We would like to congratulate Cisco, our strategic partner, on again climbing to the top of the Greenpeace COOL IT Leaderboard. With so much of the criteria tied to IT Energy Impact and innovative Climate Solutions, Cisco can attribute much of this success to their EnergyWise platform and Open Partner Ecosystem.
As an Energy Management partner in this ecosystem, JouleX is proud to support Cisco EnergyWise. Everyday, we are activating new licenses for the JouleX for Cisco EnergyWise solution as part of the Cisco EnergyWise FastStart program that delivers a free version of the JouleX Energy Manager to Cisco customers who purchase new Catalyst 3K and 4K switches. In this role, we are able to see the global impact enterprises are having on lowering their energy consumption, costs, and reducing their carbon footprints. This is exciting technology and we are proud to see Greenpeace recognize Cisco for this innovation.
From the Report:
"Cisco regains a share of the top ranking in this year’s Leaderboard, with a 9-point gain from 2012, earning a 1stplace tie with Google at 58 points. Cisco’s leadership improved across each of the three evaluation areas, particularly for updated commitments to manage its energy footprint and increase the amount of renewable energy powering its operations. Cisco continues to maintain its strong position in demonstrating and measuring the energy savings potential of the IT sector, bested only by Fujitsu in the Solutions category, and shows signs of increasing its investment in its solutions offerings, particularly those related to the smart grid. Cisco earns top marks for its increased leadership in addressing its growing energy footprint, with an update to its greenhouse gas (GHG) and renewable energy targets, along with a performance-based commitment to direct its growth toward cleaner sources of electricity and away from coal."
Click here for more information on the Cisco EnergyWise Fast-Start Program with JouleX for EnergyWise program.
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The growth and waste of Plug Load Energy is not a new problem for enterprises. As Globalization has turned the world into a global village, and businesses have become more dependent on instant access to information, Plug Load costs and challenges have grown exponentially. Best Practice suggestions abound but, as most of these practices require physical hardware or depend on training and behavioral changes in employees, they have simply been too expensive to implement on an enterprise scale.
Best Practices:
To illustrate this, here is one of the standard reports we found for addressing business plug load management: Plug Load Best Practices Guide: Managing Your Office Equipment Plug Load. The Best Practices mentioned in this guide are fairly labor intensive manual processes that do not realistically scale up well. However, the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) is an excellent platform designed to simplify and automate the management of enterprise IT plug load.
While this is not a comprehensive list, I'd like to share 5 basic steps to getting your IT plug load under control and performing as efficiently as possible for your enterprise.
1. Create an Inventory and a Baseline
The first step in improving or managing any part of an enterprise is to assess your current status. When it comes to IT plug load, this is determined by taking a full inventory of your network connected assets to discover what makes up your plug load. In smaller companies, a manual inventory is probably fine. When working with an IT asset inventory for an enterprise class business, automated asset discovery and inventory capabilities are an absolute necessity.
Examples of IT Plug Load devices commonly found in an enterprise:
- PCs & Monitors
- VoIP Phones
- Wireless Access Points
- Printers & Copiers
- Servers
- Network Switches & Routers
- Video Conferencing Systems
Once an asset inventory has been completed, the next step is to establish a baseline of both energy consumption and system utilization metrics. From this baseline, you can begin to identify energy behavior patterns. Some patterns easily identified are: energy use during certain hours, certain days, with certain types of machines, or certain departments within your enterprise.
2. Set Goals
After reviewing the patterns identified during the baseline process, use that information to establish initial goals based on your findings. For most enterprises, IT Plug Load goals will be related to reductions in three key areas: KWh used, power bills, and carbon emissions.
3. Three Rs of IT Plug Load Energy Reduction
Reduce
Set up policies to power down devices when they aren’t in use, such as outside of standard business hours or after the device has been idle for a defined amount of time. These same policies can also be used to power the devices back up at specified times and/or days of the week.
