Little Miss Enviro Geek : SCCM

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

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.

Hyper-Green: Calculate your energy & consolidation savings...now this is cool!

biwirth — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:43:30 GMT

I got a message this afternoon from our Windows Server and Infrastructure Product Manager with a hyperlink and a message: "Not sure if you have seen this but it is cool!" And I have to agree! We have released a new web site to help you calculate the energy / consolidation / carbon savings for your virtualisation business case...its called "Hyper-Green" - http://www.hyper-green.com/

Simply enter the number of servers; then move the dial to your estimated consolidation figure - in this case I chose 50% - which takes me down to 25 servers in total:

The click on Create a Virtualization Report to modify further details like:

Company Name
Country
Your average electricity cost per kWh

Click Update Report; then when you are ready, click Save Report.

Tick box the appropriate boxes on the next page indicating what products you already have in your environment and what the key business/IT drivers are:

Click Get Report and More. You'll then get the opportunity to email the report:

Be sure to check out the links to the Microsoft Virtualization ROI tool on the last page: this provides a really excellent model for calculating the details around ROI and business benefits. We use this inside Microsoft when we are helping customers prepare to put forward a business case for virtualisation:

And the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit will help you get a good understanding of how and what to virtualise in your existing environment.

Have fun! :)

LMEG

The groove that makes my fingers move: Laredo by Tomahawk & Pigs on the Wing Part 2 by Pink Floyd

Verdiem releases power management tools for Windows XP & Vista

biwirth — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:55:00 GMT

For consumers, Verdiem announced Wednesday last week they were releasing a free tool for power management on Windows XP and Vista called "Edison". Although Windows Vista's power savings settings are on by default, Windows XP's settings aren't, so a tool like this helps configure these settings in an easy graphical interface for the home user. Additionally the tool allows for scheduling of power management and provides estimated savings reports, which is something not built in to either Vista or XP.

NYTimes have reported on the release, quoting Kevin Klustner from Verdium: "Household electricity bills could also be trimmed by $20 to $95 a year for each PC, depending on local power costs and the kind of PCs in use."

I installed the software on my home PC, which is running Windows Vista Ultimate. It was a 28mb download for version 1.0.3166.0 and it was a 'follow the bouncing balls' type install (easy). My firewall prompted me a couple of times advising the program wanted to access the Internet so gave it temporary access and then followed these steps to configure it:

Step 3 - Then wait for the activation link to be sent to your email address - click on the link and you'll be activated via the web.

So all up pretty easy to setup and targeted at non-IT consumers - I would definitely only recommend it for a home computer, not corporate computers. The free software can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/environment/campaign_Edison.aspx

For the enterprise, Verdiem has developed corporate power saving software called Surveyor, which can be used to configure things like graceful application shutdown and saving open documents, and configuring different power settings for different groups of people like laptop users. They have an associated plugin to System Center called Surveyor Wake Up for SMS which helps ease patching suspended computers, even without WoL functionality.

Green IT Video: Interview with Microsoft IT Manager Australia

biwirth — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:25:31 GMT

In May I interviewed Jonathan Lewis, Microsoft Field IT Manager in Australia on his views of Environmentally Sustainable IT and what Microsoft Australia is doing in this space.

LMEG interviews Jonathan Lewis, Field IT Manager, Microsoft Australia, May 2008

To save energy, send your PCs to sleep, then shake them (nicely) awake with Wake on Lan (WoL)

biwirth — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:49:00 GMT

The team at The Manageability Team Blog have posted a very comprehensive article on how to setup Wake on LAN (WoL) capabilities using System Centre Configuration Manager 2007. WoL enables you do things like implement security patches on PCs that have been sleeping (i.e. saving energy when not being used)...excerpt here:

"Wake-on-LAN (WoL) allows properly configured (BIOS, Operating System, Network Interface Card) machines to resume operation from various sleep modes in response to a network request. The network request comes in the form of a magic packet which is a special formatted network packet. Sleep refers to the low power states of Windows XP and Vista: Standby (S3), Hibernate (S4), and hybrid sleep. Hybrid sleep is a feature of Windows Vista that combines the features of S3 and S4; when entering sleep a hibernate file is saved to the hard disk but the computer resumes from memory unless power is lost. This can create problems if systems like Configuration Manager need to distribute software to a collection of hardware devices. An example would be a Security Patch that needs to be implemented as quickly as possible for a set of vulnerable machines. By combining all the pieces to create a WoL ready infrastructure, you'll end up with an environment that allows networked PCs to be both responsive 24x7 and efficient from a power consumption perspective."

