In order
to help IT managers better understand how they can reduce their
organisation's impact on the environment, Logicalis, a global
provider of high-performance technology, has unveiled an IT Carbon
and Power Consumption Calculator.
Available at
www.us.logicalis.com/green, the online tool is
designed to enable IT managers to quickly determine the current
amount of energy consumed by their datacentres and
the potential savings they
may achieve through server and storage virtualisation and
consolidation.
Logicalis say that
the tool will help IT departments assess their power consumption
and related carbon (CO2) emissions and demonstrates that
significant carbon footprint and energy cost savings can often be
achieved through virtualisation.
"Using the IT Carbon
and Power Consumption Calculator, IT managers can better
visualise the potential impact of reducing their current IT
infrastructure through a variety of virtualisation and
consolidation technologies, including blade servers and storage
arrays," said Logicalis Senior VP Eric Linxweiler. "We knew the
numbers would be surprising to many IT executives and we wanted to
provide a simple method for estimating power consumption and the
related potential savings for organisations."
The calculations
behind the Logicalis IT Carbon and Power Consumption Calculator are
based on information from a number of sources: Emission Factors -
US Department of Energy; power rates - US Energy Information
Administration; power loads per device - various IT vendor sources
based on average configurations of sample Logicalis customers; run
time - based on a full year with zero downtime, based on Logicalis
customer examples; tree and oil measurements - various
energy-related sources.
Even though the calculator is intended to provide a representation
of an organisation's overall energy usage and costs, Logicalis
concedes that it is not meant to provide a detailed assessment of a
specific IT environment's power usage, which would require a
detailed energy audit for each environment.