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Geoeye is a company with an eye on the environment.
The Dulles, Va., company, which provides high-resolution satellite images to government agencies such as the Department of Defense as well as to commercial customers, uses solar-powered satellites, and the images are used in research such as analyzing changes in the Earths oceans.
President and CEO Matthew OConnell donated $2,500 for trees that employees planted this month at a Washington school. In March, the company established the GeoEye Foundation, which provides free, high-resolution imagery to universities to support research on land-use planning, environmental planning, urban development and climate change.
So it made sense that when Appistry came out with an energy-saving version of its grid-enabling infrastructure software, GeoEye would jump on board.
“We purchased Appistrys product because of power consumption savings,” said Mark Brender, vice president of marketing at GeoEye. “GeoEye is an Earth-oriented company, and we support green initiatives as a good citizen and a smart business.”
Appistrys EnergySaver is part of the St. Louis companys EAF (Enterprise Application Fabric) and allows application fabric administrators to define policies establishing acceptable system workload levels, said Sam Charrington, vice president of product management and marketing. EnergySaver, launched in August, constantly monitors application load and—based on the EnergySaver policy in effect—automatically powers down computers when application use is low and then reactivates them when additional capacity is required.
EAF virtualizes large-scale applications across computers in the data center, making development and deployment easier. With EnergySaver, customers will be able to take advantage of the scalability provided by EAF while slashing operational costs, Charrington said. Customers also can define policies minimizing power consumption and cut electricity costs, cooling requirements and carbon dioxide emissions.
Charrington said Appistry first started down the “green” path based on feedback the company received from some of its Washington-area customers, primarily in government, who were concerned about the tight regional constraints there.
“They are under a lot of pressure to reduce power consumption to the extent that it limits their ability to deploy some of the new applications that theyd like to roll out,” he said. “They asked us if we could help, and we realized that we could. Thus, EnergySaver.” Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini said the Appistry solution is novel in its focus on conserving energy and helping the environment.
“Its an interesting technology,” said Pezzini, who had ranked Appistry a key player in a Gartner report he co-authored, titled “Cool Vendors in Application Platforms and Service-Oriented Architecture, 2005.”
But while Appistrys EnergySaver will work well for most applications, it may not be able to support all software without some modifications. It is not a feature every application can take advantage of, Pezzini said.
“If you have an existing WebSphere or JBoss application, it may take some reworking or re-engineering to run on the Appistry EnergySaver platform,” Pezzini said.
That said, for GeoEye, deploying the application made perfect sense. Brender noted his CEOs decision to buy the trees that were planted at the school.
“This is indicative of the companys interest in the environment, and Appistrys initiatives to reduce power consumption fall in line with how we feel at GeoEye,” he said.
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