PG&E and Hi-Tech Companies Offer Incentives on Energy Efficient Server Technology

Pacific Gas and Electric has started a utility financial incentive program to support virtualization projects in data centers in northern and central California. VMware, Intel  and other high tech leaders have gotten behind the project. Virtualization allows operating system application stacks to be mapped optimally to the underlying hardware resources, increasing utilization rates by 10 to 15 times.

The financial incentives are based on the amount of energy savings achieved through data center consolidation. Qualifying customers can earn a maximum rebate amount of $4 million per project site.

In addition to the rebate, PG&E says customers can expect to save $300 to $600 in annual energy costs for each server that is removed. Those savings can almost double when reduced data center cooling costs are also taken into account.

“These savings apply to customers with small offices on up to those with relatively large data centers,” says Diane Greene, president of VMware. “They can all save on power and cooling as well as benefit from other advantages through the deployment of VMware Infrastructure products.”

Intel Corporation provides support for virtualization with Intel virtualization technology built into the Intel Xeon and Itanium microprocessors. Intel is working with HP, Dell, IBM, and Rackable Systems to promote virtualization and PG&E’s rebate program. Rackable Systems has recently completed an application for the PG&E rebate program using energy efficient Intel Xeon processor based servers.