Little Miss Enviro Geek : Sustainable IT

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/

Energy & Paper-saving Office templates: What the…?

biwirth — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:28:00 GMT

Last week I was going through a backlog of old emails and came across some information from the Templates Team Blog…and I thought “what the…”?

This team have published three templates that help save both paper and energy. And I never really had a deep think about this before (uh-duh!) – but once you take a look you’ll see there are some good tips in these templates that you can re-use for your own IT help sites and documentation for employees:

Energy and paper-saving presentation - tips and settings to help conserve energy and space for online and printed slides in PowerPoint 2007.
Paper-saving settings for print documents - tips and settings to help conserve paper for printed documents. Instructions are provided for making these settings the default for your new documents in Word 2007.
Space and paper-saving settings - tips and settings for print and online documents, to help conserve space for documents that are viewed primarily online but may also be printed. Instructions are also provided in this template for making these settings the default for your new documents in Word 2007.

TechEd 2009 US announces Green IT Track - first ever!

biwirth — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:01:48 GMT

For my fellow green geeks in the US, Microsoft have announced their first ever Green IT track for TechEd 2009. Nice! There are 9 sessions specifically on Green IT, including:

ARC313 - Understanding environmental compliance, policy and regulation for IT Leaders - I have seen a version of this internally and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to understand a bit more around how environmental management is achieved with technology.
ISB206 - What's Behind the Cloud: Microsoft's Data Center Transformation - Christian is one of the key people working with The Green Grid from Microsoft on Data Centres.
MGT201 - Microsoft System Center for the Datacenter
VIR206 - Virtualization for Sustainable Computing
WSV203 - Saving Power and Reducing Environmental Impact with Windows Server
WSV309 - Enhanced Power Efficiency and Power Management Capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 - this one should be very informative. Stephen Berard is THE man for power management in Microsoft.

To register and to check out the full list and session descriptions, click yourself into HERE.

* 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

Are digital downloads really more 'Green' than CDs?

biwirth — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:18:00 GMT

At first when you ask yourself this one, you kind of go - of course! Think about all that packaging & shipping! But then you kind of go: wait a sec - those digital downloads are hosted in big, power-hungry data centres. Microsoft recently undertook a study where they invited in the Natural Resource Defence Council to review their analysis on this very topic. And the result was that digital downloads ARE more environmentally friendly.

A couple of the key stats from this report are:

Digital download of Office (a nice chunky sized download that one!) avoided 8 times the amount of carbon compared to shipping & producing a DVD;
Carbon emissions avoided through online purchasing of 10 million copies is equivalent to:
- the electric consumption of 7,715 US households, or
- 13,008 passengers cars driven in one year, or
- 231 acres of avoided Amazon rainforest deforestation.

Checkout the full paper here: http://us20.trymicrosoftoffice.com/go-green/

HOW TO: Green IT & Visio: Monitoring HVAC & Virtualisation with data connections

biwirth — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:41:00 GMT

So I am pretty sure we all use Visio to do our network diagrams & map out of architecture, however I recently found out about how Visio can be used to map out Green IT initiatives. The Visio Toolbox site has all the goodies for Visio. There are two particularly helpful tools in relation to Green IT specifically:

Rack Server Virtualization - this is an add-in you can download for free. There is a good PDF as well explaining How to analyse Rack Server Virtualization.
HVAC Monitoring with Visio - using a partner HVAC tool, you can setup monitoring inside Visio. For instructions on this DOWNLOAD the PDF.

Linking Data with Visio

The key to start using these tools are to know how to link data to a Visio diagram (you need Visio Professional for this functionality):

For developers, check out this MSDN article on how to do this both programmatically: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb743267.aspx
For IT Pros, open Visio, press F1 (Help), then search for "Create a detailed network diagram by using external data in Visio Professional"

Rack Server Virtualization: A planning scenario tool

Some key points on this add-in are:

Identify the candidates for virtualisation from a rack & server view
You can source data on elements like usage-over-time CPU utilisation direct from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or WMI to get current CPU utilisation (snapshot in time only)
Before & After visual analysis
Ability to export your report afterwards

For more Visio Green IT resources, go to: http://visiotoolbox.com/en-US/visio_greenit.aspx

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

Sustainable Computing: How Digital Healthcare can Help the Environment, Reduce Costs, and Improve Patient Service

biwirth — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:10:00 GMT

QUICK POST: There is a great new article published in the April edition of the TechNet Magazine, available online, titled: "How Digital Healthcare can Help the Environment, Reduce Costs, and Improve Patient Service". The key focus is on using less paper through online services, digitisation of patient files & records, computerised order entry and paperless billing.

WWF releases paper on teleworking, sponsored by Microsoft

biwirth — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

I am posting on April Fools Day but trust me when I say this post is not a joke! :)

The World Wildlife Fund (not World Wrestling Federation!) have released a new paper on the opportunities presented by teleworking and video conferencing.

In their opening statement, WWF state that they believe virtual meetings and telecommuting have the opportunity to to save more than 3 million tonnes of CO2 – equivalent to about half of the current US CO2 emissions. This paper extends on the WWF’s overall position on the top 10 ICT initiatives they propose would reduce the most carbon.

