Pacific Gas and Electric Company has announced the first-ever utility financial incentive program to support virtualization projects in data centers, with industry support from VMware, Intel Corporation and other high tech leaders. Virtualization allows multiple applications to run concurrently on computing equipment, thereby enabling customers to consolidate their data centers and remove a large portion of their existing servers.
"Virtualization technology is helping our customers realize significant energy and cost savings, while addressing critical data center capacity issues, explained Helen Burt, senior vice president and chief customer officer for PG&E.; "By providing financial support, we hope to increase industry adoption of this technology.
PG&E; customers in northern and central California who are interested in earning financial incentives for virtualization projects must apply for the rebate prior to pursuing a project. The incentives are based on the amount of energy savings achieved through data center consolidation. Qualifying customers can earn a maximum rebate amount of US$4 million per project site. In addition to the rebate, customers can expect to save $300 to $600 in annual energy costs for each server that is removed. Those savings can almost double when reduced data center cooling costs are also taken into account.
"VMware applauds PG&E;'s recognition of the phenomenal energy savings made possible through virtualization, and in particular VMware's broad line of industry-leading products, noted Diane Greene, president of VMware. "These savings apply to customers with small offices on up to those with relatively large data centers. They can all save on power and cooling as well as benefit from other advantages through the deployment of VMware Infrastructure products. Virtualization allows operating system application stacks to be mapped optimally to the underlying hardware resources, increasing utilization rates by 10 to 15 times.
Intel Corporation provides support for virtualization with Intel Virtualization Technology built into the Intel Xeon and Itanium microprocessors. Intel is working with fellow organizations such as HP, Dell, IBM, and Rackable Systems to promote virtualization and PG&E;'s rebate program. Rackable Systems has recently completed an application for the PG&E; rebate program using energy efficient Intel Xeon processor based servers.
"Lowering operational costs through data center consolidation is a key opportunity for our IT customers, said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group. "The rebates that PG&E; customers receive as a result of deploying energy efficient Intel processor-based servers in virtualized environments will be a big incentive for moving faster with their data center consolidation efforts.