Green has been a buzz word in the IT industry for some time now, and there are many groups and companies focusing on helping IT understand their data centre energy consumption and methods by which this an be reduced.

We are now starting to see government take more interest in this as part of their policies to reduce CO2 emissions and carbon footprints. The UK government is one of the first to put in place regulation that requires companies to monitor, report and reduce their energy consumption. The Carbon Reduction Commitment requires companies to report their energy consumption and to buy allowances to offset their CO2 footprint. This scheme starts in April 2010, but takes energy consumed in 2008 as its baseline - so its too late now for a business to affect the first years reporting and they need to focus instead on how to reduce energy consumption over the coming years so as to limit the amount they need to spend on allowances.

Many large data centre operators and IT departments consume significant amounts of energy, both in the IT equipment and the facilities infrastructure to support the IT equipment. One of the biggest challenges today is that many IT managers do not see the electricity bills for their data centers - this usually goes to the facilities department and so they may have little or no idea of the energy costs of their infrastructure. Another factor to consider here is that many data centers are running older generation IT equipment, much of which was not designed with energy efficiency in mind and the facilities themselves were often not designed to optimize the air handling and cooling within the building or to minimize the costs of running this equipment.

There are a number of tools available today that can help an IT manager get a better understanding of how efficient their DC is in terms of energy usage and can help in understanding the effect of various changes on the overall energy efficiency of the data centre. One of these is the Power Utilisation Effectiveness ( PUE ) metric developed by The Green Grid which looks at the ratio of the IT load to the total facilities load within data centre. The Green Grid also publishes various white-papers and guidelines that can be used to better manage the PUE value for a data centre. There are also some good white papers produced by Intel's IT group on how to improve data centre layout and design.

It is also important to consider the actual IT equipment that is deployed within the data centre. Over recent years there have been many advances in server power management technology that when combined with the performance increases delivered by the latest generation CPUs can help IT reduce their overall energy consumption. With Intel Xeon 5500 based servers its possible to achieve significant levels of server consolidation, which when combined with the fact these servers typically consume less power than those they will replace can lead to significant reduction in power bills. In many cases it is cheaper to buy new servers and operate  than it is to continue running the existing installed base of servers. Intel has a simple tool, here, that can help IT make this assessment and determine how fast a payback they can achieve by refreshing their installed base of servers.

Using these tools and latest generation server technology can help an IT department make a significant contribution to lowering energy consumption and contributing to a businesses Carbon Reduction Commitment.

When the Xeon 5500 platforms launched earlier in the year, we also introduced a server refresh ROI estimator tool to help IT managers make sense of the significant OpEx savings they can achieve by making targeted investments in new server hardware.

We know that server deployment and refresh plans vary widely from customer to customer, so we needed a robust and interactive to help you model your savings opportunity, regardless of your situation.  This tool delivers just that by taking the knowledge of Intel IT and industry leading ROI and TCO consultant Alinean and putting it into an easy-to-use tool!

We identified and were able to model eleven cost and savings categories (both pluses and minuses) in the Server Refresh ROI calculation and make these cost category assumptions able to be included, excluded or modified by you.  You can model and view scenario output real time and print/email reports to share with others.

To share some numbers from the United States, in the first 3 months, there has been nearly 4,000 users of the ROI estimator, and of those users, almost 800 users have printed reports to share with others in their organizations. Here’s some of the encouraging feedback they’ve been hearing from their customers:

·       CIO for major US hospital: “This would help my IT staff justify the financial value of the technology investment they are proposing. This has been a barrier to freeing up capital internally”

·       IT Manager for major US bank: “I used to have regular funding for technology refresh projects. It was a given for my budget.  However, with the increased constraints on capital, I now have to justify this type of spending”

·       Technology Sales Consultant: “This tool helped me work better with my customer to gain a deeper understanding of their server environment and allowed us to jointly identify high ROI investments to improve their infrastructure”

Good news is the tool has continued to evolve based on feedback from the multiple customer engagements to date, and as a result, we have just released an updated version.  Check them out:

Tool Training – How to Use: We heard that the benefits of using the Savings Refresh Estimator spanned many functional roles, making us realize that the use models for this type of tool and what users were looking for would vary dramatically from person to person.  We have a pdf training guide today that can help you get started now.

PowerPoint Output: What would we do without PowerPoint? J We received feedback on the desire to make the output of this tool more sharable inside IT organizations and with business partners in a PowerPoint format as a way to communicate the opportunity and benefits for server refresh investment.  So, we now have a PowerPoint output option in the reports section that breaks down the benefits of server refresh for a variety of audiences from executive staff to facilities to finance.  Everyone inside your business can benefit from server refresh and now you can show them how.

Secure Analysis: We received feedback that many users wanted access off-line either as a way to use in meetings when connectivity was challenged or to protect internal data from exposure online.  We now have the ability for you to run the tool on your laptop to support these use models.

More … More … More Functionality. We heard lots of requests and ideas to expand the level of functionality and analysis capabilities.  We have to balance scope, complexity Keep these requests coming.  The following changes are incorporated into today’s estimator.

·       Virtualization to Virtualization Refresh Scenario – now included

·       Virtualization Loading: Can edit and change VM/server new and old

·       Custom Performance Data – enter you own performance data to better model what you expect to see in your biz

·       Depreciation Cycle – no longer fixed at 4yrs .. can adjust

·       Memory Sizing: information added to allow user analysis

·       Processor Description: allows user to cross reference data to other more familiar terminology.

I encourage you to check out the tool and let us know how it helps you get a better handle on the benefits of server refresh.  Feel free to respond with comments and feedback here.