March 04, 2008

CeBIT: Go green the Microsoft way, urges Ballmer

End users are demanding energy-saving software says CEO

By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

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Microsoft is to release a set of best practices for administrators running datacentres that share the energy-saving strategies the vendor is applying to its own operations, promised CEO Steve Ballmer.

The tips will covers issues such as how to pick a good site for a datacentre, how to deal with heat and manage power consumption, Ballmer said during a keynote presentation at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany.

The move is in response to growing concern over the release of carbon dioxide, one of the by-products of burning fossil fuels to create electricity. In addition, power demands are ever-increasing, Ballmer said.

"If you look at non-travel power consumption in the world today... information technology is one of the most rapidly growing power consumers on the planet," Ballmer said. "We think we have a real responsibility... to reduce power consumption by the IT industry."

Ballmer said the company has for the last decade studied how to engineer its products to consume less power. He cited significant power use reductions in several products.

Windows Vista, the company's latest operating system, consumes three watts per hour when running in idle mode, compared to 100 watts per hour for Windows XP.

In some configurations, Microsoft's Windows Server 2008, the company's next-generation server launched last week, uses 40 percent less power than Windows Server 2003, Ballmer said.

Microsoft also continues to develop its virtualisation technology, Ballmer said. Virtualisation software enables one piece of hardware to run multiple operating systems, which decreases the need for more physical servers.

To increase its ability to offer hosted applications, Microsoft has been building data centres where it will have access to cheap hydroelectric power, Ballmer said.

But he added, emerging innovations could reduce power consumption in data centres by a factor of five, he said.

"We've tried to be a pioneer ... in our own datacentres," Ballmer said. "These new data centres put us on a path to be among the most power efficient and ecologically sound datacentres in the world."

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