Environment

We’re all familiar with those blue and white Energy Star stickers that show us the average energy uses on our home appliances like refrigerators and clothes driers. Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released Energy Star specification for servers. The efficiency requirements are a positive step in creating an industry standard to help reduce power consumption.

The focus on energy efficiency isn’t just about being tree-hugger-green, but more about saving green – as in dollars. Limitations on space, power and cooling capacity combined with rising energy costs can give data center managers incredible headaches. IT departments are counted on to maximize compute capacity without expanding their server footprint and to find ways to effectively cool these power-intensive systems—all while working within the boundaries restricted operating budgets.

Dell understands those challenges, so we partnered with the EPA to develop the new energy-efficiency specification for servers. Not only that, but we just released details of its first Dell PowerEdge servers that meet the new Energy Star specifications. In fact, Dell is the first major vendor to certify entire platforms to meet the exact performance per watt requirements with the Dell PowerEdge R610 and R710 server platforms qualifying for the new Energy Star specification.

Our focus on energy efficiency isn’t new and didn’t start with the development of Energy Star specifications. In 2007, Dell introduced Energy Smart to help customers maximize performance per watt for their particular workload and meet operating expense goals. Dell PowerEdge servers with Energy Smart technology include Dell Energy Smart power supplies, Dell Energy Smart system design, Dell Active Power Controller (DAPC), Dell Energy Smart management and high-effi­ciency processors and memory to achieve the highest performance per watt for standards-based servers.

We build PowerEdge servers with a comprehensive, system-wide approach to balancing performance with energy efficiency by focusing on design, measurement, control and reporting for energy-efficient infrastructures that reduce total cost of ownership.

• Design: The holistic approach follows efficient design principles across electrical, mechanical, and thermal systems and combining them with intelligent component selection.
• Measurement: Real-time, accurate measurements of performance, power consumption and thermals feed into the Energy Smart control algorithms so the system can make intelligent decisions to help optimize performance-per-watt.
• Control: The architecture incorporates firmware running on a high performance baseboard management controller embedded in the system to provide an intelligent, centralized control mechanism to help determine performance-per-watt optimizations.
• Reporting: The architecture incorporates the Dell Management Console powered by Altiris from Symantec provides in-band reporting, while the standard Web Services for Management protocol provides out-of-band reporting to make intelligent performance and efficiency decisions.

I had a chance to catch up with Daniel Bounds, Dell PowerEdge solutions manager and energy efficiency guru, to hear more about the new Energy Star specifications. Here is what he had to say.

You can't read an issue of BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal or other major business publications without reading about "green IT." The same goes for IT-oriented outlets like Cnet, InformationWeek and eWeek.

The industry has come to realize that not only is consuming less energy good for the environment but it is also good for your company's bottom line. But how do you select an IT vendor while keeping an eye on these issues?

Dell recently commissioned Forrester Research to produce a study devoted to helping IT organizations improve one of their cornerstone processes — IT procurement. They researched and analyzed the state of green IT procurement, focusing on criteria to evaluate suppliers' overall sustainability policies and practices. While Forrester drew upon their years of extensive research in green IT, they also conducted 30 in-depth interviews with industry consortia, environmental NGOs, and a several internal stakeholders at Dell. Additionally, they conducted in-depth interviews with enterprise-class customers in North America and Europe (note that none of these companies were identified or selected by Dell and are not necessarily Dell customers.). Forrester spoke with IT practitioners at these organizations to understand if and how they are incorporating green criteria into their evaluations and selections of IT systems and IT suppliers.

The study shows that IT procurement will be a significant point of leverage for companies looking to improve the sustainability of their computing infrastructures. Forrester points out in the study that "Buyers struggle with this in part because there are no standard metrics and decision criteria that enable IT organizations to assess the green credentials of IT vendors."

From the report, I've pulled five suggestions on how companies can structure their request-for-proposal (RFP) documents. The report goes into great detail on suggested weighting for each of these areas and how to assess them.

1. Corporate environmental governance. These criteria are designed to illuminate a tech vendor’s overall commitment to sustainability by examining its goals and the broad processes it has in place for measuring and reporting progress toward those goals.
2. Corporate operations. These criteria focus on how aggressively a supplier is tackling the environmental impact of its own internal facilities and operations.
3. Supply chain. This includes a couple of crucial criteria that examine how a vendor is managing the environmental practices of its suppliers.
4. Stakeholder engagement. These criteria look at how proactive and participatory a vendor’s environmental programs are. They ask about a company’s engagement with important stakeholders, including customers, employees, and the rest of the IT industry.
5. Design for environment. This section focuses on how the supplier translates its sustainability practices into the products and services that it delivers to customers.

You can read a summary of the report here or if you'd like to download as a .pdf to send to your procurement teams, click here.

