CAR to drive server footprint down
WME Environmental Management News
Pauline Jasudason -
April 27, 2009
An online modelling tool, helping businesses pick the greenest and most suitable server consolidation solution for their needs, bagged the ICT industry’s eco-innovation award. The Server CAR and Carbon Calculator took an iAward for Sustainability and Green IT as a “unique” solution that can cut down corporations’ power use and carbon footprint through its modelling for “an optimal outcome”.
The Server CAR (“Consolidation Analysis Resource”) and Carbon Calculator is a modelling engine “that allows you to model the before and after of a data centre consolidation”, said Ideas International CEO Stephen Bowhill, saving companies the capital they would have needed to spend on benchmarking.
“You can model your utilisation, you can model your virtualisation and you can see the resulting output of the data centre, the savings in carbon, the savings in power costs,” Bowhill told Environmental Management News.
“It is possible to make very substantial reductions in both carbon footprint and electricity costs, in the order of 80 to 90%, by simply harnessing the benefits of new server technology [and] our tools are invaluable resources for those companies embarking on server consolidation and carbon emission reduction projects.”
The tool assists companies “get a handle” on their potential savings.
“Without such a tool, what they might do is benchmark their own … spend time and cost running servers to find out what their performance is under real world conditions,” Bowhill said. “With our servers they can actually model what a likely performance is for the new server versus the old servers and get quicker to business casing the consolidation of a data centre.”
The Server CAR was previously available in a more limited form, but Ideas International recently refreshed it into a web-based service and added a carbon calculator that can harness environmental data that the company collects – data for heat and power and rack space from servers – to tabulate carbon outputs and power costs.
The integrated Carbon Calculator also calculates current and proposed electricity costs based on the location of the data centre – showing what savings and estimated emissions and reductions could be. The tool can deployed globally and “leveraged across an entire enterprise”, the company says.
Bowhill said the company has “all the major server vendors in the database”, with “15,000 configurations built in the Server CAR and it covers probably 99% of every data centres’ hardware, and it includes full history going back to over 10 years”.
He said clients using the tool include global banks and telecommunications companies from among the Fortune 1000 …“we’re not privy to the amount of cost they’ve saved, but the Server CAR is a fundamental part of their rationalisation of data centres”.
The next step for the tool would likely be additions that aid “return to investment” calculations, “and to also make it easier for people to collect and match the Server CAR database with asset management inventories”.
“We’re looking to add in some upload and data cleansing tools into Server CAR so that you can easily add your inventory into Server CAR, and to have some wizards around return of investment and potentially around which servers are in need of replacement because they’re not green enough or they’re too expensive versus what you can get today,” Bowhill said.
Source:
www.environmentalmanagementnews.net
