HP has announced its new Green Business Technology initiative with additions to its HP Thermal Logic portfolio that include power-capping server technologies and energy-efficiency services designed to reduce costs and extend the life of data centers.

In traditional data centers, customers invest millions in capital expenditures to create a redundant power infrastructure that maximizes uptime. Additionally, to ensure power availability, IT administrators overprovision server energy.

HP Dynamic Power Capping helps customers reallocate power and cooling resources in the data center by dynamically setting or “capping” the power drawn by the servers. This eliminates the need for overprovisioning by precisely identifying how much power is actually required to run each server and setting a limit based on that usage. As a result, companies reclaim their overprovisioned energy to improve the capacity of their data center.

To expand the data center, companies can increase the number of servers threefold, using the same power allocation and infrastructure. This allows them to recover up to $16 million in capital expenditures for a 1-megawatt data center. At the same time, it can also reduce ongoing energy consumption by up to 25 percent and save nearly $300,000 a year.

“With these new solutions from HP, customers are able to drive down data center costs by reducing energy consumption and, at the same time, minimize environmental impact,” said Peter Gross, chief executive officer, EYP Mission Critical Facilities, an HP company. “HP’s Green Business Technology initiative is built on decades of innovation and experience in data center design and deployment, resulting in solutions that empower CIOs to turn energy efficiency into business benefits that impact the bottom line.”

Better use of power and cooling resources

HP Thermal Logic is a set of technologies embedded in HP products and services to deliver a more efficient data center. It combines measurement and control of power and cooling resources with industry-leading, energy-efficient product and solution design.

HP Dynamic Power Capping, part of the HP Thermal Logic portfolio, is the industry’s first solution to offer a threefold increase in data center capacity. This is accomplished with hardware-based control of system power, which places a limit on, or “caps,” the power that is used by the equipment without compromising performance. Additionally, HP Insight Control Environment software provides accurate measurement of power consumption, allowing administrators to gain insight into actual power and cooling usage via thermal dashboards.

Minimize environmental impact

HP has been committed to sustainable IT within the data center since the early 1990s. HP research and development teams continue to solve energy problems using sophisticated modeling to better provision cooling resources, allocate computing workloads and reclaim power capacity in constrained data centers. As a result, the company is introducing new HP Energy Efficiency Design and Analysis Services to address data center energy challenges:

* Energy Efficiency Analysis offers a comprehensive assessment of a data center using HP’s proprietary return on investment modeling tool. It provides scenarios and cost benefits along with detailed plans for energy-efficiency improvements, investment payback and facility reliability.
* Energy Efficiency Design provides designs for new buildings or retro-commissioning existing facilities for compliance with worldwide environmentally accredited standards, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and the Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM). HP also uses its expertise in high-density cooling, critical power and energy reduction design to create facilities that meet the specific business requirements of customers.

Reduce energy consumption

HP system practices and product design are key drivers to achieving data center energy and cost savings as well as business growth:

* The HP ProLiant BL460c G5 Server Blade has been completely redesigned to maximize energy efficiency and optimized for power-constrained environments. This server uses 44 fewer watts per blade, saving more than 700 watts per enclosure compared to its predecessor – up to a 25 percent energy-efficiency improvement.
* HP is among the first companies working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to qualify servers with an ENERGY STAR® rating. New HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers are expected to meet or exceed ENERGY STAR standards by early 2009.
* The HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure has been enhanced with a new HP 24000W High Efficiency Hot-Plug Power Supply. This provides higher efficiency than existing power supply units and also reduces losses at low loads by placing half the power supply in standby.

More information about these new offerings and the HP Green Business Technology Initiative are available here.