficiency

One of the areas I talked about that I haven't mentioned here before was the real-life example of Microsoft IT virtualizing SQL and saving a tonne of rack space, power and money by doing so. Below are two of my slides from the presentation summarising the consolidation Microsoft IT achieved within their environment:

Check out the full whitepaper here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd393309.aspx

Also some of the other resources I used in my presentation:

Harnessing the Power of Virtualization for Dynamic IT - http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2008/01-21virtualization.mspx
Virtualization: Power, Service-Interface Compatibility, and Design - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998259.aspx
Virtualization: Fuelling Green Data Centres - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347164.aspx
Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit for Energy Efficient Computing - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd537569.aspx
Planning Your Power Management and Virtualization Strategies - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.gr.powermanagement.aspx?pr=blog

Green Grid: US/Canada Data Center Cooling Calculator

biwirth — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:25:00 GMT

The Green Grid has released a quick cooling calculator to help US data centre and facilities managers determine how much "free" cooling is available to data centres using water-side economisers. However when using this calculator, remember nothing in this world is free: water is also a limited resource so there is a need to balance each environmental effect from a 'green' implementation.

For more water related blog posts and stories, checkout: http://www.greenm3.com/water/

And for more free Green Grid resources, check out: http://www.thegreengrid.org/library-and-tools.aspx

Gen 4.0 Data Centers: defining the challenges & challenging everything

biwirth — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:32:48 GMT

Posting a quick one today while I am sitting at home with the flu (urgghhhh - its not the swine flu though!). I hope you are all feeling better than I am at this point and if any of this doesn't make sense I hope you'll forgive me.

Daniel Costello, Director of Data Center Services at Microsoft, has posted an interesting 2-part entry on the Global Foundation Services (GFS) Team Blog - starting with how they defined the challenges of their extensive data center deployment, and continuing today with a post focussing on how the engineers went about challenging the status quo.

Excerpt:

"Often the application of technology involves as much innovation as the technology itself. Rather than reinvent the wheel we looked at our industry's journey thus far. We started by questioning everything up to and including the roof and the very definition of a data center. With a lot of prior art in modularization, some of which has already been applied to the IT industry, we saw a good fit. The military has been deploying portable ground stations with IT servers and communications equipment for decades. And for some time now telecom companies have deployed pre-manufactured buildings which are then assembled on site as central offices.

As part of our design project we met to discuss the modular solution space with a group of folks from our Infrastructure Services team within GFS , including members of our hardware, data center operations, development, engineering, risk management, and security teams, as well as our internal product groups. (The original Gen 4.0 team from the two-day session is 100 percent intact and still working at Microsoft, by the way.) We knew we could modularize the server room, which we now call Server PACs. The challenge became how to modularize the entire facility. So we created other PACs: Generator PACS, Medium Voltage Switchgear PACs, UPS PACs, etc. Next, we developed the system electrical one-line diagrams and mechanical schematics for our four data center classes."

Full article here..http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters/

TechNet Special Online Edition: "Going Green"

biwirth — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:57:00 GMT

A quick post today: TechNet Magazine has published a special online-only edition on Green IT. Topics include:

* Green IT Webcasts in April & May *

biwirth — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:35:24 GMT

Check out these Green IT Webcasts happening over April and May with some of Microsoft's best Green IT speakers including Christian Belady, Daniel Costello, Dan Reed, Jim Larus, Isaac Roybal, Adam Bogobowicz, and Stephen Berard.

Title	Date	Time	URL
Manager Webcast Series - Green IT	4/29/2009	4:00 PM GMT	http://bit.ly/8bX4N
Transforming the Data Center with Energy Efficiency (Level 200)	5/1/2009	11:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/12CFzf
Hyper-Green Virtualization: Scaling Enterprise IT for Energy Efficiency (Level 200)	5/5/2009	10:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/TFwxV
Cloud Computing Futures: Creating Greener Clouds with Microsoft Research (Level 200)	5/6/2009	9:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/18hsgU
Improving Energy Efficiency w/ Windows 7 Power Management (Level 200)	5/8/2009	10:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/fplU

Also, one webcast from Microsoft IT already been hosted & the live recording can be found here:

Title	Date	Time	URL
How Microsoft Does IT: Improving the Sustainability and Use of SQL Server at Microsoft (Level 300)	4/21/2009	Completed	http://bit.ly/2Mp0MS