1e Brings 'Drowsy' Computing to Data Center Energy Management

Published October 16, 2009

LONDON, United Kingdom — Get ready for the next big thing in green IT: "drowsy" computing. Power management company 1e today unveiled a new software tool that will let company servers work smarter -- and lazier.

1e's new Nightwatchman Server Edition takes the principles of its PC power management software and expands it to measure and manage server efficiency, which the company's CEO says can make a significant dent in what is currently more than $4 billion in wasted energy use every year.

"This is probably one of the largest causes of inefficiency within the data center space today," Sumir Karayi, 1e's CEO, explained. "In terms of the IT industry, it has so many pockets of waste today, that our target is massive."

NightWatchman Server Edition brings an innovative tool to bear in power management: the company has developed a method to measure "useful" computing -- the type done by employees or clients in the course of daily work -- from "housekeeping" computing, which is necessary but can be highly inefficient.

The idea behind "drowsy" computing is to allow NightWatchman to tell when servers are running housekeeping programs, whether antivirus software or indexing checks, and force the server software -- and in capable models the hardware -- into the lowest energy-using state possible, while still running.

"It's still working," Karayi said, "it's just working slower, like it's drowsy."

1e predicts that it can cut data center energy use by 12 percent with no impact in performance. Couple those savings with PUE improvements from the reduced cooling needs of drowsy servers, and a company with 1,000 servers can save $1 million over four years, Karayi said -- and the ROI on the product is less than one year.

The announcement comes at the same time as the release of a new report 1e conducted with the Alliance to Save Energy that surveyed IT managers on their server efficiency and energy use. Almost half of respondents said that more than 15 percent of their company's servers run around the clock -- at full power -- without being actively used on a daily basis.

While there are tools for measuring how servers are utilized in the data center, Karayi said those results only show part of the picture, and that the smart measurements in the NightWatchman server edition offer a much more sophisticated analysis.

PC power management has long been an easy way to gather the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency in any organization -- it is one of the simple tools the U.K. government put to work to save millions of pounds as part of its green IT project -- but there has yet to be a tool to address server energy use in the way 1e's new software claims to perform.

More details about NightWatchman Server Edition are available at 1e.com, and you can download the 1E Server Energy and Efficiency Report from GreenerComputing.com.

[Editor's note: This article was slightly updated to reflect that 1e measures server efficiency, not utilization.]

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1e Brings 'Drowsy' Computing to Data Center Energy Management

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