Check out the full article here: http://blogs.technet.com/smsandmom/archive/2008/03/04/configmgr-2007-implementing-wake-on-lan-wol.aspx

"Thin is in" for green computing, but you need to consider the flexibility factor baby...

biwirth — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:20:00 GMT

There is always a big argument over whether “thin” environments are more energy efficient than traditional ‘rich client’ environments. There is lots of research and speculation out there, but having designed and consulted on thin solutions, I think there is more to the discussion than just client power usage.

Thin clients use less energy?

There is quite a lot of debate over whether thin clients use less energy. And if you believe they do, then you would be right – according to Forrester (2008), thin clients use about 25% less power than a traditional desktop.

However if you are in the market for a thin solution, be careful of claims higher than 25%. Last week one ISV/hardware company was quoted as saying their thin client solution delivered a “75% energy saving over the average PC”. Cool – that’s nice but what they didn’t say is that they aren’t comparing what we in Oz call "apples for apples". As far as I can gather their study only compares direct rich (aka fat) client to thin client. Not what energy the SERVER expends to compensate for thin client computing. Remember that when you change to a thin client model, the SERVER takes over the client processing role. Hence the majority of the energy is spent at the server, not the client. And once you place servers in a data centre, you need to add cooling into the mix. For a fair comparison then, you need to include server energy expenditure AND cooling costs associated with the server farm in the data centre. The aforementioned Forrester study, at a 25% energy (and subsequent carbon) saving, includes the compensation for the server energy and cooling requirements.

Keep flexibility at the top of the requirements list in a desktop client strategy!

This whole Green IT push originally comes from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which has been around for more than 20 years. CSR is not about giving away your entire business profits to green initiatives. It’s about BALANCE. Balance is achieved between three core areas:

Economic
Environmental
Social

The value of each to your business can be determined by some basic analysis. One of these analysis types is called a multi-criteria analysis using a qualitative index, similar to the below example. This is pretty simple, and fairly subjective, but effective for a baseline. Essentially you apply a weighting to each element (economic, environmental and social) adding up to 100. Then for everything except most of the economic metrics (which are calculated by hard financial figures like Net Present Value (NPV)), you assign a rating based on considerations for your specific business:

"--" = 0
"-" = 0.25
"0" = 0.5
"+" = 0.75 (and so on)

As I said, the assignment of ratings is fairly subjective so if you want statistically real results, be objective. Preferably gather multiple opinions and knowledge across your business. When you assign the rating write good notes on why you have given each rating. Biased ratings don't do anyone favours in the long term.

Then on top of this type of business analysis, consider what is best practice from an IT architecture perspective. There is a tonne of material out there on best practice in a Microsoft world - check out the TechNet Library for per-product information: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/default.aspx.

When comparing rich and thin client strategies, this means considering desktop flexibility. I have seen too many companies commit to a particular long term desktop strategy, only to find their business model changes (e.g. through acquisition) and subsequently the defined desktop strategy is no longer viable.

Before you decide that thin client is the saviour to all your problems, one key question to ask is: What is your business user profile?

To provide two common examples:

If you have lots of CAD or GIS users, then thin client is not generally suitable for them. Graphic intensive applications, even after years of thin technology improvement, typically still don’t do well on thin environments. The exception to this rule, in the future, may be Microsoft's recent purchase of Calista (http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/jan08/01-21VirtualizationAdoptionPR.mspx) which provides presentation virtualisation (terminal services) for graphic intensive apps.
If you have employees that are frequently disconnected from the network, then thin is not suitable. In Microsoft I look after NSW Government agencies who frequently need to operate in an emergency situation, e.g.a flood-ravaged area where there may be no network connectivity for days to weeks on end. Instead look at technologies like Microsoft Application Virtualisation (aka SoftGrid - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/enterprise/features/tools.mspx). MAV can provide offline application virtualisation (at the same time solving a bevy of application compatibility & packaging issues) while still providing a good measure of centralised application deployment and control. This can be achieved through MAV natively, or System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 to promote a consistent management infrastructure internally.

So if we look at the three CSR factors (economic, environment & social) combined with IT best practice when developing an environmentally sustainable IT strategy, the best recommendation I could make is to consider a balance between each element, suitable for your specific business type.

Something for nothing - Rush; Making Memories - Rush; Starman - David Bowie; All my love - Pink Floyd