Microsoft recognizes the tough challenges that data center and
IT managers face today as they struggle to support their businesses
in the face of rising costs and uncertainty about the future. But
the fact is - being "lean and green" is good for both the business
and the environment.
It isn't always easy to know where to begin in moving to greener
and more efficient operations. With that in mind-we are sharing our
updated Top Ten Best Business Practices for Environmentally
Sustainable Data Centers
white paper. In this rapidly changing environment it is
important that we all continually reassessed and share our best
practices with each other. For this reason, senior members of
Microsoft's Global Foundation Services (GFS) team have pooled their
key learnings in this white paper.
As you'll read in the list of best practices we've compiled,
companies can make major gains by providing incentives to your team
to reduce energy consumption and drive greater efficiencies across
the entire data center and employing a wide range of practices that
can collectively add up to significant gains. Microsoft has been
using these practices for several years now and has found that in
addition to helping to improve environmental sustainability, they
make best use of our resources and help us stay tightly aligned
with our core strategies and business goals.
Microsoft's top ten best practices for creating sustainable data
centers are based on some basic principles:
Effective resource utilization matters.Energy efficiency is an
important element in Microsoft business practices, but equally
important is the effective use of resources deployed. We eliminate
features that are not essential for operating the services. This
principle drives our efforts to right size our servers based on
application requirements. Virtualization also improves server
utilization by consolidating multiple instances of an application
on the same hardware. Our data center designs offer various levels
of redundancy to meet the resiliency needs of the different
applications.
Standardization reduces variability and improves agility
and costs, while reducing errors. A major initiative
in Microsoft data centers involves standardizing the platform. High
degree of variability in the infrastructure can increase costs.
Standardizing on a small set of servers, network equipment and data
center technologies can drive economies of scale, and reduce
support costs. Custom deployments are more error prone and
expensive.
A holistic approach to total cost of ownership is
essential.It is tempting to make purchase decisions based
on acquisition costs, but often support and operating costs can be
a dominant factor over the life of the equipment. The total cost of
ownership should be evaluated against the value proposition of the
equipment purchased. For example, consider the cost/performance of
your servers instead of just performance. Make sure that reducing
costs in one aspect of the operation does not increase cost
somewhere else. Spending more on a higher efficiency power supply
can reduce the total cost of ownership!
Only two-thirds of the total cost of deploying a server
in a data center is related to the purchase price in this
example.
Disciplined change management improves
predictability.Poorly planned changes to the production
environment can have unexpected and sometimes disastrous results,
which can spill over into the planet's environment when the impacts
involve lower energy utilization and other inefficient use of
resources. Changes may involve hardware, software,
configuration, or process. Standardized procedures for the
request, approval, coordination, and execution of changes can
greatly reduce the number and severity of unplanned
outages.
Beyond the business principles listed above, Microsoft's Global
Foundation Services' team is taking significant steps in four areas
important to environmental sustainability:
- Using recycled resources whenever
practical
- Using renewable resources to power our data
centers
- Reducing waste in operations
- Taking part in industry environmental
groups
Quality can be improved through a comprehensive
compliance program.Microsoft recognizes that comprehensive
and clearly communicated security protections are essential to
building the customer trust necessary for cloud computing to reach
its full potential. At the Microsoft data center level, many
operations technologies and processes comprise a security program
and control framework that is evaluated regularly by external
parties.
Additional information on these best practices and more can be
found in the
white paper and via our new customer priority discussion
videos posted on our team's web
site.
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