Great Green Guidance Gratis
    		Wouldn't you know it? I just wrapped up a monster cover  story about green computing for the June issue of Redmond magazine,  when Microsoft released its top 10 green tips.
I won't walk through all 10, especially since the virtualization  tip is rather obvious. Instead, I'll highlight a couple of surprises, such as  the very first tip: Compensate IT for datacenter efficiency. Now most bonuses,  raises and SLAs are based on speed and uptime. This often leads IT to overbuild,  and thus wastes precious watts. 
Companies should also reward power savings. Something I didn't  realize is that if you have a datacenter that's only half-utilized, you waste  electricity. That's because all that power you don't need comes in anyway and  ends up stored in UPSes and driving cooling systems that are only really  partially used. Getting a detailed picture of actual application loads can help  buy future hardware that's not wasteful and is perfectly suited to your  software. 
Microsoft has a blog item and a pretty good white paper you  can check out here.
 
	Posted by Doug Barney on June 22, 2009