IT vendors are running like fury and tripping each other up to scramble onto the GREEN bandwagon. In the age of global warming, nothing aside from your product actually working and being useful, could be more important than it being GREEN. It was surely this that prompted Astaro to issue a press release with the title:

Astaro Security Technology Facilitates Greener Networks.

Good for Astaro, I think to myself, until I read the subheading which proclaims:

Hardware consolidation limits waste and reduces electricity consumption by up to 1000%.

Really?

Now, I’ve replaced incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent ones, set timers on household appliances and set my computer to low power consumption, not just for the sake of the planet but to reduce my electricity bills, and it never occurred to me that I’d be able to reduce those bills by even 50 percent, never mind 1000%!!

I read on.

Burlington, MA – January 10, 2008 – Astaro Corporation (www.astaro.com), a leader in delivering unified threat management (UTM) security appliances, today announced that its technology allows customers to remove up to 10 stand-alone products, limiting waste and reducing the electricity required to power network security applications by between 50% to 1000%, depending on the number of point products currently fielded, the size of the solutions, and their respective power draw.

What an astonishing achievement! Suppose as a business, that you pay just $10,000 per month for your supply of electrons. Well, implement Astaro’s astonishing technology and the bill reduces to, er… OK, Let me calculate. If the bill reduces by 100%, the reduction is $10,000 per month, so 1000% means a reduction of $100,000 per month. So that means the electricity company are going to have to pay you $90,000 per month. I can’t wait till Astaro brings out a product like this for the home user!

The Genuine Greenness of Client Virtualization

Now I’ve got that off my chest, let me hail a technology that undoubtedly does reduce electricity bills and is provided by companies like IBM, HP and Dell, all of whom understand the troublesome mathematics of percentages. Client virtualization, the act of running PCs in a virtual environment on a server or blade, is gloriously green. Here are the simple facts:

• The typical PC consumes 150 watts.
• The typical thin client consumes as little as 10 watts
• A blade or server could consume as much power as a PC, but you can fit many PCs onto a single blade (or server) if you buy sensible configurations.
• By transferring the PC processing power to the data center you also put it into an environment that is likely to be less expensive to cool.

One example IBM gave me, in a recent briefing, showed a power reduction of 90 percent in an installation with 800 PCs, translating into power savings of $30 per client per year. Where you have predictable and fairly light PC usage, such as in a call center, such savings are eminently possible.

The neat thing about client virtualization is that it often delivers rapid return on investment, irrespective of whether you’re trying to save the planet or cut the power bills. In fact, pretty much every kind of consolidation activity will do this – which is what Astaro may have been trying to say in its press release, before the marketeers injected it with an overdose of hyperbole.

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