This is a research meeting for MS to drive strategy.
- PC numbers vary between 10 and 55,000.
- Laptop penetration: the biggest company here is 40% laptop, 60% desktop. All of us above 25%. Everyone allows roaming computing but some with corporate policies.
- Everyone but me is on XP. They’re waiting until Windows 7. Good idea based on the features being offered: minimise project time to get those benefits.
- The big company is green: carbon neutral factory using wind turbine power …. except when it isn’t windy of course :). New data centres will reuse heat. They own the 3 turbines and got the local power company to invest: excess power is exported to the power company.
- There is agreement that there isn’t "green it". Call it greener IT.
- Data centres are at 19 degrees not for servers but for people. Servers will run at 30 degrees Celsius with no problems.
- Finland data centres are regulated into consuming more power, etc, e.g. underground which makes cooling harder.
- The big company is a car company. One of their 3 aims as a corporation is to be greener. They take it very seriously.
- Some companies using centralised power management, some not.
- Measurement of power (watt meters per machine) 50% usage for tests.
- Company politics are often an obstacle.
- On the data centre we stressed the need to be able to optimise beyond the server: storage, network, all OS’s, etc.
- Measurement: we suggested OpsMgr for monitoring H/W generated metrics and ConfigMgr.
- Asked if we had interest in application virtualisation for server applications (not terminal services). Interesting but there’s a trust and an OEM support issue. Would have to be out a while and trusted. Probably only for lightweight stuff that can exist on one server. Removes compatibility issues.
- Machine recycling? Somewhat. Ireland not much unfortunately. Lack of trust on the disk data. 75% of the attendees donate to charity or given to dedicated recycle firms (paid service). There is a story about recycled machines disappearing on a journey to recycle. No idea if the disks were wiped or not.