In their paper WWF propose four different scenarios modelled as “future worlds” which would present varied opportunities for carbon savings:

The key findings of the paper include:

Teleworking has the potential to deliver greater greenhouse gas (GHG) savings than virtual meetings
The Smart world scenario would achieve maximum benefits where IT, users and policy makers work together to deliver solutions + policies
A laptop with a webcam, wireless internet access & appropriate software represent the key technical requirement for teleworking

One of the most interesting insights, and something I see & hear from customers when I talk with them about teleworking, is that it isn’t necessarily the technology that inhibits these types of initiatives – its the organisational change and the cultural barriers. In the past two years the technology has matured and is lower cost than ever before – but some customers I speak with tell me their organisation just won’t ‘handle the change’. Typical concerns I hear for teleworking include:

Cultural attitude to work: e.g. ‘Mary isn’t working, she is sitting at home watching television / on a beach’.
Organisational change: e.g. training users to utilise the technologies appropriately.
Organisational policies: for example, ‘work hours being set between 9-5 - if you aren’t sitting down working during those times then its not acceptable’. There is obviously a need to be able to contact people during a set of work hours as most workers need to interact with other people and customers, however flexibility & the right internal policies can result in more work being done, not less. As pictured below, a study from the paper indicates increased productivity from virtual meetings:

If you are a visual person, supporting the paper is an interesting scenario & time-based calculator for some European & Asian areas and the US:

Overall the paper provides some good research for anyone planning a business case for teleworking and virtual meetings. Checkout the entire paper HERE and the planning calculator HERE.

R U a Developer? Chk this Green IT session Wednesday 1st April online @ TECHDAYS.

biwirth — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:41:47 GMT

Alright this is pretty late notice but worth it: Kathy Malone from Manguard Systems emailed me earlier today and let me know she is running a session on Wednesday 1st April on Green IT at the online Microsoft hosted 'TechDays' a 24-hour - NICE!

Session Description: "DEV200 What the Heck Is Green IT and How Can It Benefit Me in a Down Economy

When asked "what the heck is Green IT", my one-line answer is "reducing the energy footprint of IT". Everyone can contribute! The data centres, by "greenly" managing the load sent to them (but like power plants, they can't just turn away the demand); SQL professionals and DBAs have some of the best "low-hanging fruit" in Green IT, where activities like performance tuning can see an immediate reduction in "energy footprint" of an application. Architects can "Green IT it" by architecting out inefficiencies in workflow, especially cross-application and cross-business or cross-enterprise (multi-establishment business applications, MEBAs, may be a key tool). And Developers can embrace "green" patterns and practices to reduce the CPU cycles, bandwidth, trips to the server, etc. (green patterns and practices still being defined), for long-term green benefits. How can this benefit you and your company in a down economy? Ask Dell where they were able to reduce the power consumption 45% in one of their data centres using Windows Sever 2008 and virtualization. We present some case studies for each of the above "roles", collect success storied from the audience, and provide resources for anyone who wants to follow up. And invite you to tap into the Green Community and share you future successes with us!"

Find it by checking out the Session List and searching for GREEN.

So its interesting how the 24-hour thing works: In Sydney, when you register, select Eastern Standard Time. Then add sessions to your schedule. Click on the Outlook Meeting icon next to the session in your meeting schedule and Kathy's session will come up as 8am on the 2nd April.

Cool initiative! Didn't even know about TechDays..Check out the full agenda at: http://www.msfttechdays.com/public/home.aspx

See you there!

Green IT: New Power & Unified Comms whitepapers

biwirth — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:10:00 GMT

There are a few new whitepapers on power savings & telework that have been released recently (some replacing older whitepapers and some brand new):

Reducing PC Power Consumption and Costs with Windows Vista - targeted at business and technical decision makers, this whitepaper replaces the old 'Windows Energy Conservation' whitepaper (2007). Its a nice succinct paper that gives a good overview of what exactly makes Windows Vista more energy efficient, provides data on Energy Star analysis and covers two specific customer examples and the savings they have made with Windows Vista.

IT Administrator's Guide to Using Windows Vista for Sustainable IT Success - more targeted at the IT Pro, this whitepaper covers a few of the bits from the above whitepaper, then extends out to cover 7 core recommendations including goal setting, education of users and hardware considerations.

Addressing the challenges facing the distributed, 21st Century Business Through Telework - this one is a Wainhouse Research report sponsored by Microsoft and was released in June 2008. Its about 20 pages and covers off the definition of telework, business issues & impacts related to telework, technologies and three different telework scenarios. Overall it has some good background statistics & info that can contribute to your internal business case for telework / telecommuting / remote working programs. In the technologies section they are generic but do have a Microsoft Technologies box outlining what can be used from our perspective - its not particularly specific but just wanted to make a note that OCS R2 was recently released (Feb 09) which provides enhanced telephony features if you are considering this technology. Check out the latest features of OCS R2 or this link for the detailed technical guides.

Telework and the US Federal Government: At the Tipping Point - and finally, for those readers of mine in the US, this whitepaper (by the same research group as the one above) takes a specific look at the US government related issues, impacts and case studies. Although parts of it are obviously very US-government-centric (and repeat elements of the previous whitepaper), it still makes a good reference for other global governments' teleworking strategy development.

HOW TO: Windows Vista Power Management Video

biwirth — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:42:00 GMT

Just a real quick one today: on my personal Green IT website, I have posted a short 1:16 minute video targeted more for end-users and general public, on how to configure their Windows Vista machine to Energy Star-recommended power settings.

I'd expect the IT Pro to set their's through group policies so I'll be posting up a video on this in the near future.

In the meantime if your small business, mum or grandma want to know how to do it, point them to this VIDEO.