Do all the good you can
By all the means you can
In all the ways you can
In all the places you can
At all the times you can
To all the people you can
As long as ever you can

It’s a quote from 18^th-century theologian and social reformer John Wesley, co-founder of the Methodist movement.  How can RightStar, an IT consultancy and BMC solution provider, do “all the good we can do?’ One way: by improving efficiency, and providing tools that reduce power consumption, we have an opportunity to participate in “green IT,” thereby helping reduce carbon emissions.

When visiting a government agency in Los Angeles this week, RightStar had the opportunity to meet with the agency’s data center manager and his team.  There they are challenged with supporting an aging data center and its approximate four to five hundred physical and virtual servers. Initially we were told that power consumption was not an issue because given the public sector nature of this account, power was “free” and did not hit the agency’s budget. 

What we discovered after visiting the account was that although power may be free, it was nearly impossible to increase due to an aging power infrastructure.  In fact, they admitted that it would cost far more to upgrade this infrastructure than they could afford, limiting new devices that they could plug into their grid.

RightStar can offer this agency and other budget strapped organizations value based solutions with green results.  Here are two ways:

• Virtualize. Server consolidation and virtualization is an important first step. By turning off older more power hungry servers with newer virtualized servers, significant power savings can be achieved. Couple the consolidation effort with BMC’s BladeLogic Server Automation Suite provides the appropriate information to automate key tasks as applications and systems are consolidated.
• Manage power consumption. Data Center Performance Management (DCPM) software tools like nlyte’s DCPM Suite provides real-time views into application instances and power relationships within both virtual and traditional server environments. This real-time power usage data monitoring provides an instant, accurate view of energy consumption throughout the data center.  As a result, the effects of planned or unplanned power server outages can be mitigated. In addition, because nlyte maps power usage of a server to its virtual instance, virtual server sprawl is controlled.

This means that with BMC’s BladeLogic Server Automation, nlyte’s DCPM, and professional services from RightStar, we can help agencies get a firm grasp on their data center costs, especially as applied to power management. This is an important first step to improving efficiency, reigning in energy use, costs, and CO2 emissions.