Back when Mike Manos worked at Microsoft the both of us went to a Microsoft Technology Conference in Barcelona and met Frank Koch, one of the early believers in Green Data Centers. It's been four years since Frank made the early efforts, and I just saw this press release between Microsoft and Samsung.

Microsoft and Samsung Collaborate to Enable Optimized Performance and Power Efficiency for Server Systems

...

Frank Koch, infrastructure architect and Green IT lead of Microsoft Germany summarizes the joint efforts: "The world notices a dramatic increase of energy usage in data centers with more and more people leveraging their IT and moving to a private cloud. With the innovative memory modules from Samsung, we do not only measure higher throughput and performance for our hyper-v cloud solutions but a lower power consumption of the involved server systems, too. This is a great win-win situation for everyone."

The specific power savings was 15% for a 30 watt per system decrease.

Samsung's 30nm-class Green DDR3 was tested in eight gigabyte registered dual inline memory modules, installed on server systems running virtualized environments with the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system. They delivered power conservation levels of up to 15 percent for a 30-watt per system decrease, compared to systems using 50nm-class DDR3.

This gives a good reason to reach out to Frank and get more specifics on the energy efficiency projects he is working on.