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Rightsizing Servers to Achieve Cost and Power Savings

For Production Datacenters - White paper published

This week our team published a new white paper on “Rightsizing Servers to Achieve Cost and Power Savings,” written by Dileep Bhandarkar and Kushagra Vaid, distinguished engineer and principal hardware architect in our Global Foundation Services (GFS) datacenter team. The paper offers best practices on how GFS is lowering its total cost of ownership (of its servers) and achieving power savings for the company’s production datacenters. The paper can be found on GFS’ web site at www.globalfoundationservices.com on the Infrastructure page here and is discussed in Dileep’s blog post under the same title. More information is posted on Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability blog post.

Today more than ever, IT departments need to make sure that the servers they deploy are as efficient as possible in terms of acquisition cost and energy consumption. This paper describes how GFS, the team that manages and operates the company’s vast production datacenters, rightsizes its servers to achieve maximum efficiency. The paper details the processes used for collecting detailed performance data using representative workloads, and then analyzing that dataset to select balanced servers that are optimally sized for “production scenarios”. By sharing these best practices, Microsoft hopes to help other industry IT departments stretch their purchasing budgets significantly to help achieve organizational goals even in times of constraint.

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