“Katrina” was one of the most deadliest and costliest “force majeure” US has ever witnessed in its hurricane history. The most severe loss of life and property damage occurred in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana. During this difficult times, there was an utmost chaos among people to keep in touch with their loved ones and know their whereabouts. They wished, if there was a better system which could help. The evolution of “Vine” is the response from Microsoft, just to have that wish come true.

Microsoft Vine is a social media application which taps the strengths of Facebook like apps and “Twitter”.

I’m one of the invitees to beta test Vine and the first look is definitely impressive. I can foresee a lot of potential how this product could evolve, even though initial idea is pretty much limited to so-called “Crisis Management”.

Once the vine client is installed on the PC, the interface is somewhat similar to “MSN Messenger”. A successful login (Windows Live-ID is required) into MSN vine system prompts the user to pick a one time 4 digit pin as shown in figure 1. This PIN is stored with your contact information in something called “Vitals” and used to ensure that your vine messages can only be sent from the email accounts you register with vine.

Figure 1

Vine basically has 3 main tabs - Vitals, Places and People as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2

“Vitals” is basically where you put all your personal information such as, address, e-mail address and personal pin. The registered e-mail address is where you receive all the alerts in emergencies.You can add contacts from other social media tools such as facebook, linkedin and windows live as shown in figure 3. I’m sure others may well be on the list in the final release of vine.

 
Figure 3

“Places” is basically your personal network you build inside vine to keep in touch with your friends and relatives. As you can see in figure 4, I have couple of places (My Home and My Work Place) added and it is listed under “Places I Care About”. While creating your network, it also allows you to specify the radius of the location you are interested in getting the news from. The small little blue boxes on the map are the surrounding news you are interested in for that specific location.

Figure 4

“People” tab allows to add all your friends, relatives and/or create groups (Emergency Contact, My Family Members etc).

The other two tabs - “Send Alert” and “Post Report” allows you to send alerts to your loved ones and post messages about your status to only your contacts or groups.

As you can see in figure 5, I got an alert from my family to “come home ASAP” and I responded that I’m safe. All these communications are sent to both email and mobile phone numbers you registered under vine. A member in your vine network can even post a report to announce their current status. The status automatically updated on the recipients dashboard as in figure 6.

 
Figure 5

Figure 6

In crisis situations, access to a PC is highly unlikely but you can still send and post alerts to your emergency contacts via a mobile phone. You can keep an emergency card (figure 7) in your wallet to send your status messages via mobile phones either as text or e-mails in a vine specific format. You can even send alerts to a specific group of people which is built by you as part of your vine network.

 
Figure 7

Vine has a very good potential on how you can share information privately with people you care about- details of your upcoming adventure; an event in the neighborhood; breaking news and most important, that you are safe and well in any situation. Even though it has a very good way to build your social network and gives the topmost importance for your personal crisis management; dialing 911 always supersedes all these methods and indeed your last resort to get help.

Currently, the service is limited to US and it’ll be interesting to see how this would evolve globally.

Closing note - “Microsoft Vine is indeed a little social media application with enormous potential to keep families together.”

We know there has been a lot of work done or being done to make customers attract and adopt virtualization to make the environment green. To augment that, the upcoming release of Microsoft's Windows 2008 R2 has some nifty "green" features which is really a good step to narrow the gap of green characteristics between software and hardware.

You probably have heard about processors with “multicores” where a single physical processor internally has dual or quad cores presented to the OS as multiple “logical” processors. In a normal scenario once the OS is installed, all the cores are active and  start consuming power which could be a huge waste of resources if the application doesn’t need that much computing power. So, wouldn’t it be nice if we have a way to control this behavior somehow by making the cores “active” or “inactive”. The upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 R2 gives you just that capability and some additional ones. The following OS features improve reduce power consumption:

• Reduced multicore processor power consumption
• Reduced processor power consumption by adjusting processor speed
• Reduced storage power consumption

Reduced multicore processor power consumption

This feature itself is called as “Core Parking” and allows Windows Server 2008 R2 to consolidate processing onto the fewest number of possible processor core and suspend inactive processor cores, as show in the figure below.

If additional processing power is required, the “Core Parking” feature activates inactive processor cores “automatically” to handle the increased processing requirements. Needless to say, a new feature with “automation” to turn ON and OFF the heart of the computer needs to be watched out as it may indirectly affect the application response and performance if not activated on time. So, I’m not so sure what to say here as I haven’t witnessed the feature yet. Only MS can shed some light whether we can close our eyes and trust them that it really “works” :-). Anyway, I would try to get this clarified by MS folks with some good explanation to back the feature. So, watch out this space for more updates.

Reduced processor power consumption by adjusting processor speed

The second one on the list is the feature with an ability to adjust the ACPI “P-states” of processors and architecture. Windows Server 2008 R2 can adjust the “P-states” of individual processors and provide very fine control over power consumption as shown in the figure below:

One may ask, why would I really need to mess-up with the p-states on the processor cores to have them run on two different frequencies? Well, if you are really looking at ways to reduce your power consumption and looking to calculate an ROI out of it, then you got to do it. MS has given you some options to poke around with, and you need to go and figure to make the best use of it for your requirements.

Reduced storage power consumption

Have we ever thought about buying “diskless” servers yet? may be some folks did, but majority of us still buy servers with local storage. Diskless computing reminds me of those Novell days where all the nodes used to boot from a central server and things used to work well. All of sudden industry took a turn and we moved to decentralized computing, killing “centralized” approach completely. Now, after decades, we are talking about it again, sort of having “old wine in a new bottle”. And that is precisely the third option - “Reduced Storage Power Consumption”. Today many medium to large businesses have some kind of SAN storage in place, but they still buy servers with local storage. Why not we stop buying servers with local hard drives in it and make use of SAN instead to boot the OS? Booting the OS from SAN approach would give you a substantial amount of savings on power consumption. So, MS is asking customers to make use of Windows Server 2008 diskless boot from SAN feature to reduce the carbon footprint. 

Now, the million dollar question is, “How do I make use and set options 1 or 2 in my environment?”

Answer: “Use Active Directory Group Policy Settings”

Update:

New Hyper-V VMs will also consume less power by virtue of the new Core Parking Feature.