1E Launches Energy-Saving Server Software

PC power management company 1E has launched NightWatchman Server Edition, which aims to help enterprises reduce data centre energy bills, and to generate detailed reports on the reductions in both energy and CO2 emissions.

NightWatchman Server Edition (NSE) is a software-only product that can reduce a server’s energy consumption by up to 12 percent, according to 1E CEO and founder Sumir Karayi. It was revealed to eWEEK Europe by 1E in May,

Karayi said that a return on the investment could be achieved in under a year. The same underlying technology is used in the company’s existing PC-oriented NightWatchman product and, according to Karayi, Dell saved around $36 annually per PC using its power management technology.

1E said that NSE is targeting the £15 billion of IT spend wasted each year on servers not doing any useful work, and offers three key benefits: It analyses how much useful work a server is performing, the energy it is consuming and how much of its time is spent doing nothing.

This enables server managers to make informed decisions on decommissioning, consolidation, virtualisation and saving energy, reckoned the company.

NSE monitors activity and minimises energy consumption when there is no useful work being performed – the company calls this a drowsy server – and can save an average of 12 percent off its energy bill, claimed 1E. NSE does this without affecting either availability or responsiveness.

Product manager Andy Hawkins said that NSE works by being more aggressive than the operating system’s power profiles about action it takes when it detects that the server is not adding value. NSE’s assessment of the busyness of a server went beyond measuring CPU utilisation, and looked at individual applications and at I/O activity, he said.

NSE also provides dashboards and reports on the results of its power modelling algorithm. 1E said that it gathers energy consumption monitoring information from agents installed on servers both physical and virtual. NSE can report on energy consumption, cost, efficiency and CO2 emissions for all servers or group by location, department, and application.

Server managers can define groups as required, and can configure profiles of typical workloads in order to refine power savings. For example, a server running a particular application can be configured so that power savings don’t apply as long as the application is doing useful work.

Earlier research by 1E found that British users are likely to be more energy and environmentally conscious than their US counterparts.