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 at 11:53 AM