"Going Green" with Pinnacle Business Systems

Pinnacle Business Systems is striving to help our customers "Go Green." Virtualization has enabled companies to create new efficiencies in their data centers that can be applied to make data centers energy-sippers instead of energy-gulpers. The same intellectual property that enables data centers to achieve greater levels of server utilization, a reduction in server numbers and maintenance, and a shrinkage in data centers' space demands can monitor energy consumption for maximum efficiency, creating, in effect, a virtual power grid. A study by American Power Conversion Corporation found that 70% of data centers' energy-related costs are attributable to infrastructure systems.

Any plan to take a data center GREEN starts with an energy efficiency assessment, a comprehensive, fact-based analysis that prioritizes tactical plans across the data center to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy-related costs.

The savings can be substantial - more than 40% for an average 25,000 square foot data center. Based on the energy usage profile of the US, this savings equates to more than 7,400 tons of carbon emissions saved per year.

The assessment measures existing energy usage of cooling, electrical, and building systems, compares your profile to an industry standard, and pinpoints opportunities for improvement. These assessments address the obvious as well as complex solutions. For instance, in an estimated 70% of data centers, the raised floors, which were originally designed to promote cool air flow, are being used instead for storage, defeating their original purpose. At the other extreme, the thermodynamic lay-out of the data center plays a huge role in power consumption as well as computing reliability.

In another coming phase of the creation of a GREEN data center, virtualization dynamically manages the power and cooling needs of data centers by shifting workloads in logical partitions among machines to optimize performance of servers and storage devices. For instance, workloads can be shifted away from servers in data center hotspots and those servers can be powered down.

Another source of reduced power consumption: the ability to automatically put servers into "sleep" mode and reactivate them according to demand fluctuations can dramatically lower the power consumption of the servers going into "sleep" mode.

Pinnacle isn't alone in thinking that energy efficiency will be one of the major forces shaping society as well as technology in the years ahead. If you're interested in saving your company money while helping the environment, contact us today. Pinnacle Business Systems 1-800-311-0757.

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