The Energ-IT project has been set up to focus on Green IT. The main aim of the project is to develop solutions that can be used to reduce power consumption in data centers. The project final goals are to:
1. Identify a set of green reengineering actions to be applied to legacy systems without necessarily replacing them.
2. Empirically assess related energy savings.
3. Compare savings with top market solutions by means of a test data center (demonstrator) that represents the best state of the art energy saving technology.
Members of the Energ-IT project are: Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione del Politecnico di Milano, Beta 80 Group, Enter, and Neptuny.
The Energ-IT project has built a test data centre that switches from a traditional IT infrastructure into a virtualized one in order to determine benchmarks on green savings as well as to identify a set of actions that can be applied to the data center as it moves to a virtualized infrastructure. The test data centre will showcase the best energy saving technology enabling organizations to see what they can achieve.
The Energ-IT team has discussed its initial findings in the workshop “Models and actions for reducing IT energy consumption” (Milan, 11th December 2009)
The event has been organized by Fondazione Politecnico di Milano in cooperation with the European Commission.
The workshop was presented by Neptuny and by the other team members, highlighting the intermediate results of the Energ-IT project and discussing paths and tools needed to develop Green IT strategies for the 21st century.
Paolo Cremonesi, Neptuny’s CTO and member of the Energ-IT steering committee, comments “Neptuny has developed a module to predict the utilization and power consumption of a data center. Neptuny has always been focused on Green IT and its flagship product, Caplan, in addition to adopting SPECpower, the first industry-standard SPEC benchmark that evaluates the power and performance characteristics of volume server class and multi-node class computers, is possibly the only Capacity Planning solution that can take into account facilities KPIs (i.e. factors such as power, cooling, raised floor space and load or rack space) in its analyses, models and reports so as to effectively support Green IT initiatives.”
The workshop participants included Gianluigi Castelli, chief information officer at ENI S.p.A, André Richier, principal administrators of the European Commission, Pierre Chastanet, officer of the European Commission, and Roger Johnson, past president of the British Computer Society.
Energ-IT is a project financed by Regione Lombardia, the regional government of Lombardy.