A no-nonsense startup that wasn't afraid to name itself after exactly what it does, Low Power Company—otherwise known as Lopoco—has launched a new line of high-efficiency servers, which the company claims can save any enterprise more than half their data center operating costs.
This is an astonishing claim when it comes to the real world. Cutting operating expenses by 40 to 50 percent on a multimillion-dollar data center can result in the type of substantial bottom-line savings—often in six figures—that causes accountants and boards of directors to promote people.
Lopoco's servers, built on industry-standard hardware without costly or custom chips, are designed to provide substantial energy and cost savings compared with servers from conventional vendors. Lopoco's servers also use conventional form factors, CPUs and server options already familiar to users.
Companies—from large data centers to small and midsize businesses (SMBs)—are wilting under the energy costs of power-hungry servers, which typically spend more than 90 percent of their lives at idle. To counteract this, Lopoco has engineered low-power servers with proprietary IT which use only about 20 percent of the energy and 50 percent of the space of conventional servers. The Lopoco servers became available July 18.
Currently, Mountain View, Calif.-based Lopoco offers four types of servers: 12-core, 8-core, 4-core and microservers. They can be used for a number of roles: hypervisors; typical server applications, such as email, database, file sharing and Web services (Apache/IIS/PHP/Java); and cloud technologies such as Hadoop and Hive.
When using these applications, Lopoco's servers can save the average company as much as 80 percent of OPEX for combined power and cooling costs, said CEO and co-founder Andrew Sharp. Additional savings can be realized on power distribution units (PDUs) and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) equipment.
"We started Lopoco because we saw a void in the server market," Sharp said.
Lopoco's servers already have been deployed in a number of enterprises, including Light and Motion Industries. "We have purchased systems from Lopoco and all are performing flawlessly," said CEO Daniel Emerson, CEO of Light and Motion Industries. "We are also pleased with the power savings. I would recommend them to any small business looking to move off the power hogs that pass for servers these days."
Lopoco was founded by a number of Silicon Valley veterans that have held executive and technical roles at companies such as Convergent Technologies, Sun, HP and Yahoo.
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