While we at IBM Lotus have yellow as our brand colour, it seems that Microsoft are aiming for green. At CeBIT last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (yes, the guy who did the whooping monkey dance) claimed that Microsoft are at the forefront of environmentally-sound computing. Ballmer’s claims included the fact that Windows Vista’s idle mode consumes 33 times less power than that of Windows XP, and Windows Server 2008 consumes up to 40% less power than the 2003 version. Notice the mixing of measurements here, one being a factor and one being a percentage, making the second measurement seem more impressive than the first at a first glance… but when you think about it, it’s not.

Now, don’t get me wrong, making computers more energy-efficient is a wonderful thing and I applaud Microsoft for putting this into their strategy. However, let’s think about this in more detail. I can see that making desktop computers and laptops more energy-efficient while in idle mode will reap benefits, since people leave their workstations on when they go for lunch, go for a meeting, go to the toilet, go for a ciggie break, or (if you work from home) go for a quick game of Wii tennis. But Softchoice refute this claim, stating that Vista’s CPU requirements are 243% greater than that of XP, and this alone will knock out any idle time savings.

So how about the servers? Well, if it’s down to idle time the big question would be “why would your servers be idle?”… or “when would your servers be idle?”. And another thought springs to mind… if you servers are idle, is your server strategy wrong?

Taking this further, my thoughts go down two paths. The first is one that I do come back to quite often, the ol’ Domino versus Exchange argument. As I often say, I’m no Exchange expert, so by all means go and ask an Exchange expert about this. My understanding is that Exchange 2007 no longer supports active / active clustering… Exchange 2003 did, but not 2007. Why Microsoft decided to take it out of the product is a mystery to me - I’ve heard it said that no-one used it anyway, but that sounds like a reason to improve it, not yank it out. Domino does support active / active clustering (most Domino customers use this model), meaning that all the servers in a cluster are working and thus they need fewer servers to achieve 24 x 7 operation than an Exchange customer would. Fewer servers is a more green approach, whether they be working their chips off or sitting idle.

The second path is a continuum of the first (are you following this?) and comes back to the ‘fewer servers’ issue. Microsoft solutions run on Windows. That’s it, end of story. IBM solutions run on Windows, but also System i, System p and System z (and Linux, and a few other platforms such as Sun Solaris). Let’s take System i for example - anyone who wants to argue that System i doesn’t scale well beyond the capabilities of Windows either doesn’t know anything about the subject or needs their head tested. We have a Domino customer running 24,000 users’ mail boxes on two clustered System i servers. If they were to move that deployment to Windows servers, I’d say they’d need somewhere between eight and twelve servers (and if, to throw the thought in, they were running Exchange that would mean even more servers because of the clustering requirements).

Okay, it’s not as simple as saying it’s two servers versus eight (or ten, or twelve) because clearly the System i server is a different beast to a Windows server, in terms of both operating system and hardware. But System i servers are no longer the size of an American-style fridge-freezer so the difference in power consumption is not what you’d think. Server consolidation from many small-scale servers to fewer large-scale servers does add up, especially when you start to consider the whole ecosystem of a data centre in terms of cooling and peripheral devices. About a year ago one of my colleagues conducted a cost of ownership study for an Exchange-using customer with around 150 servers, and calculated that they could save about £300,000 per annum in electricity consumption by switching to fewer consolidated large-scale Domino servers.

And this isn’t just about Domino… take WebSphere Application Server - the same applies, you will have the potential to run many more transactions on one System p server than on a group of Windows servers.

IBM’s colour is blue, Lotus’ is yellow… mix them together and what do you get?