The Microsoft Stack: Is Vista Power Management Ready for the Enterprise?

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AS OF 11/22/2008 3:43AM EST

The Microsoft Stack: Is Vista Power Management Ready for the Enterprise?
By Patrick Hynds

June 15, 2008 — One of the most common reasons given for why an organization should upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista is that Vista is more power efficient. Vista has features that can make it more power efficient, but what problems does it actually solve for those of us up to our elbows in wires?

How about the value proposition of “green” computing? Vista has improved power management built in, virtualization is helping reduce resource costs, and more companies are working to build out their green technology reputation every month it seems.

Almost anyone you ask will tell you that not only is this all good for the environment and corporate image, but it also just makes good business sense in most situations. The problem is that reality gets in the way and it usually isn’t as easy as it sounds to do it for real.

In my travels as a consultant, I have seen many organizations run into troubles in the data center because of power, and almost never at the client workstation. In the data center, we will sometimes see this trouble in the form of an overloaded circuit due to the inattention of the network staff. More often, it is that systems have grown beyond the ability for the physical infrastructure to support them in terms of power allocation. I have seen data centers in some of the largest cities, like London and New York, where it is not possible, due to regulations, to add more power.

With systems such as storage growing faster year after year, and storage consuming more power per unit of rack space than pretty much anything else in the data center, this can mean you end up saying “no” to things that are needed for the business. We all know that’s never a good situation. Maybe a push for green technology will solve this problem?

So with that being said, we have all the more reason to look at how we can conserve power. Why not make Vista part of that solution? The problem, if we can temporarily put aside the whole global warming, good citizen of the world, save the planet thing, is that the job of IT is to make sure things work. If there is time and it makes sense, then you can worry about it working with less energy or for less money. Good managers, administrators and pretty much everyone else have realized that the job is to get the job done. If you plan to be successful, you concentrate on the mission, and if you want to hedge against failure, then you can look to be cheap.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge proponent of alternative energy and conservation and good stuff like that, but I am also a pragmatist, which means your arguments have to be based on a reality that takes into consideration human dynamics and motivations. I seldom appeal to a board of directors to do something because it is a good thing to do. I normally lead with why it will benefit the corporation and further those goals. In this light, the Vista power management improvements are not going to fix the problem in the data center. Conservation and consolidation can help you in the data center.

Virtualization is an easier “green” pitch because it is a data center technology. It helps with the problem where the problem exists. Microsoft is certainly poised to be a contender especially now that Hyper-V is coming down the pike. I think that it helps everyone that both Microsoft and VMware are in this space. No matter which technology you pick here, it seems that culling physical systems to consolidate into virtual systems is a huge benefit and where the green-minded admin should look first to save some watts. Not only does it reduce the wasted energy of all those machines, it also, typically, helps you identify systems that are just no longer needed.

Vista Power Management features belong on a list of reasons to justify installing Vista on laptop computers, not a list of why an enterprise should adopt it on their desktops.

I am much more interested in the Vista security improvements that make it a better fit in the enterprise than Windows XP, but that is for next column….

Patrick Hynds, president of CriticalSites and a Microsoft Regional Director, can be reached at phynds@criticalsites.com.

Related Search Term(s): Data centers, green computing, power, virtualization, Windows, Microsoft

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