Going Green: Vendors Deliver Solutions to Save Money – the World

Last year, data centers in the United States devoured 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, forking out $4.5 billion for the privilege. Both of those numbers had doubled from the year 2000, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a report released in early August. Experts say ever-increasing bandwidth needs are to blame — more data are stored digitally and applications such as video hog capacity. The consumption sucks up precious power and the output blasts heat and emissions into the atmosphere. Not only does this cost millions of dollars, it also hastens climate change.

Communications companies are more than aware of the problems. And, whether spurred by Al Gore’s inconvenient truths, a desire to cut power bills or attract new customers, many are going green.

Turning Green
It’s well known that industry titans Sun Microsystems Inc., HP and IBM Corp. have developed eco-friendly servers and other computing gear, as well as assessment services and assistance in making their data centers more efficient. Smaller vendors like Avaya Inc., Extreme Networks Inc., Foundry Networks Inc. and Mitel Networks Corp. also are delivering ‘green’ gear. Some of these products cost more upfront than their less-efficient counterparts, but they promise to save energy — and dollars — in the long run.

That’s all good news for large enterprises, who are coming up against power and cooling issues and growing costs in the data center, writes Ian Brown, a senior analyst at Ovum. He adds that these customers also probably could benefit from service providers getting in on the action, and vice versa.

“The surprise is that IT services vendors have done relatively little in the way of jumping on the bandwagon,” he writes in an analysis following Sun’s recent news on its eco-friendly efforts. “What better way to attack energy efficiency than by 'outsourcing' the problem to an IT services vendor's shared data center? The future promises legislation around carbon footprints and pressure to reduce energy consumption. For most large enterprises, running power-efficient data centers is not a core competency; for infrastructure services providers it should be.”

Sun Kits
While service providers may not be stepping up to the plate in terms of helping enterprises manage their data center-related energy consumption, HP, IBM and Sun are.

For example, Sun, which launched its Eco Innovation Initiative in November 2005, in late August of this year continued on that tack by announcing Sun Eco Ready Kits and a suite of Eco services.

The Sun Eco Assessment Kit, The Sun Eco Optimization Kit and the Sun Eco Virtualization Kit were designed to assist customers in creating energy-efficient data centers while saving money. The Sun Eco Assessment Kit provides a methodical approach to analyzing data center energy efficiency, using a combination of assessment services for systems, storage and data center infrastructure. The Sun Eco Optimization Kit helps customers optimize, consolidate, refresh and recycle their hardware infrastructure while taking advantage of special offers on Sun systems, storage and services. As part of this solution, customers can upgrade to the Sun Fire UltraSPARC IV+ and Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, combining extreme optimization, utilization, and reliability in platforms to protect current customer investments. The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit offers virtualization solutions that enable better asset utilization and data center energy efficiency.

At the core of Sun's virtualization offering is the Solaris 10 OS, including Solaris Containers, which enables companies to securely run multiple software-isolated applications on a single system to consolidate applications onto fewer servers.

In addition, Sun announced the new Sun Eco Services Suite to help customers improve their data center energy utilization, tune their cooling air distribution and other infrastructure systems that can impact both operational costs and service levels.

The Sun Eco Services Suite encompasses:

• The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Basic, which is designed to maximize power and cooling efficiency in the IT infrastructure running Web-based services.
• The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Advanced, which provides technical evaluation of data center energy use, cooling capacity, rack placement, air distribution and other environmental factors.
• The Sun Eco Cooling Efficiency Service for Datacenter, which helps recover misused air conditioning capacity and direct it to the areas where it is needed, improving hardware cooling and increasing redundancy while helping reduce capital and operating costs.
• The Sun Eco Optimization Service for Datacenter, which provides direct assistance with implementation of data centers.

Savings Account
As for the smaller vendors, Mitel delivers energy-efficient IP phones, which it says provided one customer $500,000 in savings over three years.

The phones use 3.3 watts each. Overall, lower power consumption means fewer switches, which means fewer heating and cooling systems. The amount of hardware needed to support the phones is reduced significantly, the company says. “Going green, in many respects, has very tangible results,” says Christian Szpilfogel, vice president of strategic business for Mitel.

Avaya execs think the same.

“This work is very refreshing in that it’s very easy to come up with very hard-dollar, cost-justified numbers,” adds Bill Riley, marketing manager at Avaya.

He’s talking about Avaya’s partnership with Extreme Networks. Together, the companies have developed an IP phone system that uses up to 6.5 watts per phone and lets IT administrators program employees’ phones to turn off at certain times. Those capabilities save a lot of money. Say a school district has 1,250 phones across 25 buildings, Riley says. If 1,000 of those devices are turned off during summer break, “that looks like an 80 percent power savings” over the course of one year.

Similarly, corporations can program employees’ phones to turn off at 5 p.m. and restart at 6 a.m.

For its part, Foundry Networks has unveiled a new switch — the BigIron RX-32 — that fits more functionality into one unit (cutting down on the number of switches a customer must buy) and produces less heat.

“Going green can actually make more economical sense” than not, says Ananda Rajagopal, a product marketing manager for Foundry.

Eco Barriers
Maybe so, but end users won’t rush to replace their infrastructure with greener technology, says Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst of research firm Commfusion LLC. For one thing, there are budgets to consider. Pleasant likens the principle to the car industry — many consumers might want to drive expensive hybrids but aren’t ready to replace their perfectly serviceable, gas-powered vehicles.

Plus, there’s some skepticism that environmentally friendly systems might not work as well as familiar, existing networks. Companies “are going to have to prove that the new technologies or systems are every bit as good as what [end users] already have,” Pleasant says.

Still, she has faith that many executives feel a sense of responsibility to improve their companies and the world.

To find out more about Sun’s eco-friendly solutions, read “Here Comes the Sun” in the October issue of xchange.

Avaya Inc. www.avaya.com
Commfusion LLC www.commfusion.com
Extreme Networks Inc. www.extremenetworks.com
Environmental Protection Agency www.epa.gov
Foundry Networks Inc. www.foundrynet.com
Mitel Networks Corp. www.mitel.com
Ovum www.ovum.com
Sun Microsystems Inc. www.sun.com

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