At the recent Microsoft Research TechFest 2008 a couple of great Sustainable IT solutions were showcased - one of which was a small chip based device called Tiny Web Services.
The Tiny Web services device is built on .NET framework and essentially it is a chip with a small amount of code, that communicates using WDSL/TCP/IP over 802.15.4 radio to the Internet and other devices in the home/office network. As an example, you could monitor the temperature of a room and have it adjust dynamically to help reduce heating/cooling costs. Alternately things like weather information can be sent from the Internet to the device to adjust metrics, like temperature.
This is an excellent innovation for the future of data centres cooling management. It's not available now as its still in testing but great to talk about when discussing the future of Microsoft Sustainable IT with customers.
Checkout my article about Microsoft Tiny Web Services
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