EMC Aims to Cut Data Center Power, Cooling Costs

The company introduces new services and tools designed to help customers create more energy-efficient data centers.

EMC on Dec. 6 introduced two new products to help customers create energy-efficient data centers. EMC Energy Efficiency Services is a set of assessment and planning services designed to help customers maximize energy efficiency in the data center, while the EMC Power Calculator enables EMC to provide customers with accurate energy-consumption data and cooling requirements for EMC Symmetrix DMX-3, EMC Clariion CX3 UltraScale and EMC Celerra networked storage systems based on their specific configuration and workload requirements, company officials said.
"As energy costs continue to rise and power grid capacity is pushed to the brink, energy provisioning and consumption are emerging as critical concerns for todays CIOs, IT administrators and facility managers," said Paul Goetz, EMC vice president of Consulting and Management Services, in a statement. "Energy costs represent the second largest line item associated with datacenter operations today, consuming more than 10 percent of a typical enterprises IT budget--a number that many experts predict will rise quickly in just a few years. With these new services and tools, EMC is helping enterprises achieve optimal utilization of their IT infrastructure, reduce operational costs, minimize the risk of power-related outages and shortages, and reduce their environmental footprint." With EMC Energy Efficiency Services, EMC Global Services professionals assess a customers data center environment and their IT assets as well as plan, design and implement changes to better manage and forecast power consumption in the data center, according to company officials. As part of the service, EMC professionals evaluate customer workloads and configurations to determine both current and projected energy consumption across IT assets. This includes servers and storage; data center capacity and utilization; and power and cooling costs associated with mechanical, structural and maintenance considerations, EMC officials said. EMC officials said these services can help lower data center and IT infrastructure costs for server and storage power consumption, resolve existing and potential heat-related issues likely to create outages, and provide options for power savings associated with future expansion. Click here to read about CIOs biggest data center concerns. The EMC Power Calculator for EMC Symmetrix DMX-3, Clariion CX3 and Celerra networked storage systems is offered at no cost and is a unique, EMC-developed tool designed to estimate actual energy consumption and cooling requirements based on customer-tailored configuration specifications and workload forecasts. "Enterprises look to IT vendors for solutions that deliver a clear return on investment, but traditional ROI calculations often fail to account for long-term energy consumption and the associated impact on total cost of ownership, which can be more significant than the original equipment costs," said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, in a statement. "However, by utilizing EMCs new comprehensive Energy Efficiency services and deploying the companys innovative, power-friendly solutions, organizations can help ensure that they achieve measurable cost reductions across their IT infrastructures." Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.