Energy Matters

The 2009 EMC Information Calendar

IT Energy and the Environment: Simple Checklists

On Monday this week, I had the pleasure of presenting at the 2009 Technology Conference sponsored by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE). I was asked to present at a pre-conference session: “Green Computing – IT’s Social Responsibility.

First a bit on them:

• ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) is the membership organization and voice of the association profession. Founded in 1920, ASAE now has more than 22,000 association CEOs, staff professionals, industry partners, and consultant members.
• The Center for Association Leadership is the premier provider of learning and knowledge for the association community. The Center was founded in 2001.
• ASAE & The Center serve approximately 10,000 associations that represent more than 287 million people and organizations worldwide.

I discovered that their member associations range from a few dozen employees to a few thousand so their IT environments vary. A lot.

Most of the time my interactions are with customers who run large to very large IT operations and so I take my examples from those environments. The efficiency principles are the same for smaller environments but the scale is different enough that the savings may seem hardly worth it. Although, I’d say that every little bit helps.

Why waste any asset?

Calculated for Good

From time to time one of my EMC blogging colleagues will spend a bit of electronic ink on matters related to energy.  I find it encouraging when they do, since it has always been my objective to have the topic become woven into our discussion  - not stand alone.

On the other hand, they don't typically scoop me as Mark "Storagezilla" Twomey did yesterday. 

- No offense taken Mark.  Always happy for help toward the cause -

For nearly two years, EMC has had a Power Calculator available to EMC field staff and partners to assist in understanding specifics about power and cooling for different storage system configurations.

It's a cool tool.  (Get the puns if you can.) Makes it simple to calculate annual operational costs, weight, floor space, sound levels, and of course, power and cooling requirements.

It has been a terrific resource to help customers with guidance in comparisons of multiple configurations and sites, to help comparing current and previous hardware generations or in making storage tiering trade-offs among cost, performance, capacity and energy consumption.

So, useful as it has been to our own staff and partners, we wanted to make it available to our customers too. 

If you are an EMC customer, go have a look on Powerlink and let us know what you think.

This is where I would have said "Ta Da!" but Mark beat me to it.

 

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