Remove
Employ utilization reports to identify devices that are unused, redundant, or need to be retired.
Replace
When it’s time to replace or upgrade devices, make the sustainable procurement process as simple as possible with Device Comparison Reports to determine the most energy-efficient and long term cost effective devices for your needs.
4. Measure
As you implement the energy management policies, remove energy wasters from your network, and replace old devices with newer and more energy efficient assets, it is important to continually measure your progress. Reports can be generated based on any group of devices you define. From these measurements, not only can you track your progress, but identify more opportunities to save and areas that need policy adjustments for the most efficient energy utilization.
5. Educate
Engage internal stakeholders and clearly communicate the energy reduction goals. Share the successes and suggestions for other ways they can contribute to achieving your plug load goals throughout the rest of the enterprise.
Through these steps, our customers have realized savings of 30%-60% of the IT plug load energy costs almost immediately, without investing additional resources in manual processes or additional equipment.
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Since the release of JouleX Energy Manager 4.0, we have experienced great traction in the market and our customers are excited about all of the new features and benefits.
New features and benefits include:
- Distributed Cloud-Based Architecture Improves Scalability and Efficiency
- Fully Centralized Management Accelerates Time to Value
- Roles-Based Access and Management Provides Greater Control
- Multi-Dimensional Graphic Visualization Adds New Visibility (integrates campus and data center floor plans or even network diagrams)
- Expanded Data Center Infrastructure Coverage for Greater Efficiency in the Data Center
Watch as JouleX CTO, Rene Seeber, and Solution Architect, David Prantl, demonstrate the latest features of the JouleX Energy Manager platform in this short video.
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JouleX would like to congratulate our Managed Energy Services partner, Dimension Data, on recently being named a leader in Sustainable Technology Services in the annual Green Quadrant® Sustainable Technology Services report by Verdantix. This report highlighted Dimension Data’s best in class IT energy services.
Dimension Data provides Managed Energy Services based on the JouleX Energy Manager platform, a highly scalable network-based energy management platform with a centralized cloud-based architecture. This platform enables Dimension Data to deliver comprehensive, feature-rich cloud-based energy management services to their managed network customers around the globe.
Dimension Data also employs the JouleX Energy Manager for their technology lifecycle assessment and consulting services. By using JouleX technology for comparing the energy efficiency of various types of IT devices operating in a customer's environment, replacement costs, and other important factors, Dimension Data can provide a broad range of projections and product replacement options to best serve their customers’ business needs.
You can read the full announcement by Dimension Data and also get a complimentary copy of the Verdantix report here.
Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed! We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!
We were honored to participate in the Enterprise Energy Management - Be Energy Wise! conference held at the Swiss Stock Exchange in Zurich today. The conference was hosted by JouleX partner BORN Green Technologies.
JouleX CEO, Tom Noonan, delivered the executive briefing on taking steps to reduce energy throughout the enterprise.
Excerpt:
It’s time to stop looking over our shoulders and denying the obvious: We are wasting an enormous amount of energy and money and, as a result, we are polluting our environment for generations to come. It is time to look beyond the horizon and start envisioning the future.
Enterprise Energy Management is a smarter and more scalable way to achieve energy efficiencies across our entire IT infrastructure; our data centers, our distributed networks that automate our offices, even our network attached building management systems like lighting, heating, and cooling.
Enterprise Energy Management is based on the principles of conservation and optimization, on providing the right amount of power dynamically only to those things that need to perform productive work, and minimizing the amount of energy supplied when idle or operating at less than full capacity.
Enterprise Energy Management begins with having a real time understanding of the energy consumption and utilization/loads on every single device on the network, on every virtual machine processing in the data center and on every aspect of our IT infrastructure.
Dr. Clemente Minonne, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, delivered the day's keynote speech: How IT can get more visible to the Business. The conference also featured a case study, Why Enterprise Energy Management?, and Cisco Systems shared information about the Cisco Smart Services Impact.
