THE VOLE RECKONS it can save you cash on your electricity bill with its newest software, Windows Server 2008, which purportedly cuts power consumption by some 10 per cent.

In a white paper released this week, Mighty-Soft said it had tested and compared the power guzzling habits of two installations on the same server with two dual-core processors and 4GB of RAM. One was made to run Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition with SP2 plus hot fixes, whilst the other ran the new Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.

Results showed that Windows Server 2003, despite only being up to giving 80 per cent maximum throughput of its new and improved rival, managed to chomp its way through a whole 10 per cent more power. The Vole reckons that this is most likely due to the fact that the new software has extra power management features bunged in to it, including a nifty automatic adjustment tool allowing the processor to work hard or slack off depending on workload.

Of course, despite the good results and power saving on physical machines, Volish boffins discovered, unsurprisingly, that the results would be even better using virtualisation.

Still using Windows Server 2003 as a benchmark, Microsoft ran a test on a virtualised version of Windows Server 2008, only to show that a grand total of four Windows Server 2008 virtual machines, running on a physical IIS 7.0 Web server, with 20 active clients, still used less power than just one Windows Server 2003 IIS 6.0 Web server.

Impressive? Maybe. But the Vole only compared itself to its own earlier product, not to an alternative contemporary Linux-flavoured offering, or other virtualisation products on the market.

You know where to send your own comparisons... µ

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