365 Main, Inc. Green Datacenters

Miles Kelly, Vice President Strategy and Marketing for 365 Main and I had a wonderful, albeit rambling, conversation about datacenter dynamics, green computing, and orchestrating virtual servers. His company, 365 Main, Inc., creates and maintains datacenters for quite an impressive list of companies. They have datacenters in Newark, NJ; San Francisco, CA; El Segundo, CA; Chandler, AZ; and Chantilly, VA totalling up to over 800 thousand square feet.

It appears that PG&E, the power company in California, has a program to incent companies to reduce companies' power consumption through the use of virtual machine software and management software for virtual environments. For virtualization/consolidation projects, PG&E pays incentives based on the annual accrued energy savings at the rate of 8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Based on typical power use of servers, incentives are typically on the order of $200 per server removed, up to a maximum of 50 percent of the project implementation cost.

Miles tells me that some of his clients have been able to reduce energy consumption as much as 20%.

Although Miles tells me that his clients have largely been using tools from VMware, Cassatt, Scalent, Surgient and others have been touting the cost savings of a virtualized datacenter for some time.

Would your organization take advantage of a program such as the one PG&E is offering?