VARs Look to Energy Efficient Technologies For Green Data Centers

Green data center solutions aren't translating to greenbacks for the channel just yet, but VARs are starting an increase in customer interest for more energy efficient technology.

Solution providers in the server space say they're receiving some requests for energy-efficient technology for data centers from vendors as well as end users, but the demand for low-power solutions isn’t yet as strong as the consistent need for added performance and competitive pricing.

Vendors, particularly the top microprocessor firms with low-power processors, have made a strong effort in recent years to deliver products that spend less energy, which lowers customers' electric bills (and total cost of ownership for data center products) while also benefiting the environment. Now many of their channel partners are getting into the act.

While performance and price remain the two primary criteria for server purchases, power efficiency has become a topic of conversation between solution providers and customers — although not all. Integrators and system builders who serve larger enterprises tend to be the ones having conversations with enterprise customers about reducing or maintaining power usage levels, while SMB-level customers are less interested. However, VARs say even those smaller businesses could see additional benefits from adopting energy-efficient server platforms besides reduced consumption.

CRN spoke to VARS in the server space who have received extensive requests for power-efficient solutions from end users. ’Energy efficiency is and has been a major concern for all our server customers,’ said Andrew Kretzer, director of sales and marketing at Bold Data Technology, a Fremont, Calif.-based system builder. ’In fact, it has been quite common for us to include a power budget with our server quotations – especially when these machines are being deployed to data centers.’

Power-efficiency is also closely intertwined with cost-efficiency in the mind of many server partners. ’Where performance per dollar used to be the normal metric, we are often now selling based on price or performance per watt,’ said Kretzer. ’Lower powered components can often pay for themselves in just a year’s time with the energy savings that are realized.’

Faced with growing customer demand for cost-effective data centers, system builders have had to balance performance requirements with energy concerns in their own data center system designs, including high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

’Energy-efficiency is a major concern for many of our customers,’ James Huang, product marketing manager at AMAX, a Fremont, Calif.-based system builder. ’To help our customers to deploy more energy efficient servers in the data center, AMAX has introduced many power-saving computing solutions, including our ClusterMax Eco power-efficient clusters, designed specifically for the data center market."

NEXT: Vendors Push For Lower Power Consumption

Daniel Duffy, CEO of Valley Network Solutions, a Fresno, Calif.-based solution provider, said some of the early incentives for developing energy-efficient platforms came from the vendor rather than the customer – but even then, most vendors are late in the game.

’HP has always taken the lead in innovation and R&D in product development so efficiency and power-sensitive architectures are something they have been offering for quite some time, that they’ve been working on developing for even longer,’ Duffy said. ’We feel that they have significantly more experience and expertise than the myriad of other companies that are just now showing an interest in these issues.’

According to Andy Bryant, president of Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) at Arrow Electronics, vendors have been the ones to turn their customers’ attention to the benefits of reduced consumption and offer environmentally-friendly products.

’I think it’s happening with the vendors today,’ Bryant said. ’Certainly, they’re all talking about focusing on green initiatives with their products, and power consumption is one of the big issues there. So yes, I think it will continue to be a major focal point with customers, and I think the vendors and their technologies will be taking the lead.’

Among the system builders who have leveraged low-power hardware from manufacturers in their own products, Huang said AMAX’s server and workstation solutions use 90 Plus Gold and Platinum power supplies along with new low-power AMD and Intel CPUs that include single-, dual-, quad-, and eight-socket versions.’These solutions greatly help our customers reduce energy consumption while continuing to deliver optimal performance for their applications,’ he added.

Other system builders say that after garnering some interest from customers, energy-efficiency has gradually receded from their minds, in part due to an apparent lack of sufficient returns from reduced consumption. ’No, we’re not hearing a lot from customers about low-power servers,’ said Steve Brown, vice president of sales and business development at Blue Hawk Networks, a San Jose, Calif.-based solution provider. ’Initially energy-efficiency was a big deal. Then people tried it and realized they weren’t saving very much.’

According to this perspective, end users may not always see the value proposition in implementing power-saving platforms. ’Data centers typically charge all-inclusive prices anyway,’ Brown said. ’I would say power accounts for about ten to fifteen percent of the decision-making when it comes to data centers. Very rarely does reducing power by twenty-five percent come up in that conversation.’

Brown said customers may consider power-efficiency in the process of purchasing server products, but if they do it’s secondary. Much like AMAX, which in contrast says its customers have in fact expressed their concern with regard to power levels, the counter-weight to efficiency appears to be performance. ’What I’m seeing is people steering back to price-performance with a note of conservation’ Brown said. ’People want performance and the right product. Compared to performance, power-efficiency is always lower on the list.’

NEXT: Virtualization A Key Factor In Lower Power Consumption

Concerns about performance and, secondarily, efficiency are increasingly being met, according to Brown, by data center virtualization platforms that eliminate much of the hardware responsible for consumption and create new opportunities for vendors as well as their channel partners.

’Where this space is headed is virtualization. That’s where the performance is being moved,’ Brown said. ’Virtualization also helps with power consumption, and there’s a bigger margin there for VARs. I don’t believe you can be a solution provider with just the de-facto standard. I think when you look at performance and power and consumption virtualization is the key. It’s not the technology or having less-power consuming supply or a low-power chipset from Intel. That stuff’s just going away.’

But not everyone can afford virtualized data center infrastructure. Along with balancing considerations of price-per-performance as compared to energy and cost-efficiency,and balancing vendor offerings with end user requests, server partners consider the scale of their customer’s IT infrastructure before either selecting or creating energy-efficient solutions.

’We sell servers to smaller companies that need to get the most performance out of their investment,’ said Michael Rathburn, senior technical specialist at Applied Systems Associates, Inc, a Murrysville, Pa.-based solution provider. ’Because of that, we want the most power we can possibly get into their systems and are not interest in power savings. Larger companies that have many servers probably have more interest in power savings.’

Other channel partners who serve customers with limited IT budgets also noted a lack of enthusiasm for power-efficient servers. Daniel Duffy said that since his company serves a predominantly SMB market, including Government and Education segments that together make up 25 percent of its business, he rarely receives requests for low-power servers.

’The vast majority of our customers do not have a data center in the traditional sense,’ Duffy said. ’They have one to a few servers, operating in something that ranges from a cubbyhole, or closet to a dedicated room. So efficiency, operating costs and environmental concerns don’t have top of mind awareness for most of them. Most are focused on running their business, and their IT staff (who normally wear multiple hats, if they even have IT staff) are normally more project driven, and their purchasing decisions are based most of the time on application, performance and storage needs.

Duffy said VARS can help SMB customers cut costs across the board by reducing their hardware requirements, rather than have compromise between saving power and adding performance. Initially however, Duffy said, issues of power and efficiency aren’t even on their radar, and if they are they remain low on the priority list. ’Only after some educating are they slightly more interested in hearing about [energy-efficiency],’ he said. ’But when they start to see how they can spend less on power and cooling, and extract more performance from less hardware, then the interest levels rise.’

Whether cloud migration and the onset of virtualization can eliminate energy, heating, and space requirements, a gradual reduction in the levels of power that hardware requires will likely continue to be a feature in server products. However, as the SMB market grows and suppliers downstream continue to feel pressure to keep costs low and performance up, the demand for power-efficient servers could get pushed down the priority list – or it could gain momentum as a result of other transformations in the data center.