Earth Day is the time of year when everywhere you turn it’s green. The newspaper, radio, and of course TV: several broadcasting networks are featuring special green-themed logos and programming.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see thousands of “green” consumers at this year’s Go Green Expo in NYC. I had the pleasure of speaking at the conference on Saturday about Dell’s green IT strategy. While I'm usually I’m talking to CIOs and business executives about the importance of being green, this conference provided me with an opportunity to connect with another important group—data center end-users or consumers. Besides, it’s not everyday I get to follow Mariel Hemmingway or present before Nigel Barker.

Given today’s digital lifestyle, more and more consumers are becoming concerned about where their data comes from. When they access e-mail, download a video or share photos they want to utilize the greenest technology or systems. Many now realize that a simple Internet search could access a server database say in China, affecting the carbon emissions in that country. Consumers understand that someone has to power all the sheep throwing on Facebook and know that it’s better for the planet if it’s powered by green servers. The energy efficiency of our data centers is no longer just a business challenge, it’s a global, widespread issue affecting everyone. This was one of the topics I discussed during my keynote and it seemed to resonate well with the audience.

So my green data center crusade continues. This week I’m in Washington D.C. with Paul Bell, president of Dell’s Global Public-Sector, talking to federal-agency leaders and policymakers about energy-efficient IT.

I, along with others at Dell, continue to spread the word about the energy efficiency of our products, our efforts to be the greenest technology company on the planet and how we’re helping customers meet their environmental goals.

Until next time, Happy Earth Day!

Last week we announced our Efficient Enterprise portfolio of integrated products and services. This week we are revealing the details of our five new blade, rack and tower 11^th generation Dell PowerEdge servers that are now available. These new servers were officially debuted at the Intel Xeon 5500 series processor launch event this afternoon in Santa Clara, California, and Intel’s Boyd Davis wrote about it earlier today on Direct2Dell.

Despite economic challenges, many companies and organizations want to take advantage of the significant performance increases paired with the cost savings from energy efficient technologies and virtualization. The majority of data centers were built during the dot-com boom and are reaching their 10-year lifespan, so it’s no surprise that many companies are in need of a refresh. Dell designed its new servers with input from hundreds of IT pros worldwide with a theme in mind: do more with less. The new server portfolio does that by simplifying data center operations, improving performance and energy efficiency, and lowering total cost of ownership.

Before we take a look under the hood, let’s check out the sleek design. Not only do these new servers look cool enough to be in Bruce Wayne’s lair in Batman “The Dark Knight,” but they have also won 2009 iF Germany Product Design Awards. It’s not just about good looks. The new servers have system and image commonality across platforms with logical layout of components and power supply placement allows for straight forward installation and redeployment.

What’s New Inside?

• Simplify with the Industry’s First Embedded Systems Management: Dell put a lot of the systems management media you need for deployment, diagnostics, update, and configuration right on the motherboard. Unified Server Configurator powered by LifeCycle Controller radically simplifies IT processes so you can deploy operating systems 43 percent faster.
• Save with Industry Leading Energy Efficiency: Energy Smart technologies in the new servers cut power usage while cranking up performance capacity. We expect Dell PowerEdge 11^th generation servers to have the industry’s highest performance per watt, according to SPECpower_ssj2008 results to be published later today.
• Do More with Leading Virtualization Performance: In addition to the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, the PowerEdge servers have embedded hypervisors from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O. All of that emphasis on virtualization paid off. Dell PowerEdge R710 achieved the industry’s highest VMmark score for 2U servers, topping all 2- and 4-socket platforms in virtualization performance.
• More Horsepower to Do More: the new servers provide up to 50 percent more performance over previous generation servers to run those massive databases and applications more efficiently. According to SPECjbb2005 Dell PowerEdge servers lead the industry in performance.

We’re excited by this major refresh of our server portfolio and by what it can do to advance IT for our customers. If you want the details on how you can do more with less in your data center with the new 11^th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers, check out our benchmarks.

 Dell has made aggressive strides with the "greenness" of our enterprise products and solutions in an effort to help our customers meet their environmental and cost goals. Our hard work is paying off...

 According to a recent GreenFactor study released by Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe, Dell is the number one green technology brand among IT buyers. Strategic Oxygen surveyed more than 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers, including CXOs, CIOs and IT Managers, in 11 different countries. Take a look at Lionel’s Direct2Dell post for a bit more context on the topic.

 While we're happy to see the industry taking notice of our efforts, our work isn’t finished yet. We're still helping customers find their hidden data centers by focusing on IT productivity; we just released new infrastructure products that help reduce IT complexity and cost while improving power and cooling in the data center; and finally, we're working on our next generation of enterprise products and technologies that will continue to set new standards for energy efficiency. Time to get back to work!