July 10, 2008 - Microsoft says that some of the biggest barriers to datacenter efficiency are its own set-in-their-ways employees, Sustainable IT reports.

Speaking at a datacenter strategy conference in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday, Microsoft engineer Christian Balady outlined how the computer giant is using employee incentive programs and other “behavioral” approaches to boost efficiency at its computing facilities. Here were the top five strategies:

#1: Plugging power-management software. Microsoft is offering new incentives for IT managers who may be resistant to powering down idle equipment. The company is also keeping idle equipment in reserve as a backup in case front-line systems fail, which can also save money and energy, according to Balady.

#2: Shifting focus on energy-use metrics. Microsoft measures datacenter energy efficiency according to Power Use Effectiveness (PUE), a relatively new metric which appears to be catching on within the industry. (For more on how Microsoft is using PUE to monitor datacenter efficiency, click here.)

#3: Re-allocating responsibility for energy costs. Microsoft now charges individual business units by the amount of energy their servers use rather than the space they take up. This prevents users from packing as much as possible onto a single server, which then requires more energy to cool, Balady explained. "We moved from cost as a function of space to cost being a function of power," he said. (Surveys indicate that IT managers often lack hard numbers on datacenter efficiency because they are rarely asked to monitor their own department’s energy use.)

#4: Rethinking software approaches. “A developer may write new code that could speed up very slightly the time it takes for a service to respond to an end-user. If [the energy use is] a lot, the developer may decide to forgo the slight bit of extra speed to save on the energy cost,” said Balady.

#5: Greening up computing facilities. Microsoft’s datacenter managers are now paid annual bonuses on the energy savings they achieve each year – a strategy that has led to come pretty creative thinking, according to Balady. For example, “One datacenter manager decided he wanted to clean the roof of the facility so that it could reflect heat better… and now the company keeps all its datacenter roofs clean.”

Such innovations are already paying off for Microsoft, Balady concluded. From 2004 to 2007, Microsoft boosted the energy efficiency of its datacenter operations by 22%.