A new full-service data center facilities and IT consultancy was launched at the DatacenterDynamics conference in New York City Tuesday.

i 3 Solutions Group, formed by two data center industry veterans, is positioning itself as a vendor-neutral technology consulting company that offers clients help with  all of their technology-infrastructure needs, from real-estate to IT solutions.

 Ed Ansett, a managing partner and one of the founders of i 3, described the firm as “consulting in critical facilities … and information technology equally balanced. We believe we’re the only company in the world that spans those two things with equal emphasis.”

The company’s second principal is Michael Garibaldi, former COO of CS Technology.

i 3 already has a number of clients in technology, financial-services and telecommunications verticals and has opened offices in New York City and Singapore. A London office is coming later this year, Ansett said.

The company is differentiating itself from the likes of HP and IBM – both of which also offer full-service data center infrastructure consulting – by emphasizing vendor neutrality. “We are completely independent consultants,” Ansett said. “That’s a very important differentiator.”

i 3 places a lot of focus on research into energy efficiency, and the first product of its efforts was also released at DatacenterDynamics New York.

A white paper co-authored by Ansett and James Dow (former CTO of CS Technology) outlines a framework for measuring energy efficiency of IT that the authors say provides a better insight into data center energy efficiency than the widely used Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) metric alone.

“The principle that underlies the approach taken is predicated on knowledge of the energy efficiency of a particular device (server, network node or storage) for the operating conditions that the particular device will experience,” Ansett and Dow write.

“It is acknowledged that currently the gathering of data required to achieve this goal is not straightforward, particularly for network and storage components. However, most of the data already exists for compute in the form of OEM calculators.”