Thank you to our partner BORN Green Technologies for hosting this great event. We are thrilled that JouleX has become such an instrumental voice in telling the Enterprise Energy Management story and that this voice has been added to many others showing the enterprise business world that it is possible to cut energy waste and costs, reduce carbon emissions, and easily share those results in a meaningful way.
Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed! We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!
JouleX is on tour again with Cisco; this time demonstrating capabilities for the data center. We are really happy to participate in the Cisco DC Tech Days in Germany, February 28 through April 17.
Our energy management presentations will focus on enhancing your Cisco UCS and Nexus infrastructure with capabilities including:
- Sustainable Procurement
- Energy Forecasting
- Data Center Infrastructure Management
- Dynamic and Centralized Energy Management and Power Capping
The event is free. Choose a convenient date and location and reserve a space today by visiting the Cisco website: http://www.cisco.com/web/DE/events/dctechdays2013/index.html#~Welcome
We look forward to seeing you there!
Dates
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Berlin
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10. April 2013
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Hamburg
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17. April 2013
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München
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09. April 2013
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Stuttgart
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11. April 2013
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Eschborn
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28. Feb 2013
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Düsseldorf
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10. April 2013
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Anyone looking for a nice example of how to put together a great Corporate Sustainability Report should check out the one just released by JouleX customer, Danske Bank Group. Danske Bank is the largest bank in Denmark and one of the leading financial enterprises in northern europe. In its 2012 Corporate Responsibility Report lists its sustainability goals and its progress against them. For example, the company set an ambitious goal of reducing their electricity consumption 20%, from 2009 levels, by 2014. Danske Bank not only met that goal two years early, they beat the goal and then raised it to 30%!
from the report:
"In 2012, we began implementing a new online system for monitoring electricity consumption from IT equipment called JouleX. The system allows us to reduce energy consumption by monitoring, analysing and controlling how much energy we use in our IT equipment – from laptops and printers to servers and wireless access routers– when they are connected to a network.
Preliminary tests of the system in 2011 showed tremendous savings potential, and once fully implemented, the system will allow us to become better at monitoring and identifying areas where we can reduce emissions."
Danske Bank Group
Corporate Responsibility Report 2012
We commend Danske Bank on clearly defining their sustainability goals and measuring progress against them. JouleX is excited to be working with them to continue to exceed their electricity reduction goals and document their success for years to come.
Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed! We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!
In a press release last week, Verdantix announced the release of its report: Green Quadrant Energy Management Software (Global) 2013. Our team is excited to share that JouleX Energy Manager was among the Top Enterprise Class energy management software platforms in the industry. We're glad that we continue to be one of the few companies that Verdantix recognizes as an enterprise wide solution.
JouleX's success is built on our ability to address to the needs and expectations of the industry that we serve. We continue to attribute the recognition that JouleX receives to our incredible team of developers, whose hard work and dedication continue to propel our company forward; and to our customers.
From the Press Release:
“The global energy management software market is poised for growth in 2013” according to Alisdair McDougall, Verdantix Analyst and author of the report. “Two-thirds of the customer panel expect their annual spend on energy management software to increase during the next three years as they implement new solutions, expand existing deployments and increase the breadth of functionality in use. Successful software suppliers will develop functionality that maps to the specific requirements of energy domains, a strategy pursued by JouleX for data centers, SAP in manufacturing, Siemens for retail chains, IHS for asset intensive sectors and Verisae in grocery retail. Product strategies offering a standard set of functionality for all industries have universally failed and have resulted in some suppliers exiting the market.”
From the Vertantix Report:
“JouleX demonstrates value to firms through proof-of-concept solutions. JouleX has over 170 customers and has built a strong customer base within the telecommunications sector with customers including Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, Orange and Vodafone. As a result of its long-standing partnership with Cisco, JEM for EnergyWise is available as a free option for Cisco’s smaller LAN switches (see Verdantix Cisco And JouleX Target IT Facilities Energy Management). JouleX currently has over 200 pilot and proof-of-concept solutions installed with firms not yet paying for the service.”
