Green IT\Environmental Sustainability with Microsoft Solutions

Environmental Sustainability in business has garnered a great deal of attention over the past year.  Initially, this rise was for reasons of morality and social responsibility.  More recently, the focus has shifted to cost reduction implications.  Consumers, like businesses, are becoming more and more aware of their impact on the environment.  'Going green' is a term with positive implications across the board, for employees and customers alike.  Of late, Corporate responsibility and the impact that business has on the environment has come to the forefront for consumers and governments.  As such, most corporate leadership groups are examining ways in which they can reduce the environmental impact of their operations to benefit their reputation, meet current and futureregulatory guidelines, and, at the same time, reduce costs.  Microsoft strives to take a leadership role in the business community on these topics, with respect to our internal practices, as well as with our technology solutions.

Many IT organizations have started down the path of becoming more 'Green'.  Generally, this focus is on a single area - power usage reduction.  Without a doubt, this is a significant element of environmental sustainability.  That being said, it is not necessarily the only one that businesses should be investigating.  I have taken the time to gather some high level information about Microsoft solutions that impact the environment and provide ways to reduce costs.  Additionally, I have taken the liberty of classifying them as Easy, Medium, and Hard, with respect to the level of effort taken to implement these solutions.

Our main portal for Environmental Sustainability at Microsoft is located at http://www.microsoft.com/environment .  You can visit if you want to learn more about these features, solutions, and Microsoft's own internal efforts to improve our own environmental 'footprint'.

Easy

Windows Power Management          

Whether you're running Windows XP, Windows Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, or all of the above, you have opportunities to implement power saving policies in your environment.  Say what you will about Windows Vista (and much has been said), but it introduced some significantly enhanced power management features.  The enterprises that have deployed Vista widely have been able to measure significant cost savings from power management alone.  See here for an example.   Windows 7 will do more of the same.  Windows XP, which still represents the majority of the deployed systems in business today, is not as strong in that department.  However, Group Policy Preferences, which are available as a free download here, provide IT administrators with many more options to manage default power plan options in XP.  On the server side, Windows Server 2008, by default, consumes 10% less power than Windows Server 2003.  Windows Server 2008 R2 will also introduce new power savings features when used with compatible hardware, such as core parking and P-states.  All in all, IT admins have tremendous opportunity to save cost and reduce power consumption in their environment, simply by taking a harder look at the management options in the Windows operating system and supporting tools.  See the "'Managing Power with Group Policy" series of blog postings here to get started.  We estimate that you can very easily save $65 per PC, per year.

Virtualization       

I place this in the 'Easy' category because almost everyone out there that I speak with is already headed down the path, and the tools one can use to virtualize systems are very mature.  Obviously, Microsoft advocates Hyper-V as the hypervisor of choice for the datacenter and branch office, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage Hyper-V (and VMWare ESX) environments.  http://www.hyper-green.com provides calculators, informational resources, and case studies for customers who have been extremely successful in leveraging Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  Both of these technologies are rock solid and have been receiving rave reviews.  On the horizon in Windows Server 2008 R2, we'll also have the latest release of Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008 R2.  The bottom line is, whatever your hypervisor and management tools of choice are (and there are *lots* of choices out there these days), maximize their usage and virtualize whatever you can.  Done right, you'll receive benefits in manageability, power savings, rackspace\floorspace reduction, and more.

SCCM DCM Energy Star Configuration Pack                

Desired Configuration Management is a tremendously powerful, though underutilized (in my experience) feature of System Center Configuration Manager 2007.  For those SCCM customers who haven't yet taken advantage of DCM, this represents a tremendous big bang opportunity to get started.  For those SCCM customers who are already invested in the feature, it is an easy extension.  To get started, download the CP here .  This pack, endorsed by the EPA, provides IT administrators with a tool that can assess your client systems against Energy Star efficiency levels, and track the compliance of your entire fleet against these guidelines.  If you're not an SCCM user today, I hope that options like this make you take a second look.

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit

The MAP toolkit (available here), is a free download that provides agent-less assessments of your environment, targeting key scenarios (Windows Vista, Office 2007 readiness, Windows Server 2008, and Power Savings opportunity).  MAP will provide a report that outlines the power savings opportunity in your environment, based on a set of assumptions.  This information would be used in conjunction with some other options\information to help create a detailed picture of power usage and potential savings.  While it's not an end-all reporting solution, it's free, so have a look!

Medium

Wake-on-LAN

Wake-on-LAN is a technology that's been around for a while, and while our operating systems have included support for it for some time, SCCM 2007 introduced native capability for the first time in our management stack.  While Wake-on-LAN has many dependencies on the network infrastructure (hence it's inclusion in the 'Medium' category), it provides a great tool in the arsenal that enhances power savings while not sacrificing manageability.  Other third party management tools also have support for Wake-on-LAN, so ensure that you use it where possible.

Sharepoint      

Here is where we break somewhat from the traditional thinking of Green IT being all about power savings.  Paper is still the predominant media of choice for forms in enterprise environments.  Combined with built-in workflow capability, this represents a huge opportunity for most customers to improve both efficiency and process performance.  And you get to save trees!  One could also make the argument that MOSS helps customers with storage usage (moving away from email attachments, better archiving, search capabilities, etc.), and when combined with some of our other communications and collaboration solutions (see below), makes telework that much more possible and efficient.  See this post for more information on the 'green' elements of Sharepoint.

Hard

Unified Communications        

With the advent of Office Communications Server 2007 (and, in a supporting role, Exchange Server 2007), Microsoft has been steadily rolling out Unified Communications functionality to its employees in the form of soft phones, RoundTable devices for video conferencing, Live Meeting, voicemail integration with Exchange, and more.  This is tremendously powerful technology that looses users from the shackles of cubicles and office phones, legacy PBX voice mail, and the like.  Airline travel represents 3.5% of global carbon emissions.  Car commuting produces upwards of 800 Mt of carbon emissions per year.  Since widely deploying Unified Communications solutions, Microsoft has saved millions of dollars on telecom costs and telecommute benefits (reduced travel).  Analysts estimate that companies can reduce travel by 10-30% by implementing Unified Communications solutions.  Take all of that into consideration, and UC has the potential to hugely impact global carbon emissions, while driving massive cost out of enterprise environments.  It's not as easy as flicking a switch, but more and more customers are going this route.  Go here to read about some of their experiences.

Analytics\Performance Management       

With our Business Intelligence tools, it is possible to proactively plan, measure, and monitor the environmental impact of business and IT projects through dashboards and KPI's.  Dynamics AX recently added functionality to track and measure carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions in an enterprise environment - The Environmental Sustainability Dashboard. 

All in all, we have a lot to offer enterprise customers that are looking for ways to improve their Environmental Sustainability story.  Next time you get a chance, grab a Microsoft person and ask them about ours!

Additional resources

EZ GPO from the EPA - A free utility to manage GPO power management settings for Windows 2000 and XP

1E - A great longtime Microsoft partner that has some awesome power management utilities

Verdiem's Edison - A free tool that monitors energy usage that can be configured to provide guidance and feedback on proposed power management settings changes.  Verdiem also has an enterprise tool for centralized management.