According to a recent report, Microsoft says that it wants to reduce the overall data center energy consumption by 50 to 60 percent, and reduce energy consumption across the rest of the company by at least 30 percent. IBM has already announced green data center capabilities with similar goals. Microsoft says its latest energy audits find that its total carbon footprint for 2007 was 936,000 tons of CO2. Microsoft says it is looking to reduce or eliminate infrastructure such as chillers and cooling towers in its new data center facilities, and rely more on more environmentally friendly methods of cooling, such as piping in outside air. The company is also reducing the amount of backup and recovery conducted for non-mission-critical workloads to manage power consumption.

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