Power is one the biggest overheads that enterprise customers have to deal with. With cost cutting or cost efficiency becoming the mantra for companies the world over, the onus is on IT managers and solution providers (SPs) to find ways to cut down power consumption.

VMware recently noted that most servers and desktops today are in use for only eight to 15 percent of the time they are powered on, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60 to 90 percent of the normal workload power even when idle. Of course, this power wastage can't be controlled by an IT manager. The only control he can put in place is invest in virtualization, which will reduce the number of servers deployed and therefore reduce the power consumption.

What is interesting is that enterprises are now waking up to the need to have power management system in place to improve their financial efficiency. Most of them know that energy efficiency is important but they don't know how to address it.

Also, the problem with power management is that it has become too vendor-specific. It is time that SPs rise up to the occasion and offer the best solutions, which are vendor independent, that will add value to their client's energy system in a quantifiable manner.

Sandeep Nair MD Emerson Network Power India

Need of the hour
The first thing that any customer will ask an SP while talking about energy solutions is the basis of calculation for finding out the real-time energy efficiency his company will enjoy. There are return on investment (RoI) calculators that are provided by most vendors which will give partners a tool to present the tangible benefits of the deployment of efficient power systems in a data center.

Now, when I talk about a data center, it need not be a huge setup with rows of servers and other high-end equipment. Even the server room of a small and medium enterprise (SME) qualifies as a data center. And according to various market reports, India will emerge as the second largest data center market after Japan by 2011. This is not surprising because India has already made itself the outsourcing backbone of the world.

IT is big fish in any data center. But unfortunately they are also the generators and consumers of heat and energy, which in turn pushes up the overheads. We figured this out by a simple experiment that we carried out internally. When you want to overload a UPS to find out its actual performance you overload the KVA limit. So if it is a 400KVA UPS you put in more power and it in turn emits more heat. What we have done is found a system where that heat is used to feed power back into the UPS.

What partners can do
Partners need to map an IT equipment procurement policy which favors low power processors and high efficiency power supplies. Over time, get your clients to phase out the inefficient servers with those blade servers consuming lower power. Also, get them to consider virtualization because this means lesser deployment of physical hardware.

Prepare a RoI and total cost of ownership (TCO) chart, which shows the approximate period when the customer is likely to enjoy the benefits of the energy saving equipment deployed.

For instance Emerson has found that for every 1Watt (W) saved at the component level, an additional .18W and .31W is saved at the AC/DC level and another .04W is saved at the power distribution level. This goes further down the line and saves .14W at the UPS level, 1.07W at the cooling level and .07W at the building switch gear/transformer. In short, as part of our cascade effect theory we have deduced that for every 1W saved at the processor level, 2.84W of total consumption is saved!

Enterprises are ahead
The early adopters for any technology are enterprises and in power management solutions too it is no different. Having said that there is an increasing interest evinced even by SME customers for efficient power mapping and deployment of power efficient products and power management solutions per se.

This is because energy utilization has a direct impact on the cost efficiency of any organization. So if the operating cost is impaired that this affects the competitiveness of the company. Also, alternate power costs more than prime power, so companies have no option but to figure out ways to cut down on their power costs.

While doing this customers take a holistic view for RoI.

For instance, when you are driving a car, the measure of output is kilometers and the measure of input is fuel and you can gauge how well the car is performing.

But with a data center there is no measure for gauging power efficiency. Since there is no unified measure you can offer to your customers for finding this out, what you can do is measure the quantum of energy that they can save.

What you can offer your customers is reliability, availability of the power and set some strict service level agreements (SLAs) with them. The customer is not concerned which equipment you are proposing to deploy and how you will set them up as long as these three criteria are met.

At the same time, partners are worried that if they ask their customers to go for energy efficient products, which are right now priced higher than the regular products, then the customer might go elsewhere. This is why it is important to engage with the customer on the TCO and communicate it in a quantifiable fashion. This adds more value and significance to the entire proposition presented. At the end of the day, the customer only understands one thing-business. And business understands only one thing-RoI.

VINITA BHATIA
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in

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