At the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing today, Power Assure — a green IT business from Santa Clara, Calif. — revealed that its energy management software is now compatible with Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) Blade servers.
According to Jed Scaramella, a research manager for servers at IDC, here’s how fast blade servers, in general, are gaining traction in the market:
In 2010, the server blade market in the U.S. was $2.7 billion, representing approximately 14 percent of the U.S. server market… [IDC] expects the blade segment to grow 19.8 percent in 2011 to $3.2 billion in the U.S – compared to the total U.S. server growth of 2.4 percent.
On a worldwide level, the blade market is expected to grow 22.4 percent in revenue over the next year to $7.3 billion, which is relative to total server worldwide revenue growth of 3.5 percent.
Growth in blades is driven by customers’ need to deliver a more flexible IT infrastructure; blades can simplify management and create an agile environment that is better able to respond to the changing needs of a business.
By design, blade servers (including Cisco’s) are supposed to use less energy, and take up less space than their predecessors. Still, Power Assure — and competitors like SynapSense — have designed software to make them even less power-consuming, and hopefully more affordable and longer-lasting, for data center owners and operators.
According to a post on Cisco’s corporate website, in September 2010 the company’s chief financial officer Frank Calderoni said that the company was seeing 82 percent growth for its UCS product line on a quarter over quarter basis. (Neither IDC nor Cisco offered specific market share data on these servers in time for publication.)
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In general, Power Assure — whose investors include Good Energies, Point Judith Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson — claims its solutions cut ongoing power consumption for IT organizations by an average of 50 percent.
Computers and data centers in the U.S., in recent years, have only used a few percentage points of all electricity consumed in the country, but that number is on the rise along with the cost of electricity generation from traditional power sources.
For more information, check out the reports over at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories Data Center Energy Management website which covers the economic and environmental benefits of efficient IT organizations.
