JouleX Blog

5 Universities First to Receive new APPA Sustainability Award

Ida Davidson — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 05:00:00 GMT

We would like to take a moment to congratulate the first ever APPA* