sustainableIT, the pioneer and market leader in green IT solutions and PC power management in South Africa, today announced the launch of NightWatchman Server Edition, from 1E, to the local market.
“With NightWatchman Server Edition, 1E is targeting the $24.7 billion of IT spend wasted globally each year on servers not doing any useful work,” says Tim James, Director of sustainableIT, 1E's local business partner.
Traditional monitoring tools primarily focus on availability and performance, but provide little insight on whether a server is providing any business value.
NightWatchman Server Edition provides detailed efficiency and power reporting so that decisions such as decommissioning wasteful servers are made much simpler, and with productive servers energy savings can be further enhanced with Drowsy Server technology.
“The number of unused servers in the world today is staggering. A recent study showed that 4.7 million servers in the world are not actively being used. Today, organisations are paying for energy, hardware, maintenance and software licensing, even when servers are not providing any business value. Given the economic and environmental issues we face today, there has never been a greater need for efficiency, especially in servers and data centres,” says Sumir Karayi, CEO and founder of 1E.
The key features of NightWatchman Server Edition are:
* Useful Work analysis - revolutionises the measurement of efficiency across servers by showing the useful work a server is performing, the energy it is consuming and whether there is any waste. This enables server managers to make informed decisions on decommissioning, consolidation, virtualisation and saving energy, with a degree of confidence not available until now.
* Drowsy Server - continuously monitors activity and dynamically minimises energy consumption when there is no Useful Work being performed without impacting the server availability. When a server is in a 'drowsy' state, this provides an average saving of 12% in energy costs.
* Instant visibility dashboards and reports - sophisticated power modelling algorithm enables energy consumption monitoring across all servers without any additional hardware. Report on energy consumption, cost, efficiency and CO2 emissions for all servers or group by location, department, application and more.
sustainableIT has also today made available an independent global study of server managers for download from their Web site. The study, conducted by Kelton Research, commissioned in association with the Alliance to Save Energy, revealed that the world's largest IT departments have millions of servers that are not doing anything useful.
“Contrary to popular belief, one of the largest causes of energy and IT operational waste in data centres are servers that are simply not being used. The savings from decommissioning non-productive servers cannot be ignored. Organisations need better information on server efficiency and more effective ongoing server energy management,” comments Sumir Karayi, CEO, 1E.
The key findings from the 1E/Alliance to Save Energy study are:
* Fifteen percent or more servers are not doing anything useful, according to 72% of server managers.
* Over eight in 10 (83%) admit they do not have an adequate grasp of server utilisation.
* Seventy-two percent of server managers polled admitted that they rely on CPU utilisation as their measure of server efficiency. (Note: a CPU is busy whether the server is providing a service to the business or doing routine maintenance tasks, which provide no business value.)
* Sixty-three percent rely on manual checks, trial and error or wait until something is broken to find unused servers.
* Sixty-five percent have virtualised unused servers and almost one in three (32%) state they are actively seeking a solution to virtual server sprawl.
* Forty-one are concerned about and a further 43% are using change control procedures or software to manage virtual server sprawl, a phenomenon where a disproportionate number of virtual servers have low or zero utilisation.
* Seventy-five percent admit that their company's mandate to deliver high levels of IT service internally get in the way of measuring and improving server efficiency.
The release will come as welcome relief for many who are looking to save as much energy as possible to keep costs in check. In South Africa, where we are facing anticipated energy rate hikes of 45% for the next three years, server, data centre, and facilities managers are coming under increasing pressure to reduce energy use. “NightWatchman on the desktop is a fantastic opportunity to reduce energy on corporate networks. NightWatchman Server Edition builds on this success and provides yet more opportunity for ICT departments to do their bit to reduce unnecessary cost,” James concludes.
Share