“JouleX achieved high scores for data centre and ICT energy data capture (2.6) with best-in-class scores for integration with data centre and ICT equipment and management systems, commercial and retail building energy data capture (2.5), master data management (2.4) and data architecture and scalability (2.0).”
“JouleX and Schneider Electric provided the most extensive list of partners including consulting, systems integrators and technology firms achieving best-in-class scores (3.0) for the size and quality of their partner network.”
“Firms looking to better manage building portfolios containing a high density of ICT equipment or data centres should also consider JouleX for its deep domain expertise and experience.”
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The JouleX team is gearing up for another amazing year! As always, we'll be joining our Strategic Partner, Cisco, at CiscoLive London 2013.
We would love to demonstrate the newest features of JouleX Energy Manager for you at either our Gold Exhibitors booth (G2) or in the Cisco EnergyWise and UPOE Partner Pavilion (EW1).
In addition to our booths that will be staffed for the entire event, our very own Josef Brunner will be conducting a Breakout Session.
Session Title: Reducing Energy Consumption and Costs from the Core to the Edge with JouleX and Cisco
Description: This presentation will discuss the merits of reducing energy consumption, energy costs, and carbon emissions by leveraging the Cisco EnergyWise-JouleX solution. JouleX provides management for Cisco EnergyWise and allows customers to leverage their Cisco gear to monitor, analyze and control energy consumption for all network-connected devices across the enterprise, from the core to the edge of their networks. We will showcase case studies where the customers were able to reduce their annual energy costs by millions of Euros.
Speaker: Josef Brunner Chief Architect & Co-founder JouleX
Schedule: Thursday, 31 January 11:00 - 11:30 at the Gold Pavillion
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Through extensive research and customer use cases, we’ve determined that there are four key functions of an effective Enterprise Energy Management platform: Discovery and Measurement, Assessment and Simulation, Policy and Control, and Reporting. A comprehensive solution should be able to assess and manage your energy needs from the moment the power enters your facility until the bill arrives in accounting.
These four functions should be dedicated to the monitor—analyze—control processes for every smart device in your enterprise. This approach is what the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) platform is built on. Let’s take a look at how these JEM functions work within a typical enterprise:
Discovery and Measurement—JEM leverages a unique automated discovery method to locate all the network-connected devices, systems, and facilities assets in the enterprise. It then begins to continually monitor and measure energy usage and utilization of those devices.
Assessment and Simulation—JEM then analyzes the energy usage, carbon emissions, utilization and costs associated with each machine. This data analysis allows Energy Managers to simulate policy scenarios, enabling them to identify their highest cost savings opportunities and device productivity levels. The JEM allows for simulation of energy policies by device, location, division, business unit, department, cost center, or any other segmentation designated by the enterprise.
Policy and Control—Once the simulations have been completed and the appropriate policies are implemented, JEM executes those automated energy management policies, or generates alerts, by device, time, location, or event. This results in a reduction of wasted energy costs and an increase in efficiency, ensuring that the energy use follows the productive user.
Reporting—The JEM Reporting engine consolidates all of the data collected, then delivers comprehensive and fully customizable reports on energy usage and the cost/carbon savings realized through the active energy management policies. From an enterprise-wide view, all the way down to individual devices, JEM delivers custom reports based on the unique reporting needs of the enterprise.
Based on the energy metrics and intelligence we have collected over time, most enterprises use JEM to develop policies and rules to optimize energy usage and reduce costs on a massive scale. Our typical customers achieve energy savings of 30-60 percent annually. These results have been proven time and again through the robust reporting, supporting the business case for corporate sustainability initiatives, sustainable procurement, and demonstrate incremental improvements over time.
Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed! We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!