I was speaking at a partner event this week in NJ, and shared the stage with VMware. During the discussion, a mention was made about Pacific Gas and Electric, a large US utility company, offering rebates (or financial incentives) for data centers that invest in server virtualization technology. This rebate is due to the lower power consumption derived from blade servers and virtualization.

In the last blog entry, we discussed storage power consumption as one of the costs of storage TCO. I tend to see much more interest in California and parts of Asia around reducing power consumption, with servers and storage. I am not sure why this is not as big of an issue in other parts of the world.

Storage consolidation can save in total electric costs. Storage virtualization cannot always make that same claim. This can be attributed to virtualization encouraging the extended use of older arrays within the storage pool. Extending the useful life of IT assets is usually a good idea, but can offset plans to reduce electricity. Older arrays consume more kWatts per TB than newer systms. Virtualization with newer arrays, and providing tiers of storage (out of the frame) has also demonstrated lower kVA, BTU and kWatt consumption.

Perhaps we need an incentive from PG&E for storage virtualization to get newer tiers of storage to reduce the TCO and get a rebate on the electric bill.

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