JouleX Celebrates a Year of Success in IT Energy Efficiency Management

A year ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Thomas Noonan, CEO of JouleX, when his company had its coming out party at Interop (News - Alert) 2010. The company, having studied business energy utilization patterns, developed a network-based energy efficiency management system that collects near-real-time data from networks, creates energy profiles for all IP-based devices, and automates equipment shutdown during non-use periods to reduce energy costs and create a greener IT environment.

“We can reduce 40-60 percent of the overall energy consumption on a distributed IT network. Forty to sixty percent of a million dollars is real money, and we believe that kind of return is going to drive businesses to implement Joulex as a way to reduce energy costs, reduce the carbon footprint and reduce greenhouse gases,” Noonan noted in an interview.

This year, celebrating its first birthday, JouleX boasts nearly 70 customers and is already on the fourth release of its solution, driven largely by increased sustainability awareness and an understanding that energy is one of the greatest operating costs for any business.

“It’s been an incredible first year,” says Noonan. “I see JouleX on a similar if not faster growth curve than ISS.” (Noonan was previously chairman, CEO, and president of security firm ISS, which was bought by IBM (News - Alert) back in 2005.)

Noonan explains that the company’s latest major focus is the data center market – it just launched its Data Center Manager solution, specifically aimed at the energy needs of data center operators. He suggests many data centers are guilty of wasting as much as 50 percent of the energy they consume, largely due to about one-third of today’s servers consuming 80 percent of their rated power but processing at less than 30 percent of their capacity. That’s significant waste that can be turned into hard dollar savings.

Ironically, as businesses adopt virtualization strategies as a cost saving measure, Noonan believes the trend is only feeding the overall inefficiency of data centers.

“As servers are virtualized, people have lost visibility into how efficiently they are operating,” he explains. “Our goal is to bring visibility to what people are operating in their data centers.”

Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) speaks with Thomas Noonan at Interop 2011

Most businesses monitor at the data center or branch circuit level, which doesn’t allow then to understand consumption at the server level. The JouleX system provides insight into not only how much energy each server consumes, but each application, allowing businesses to more design more efficient power schemes. For instance, if a server is only processing at 30 percent of its capacity, there is no need to provide power for 80 percent.

“Power is the Number One problem in every data center we go into,” he says. “You can cook a turkey on a switch when it’s powered up.”

Many large enterprises pay more than $1 billion in energy costs annually. A 40 percent reduction, thanks to more granular visibility into energy usage and consumption can have a significant impact on their bottom lines.

“That’s real money,” says Noonan.

JouleX believes that the key to achieving energy efficiency is bringing utilization and consumption into alignment. The JouleX system, an agentless service that requires no hardware meters and no changes to enterprise networks, brings that alignment to data centers reducing power waste, allowing them to enjoy a previously unimaginable level of cost savings and energy efficiency.
Erik Linask (News - Alert) is Group Editorial Director of TMC, which brings news and compelling feature articles, podcasts, and videos to 2,000,000 visitors each month. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Erik Linask