Save the planet – turn your thermostat up

I know the perceived wisdom is that we should all turn our central heating thermostats at home down by a degree or two to save money and reduce our carbon footprint. Oddly, the opposite is true in the world of IT. According to recent research by Dell, datacentre managers need to stop molly-coddling their servers by keeping the air-conditioning down at 19 degrees C and can turn the thermostat up to 25 degrees C at little or no risk to the operation of their systems.

With oil at $135 a barrel and rapidly increasing energy costs impacting IT budgets, every IT manager is looking for ways to run their operations at lower energy costs without jeopardising customer service and although higher temperatures in the datacentre may make life slightly uncomfortable for the operations staff, the significant savings realised in reduced power consumption by air-conditioning systems could be worth a little personal discomfort.

As well as a watchful eye on energy costs, most IT managers are exploring ways to consolidate and virtualise servers, applications and desktops. On the topic of virtualisation, it's worth mentioning the latest announcement from the Windows Server 2008 team about Hyper-V (the virtualisation hypervisor in Windows Server 2008):

"Microsoft has reached another key milestone in the development of Hyper-V, with a feature-complete version now available for download as a release candidate (RC). You can download the update for Hyper-V RC here and experience the improved stability, usability and performance and also test the support for additional guest operating systems."

It is the last part of that statement from the webpage that I think you will find intriguing – ‘support for additional guest operating systems’ – which will enable you to both run and manage Windows, Linux and other operating systems from your Microsoft virtualised environment.

You can now evaluate the Hyper-V that will be released as part of Windows Server 2008, and finally for today (if I am allowed a shameless plug), you can find out more about the virtualisation capability within Windows Server 2008 at our Live Meeting (webcast) on Tuesday June 3rd from 10:00-11:00.

Posted by Ian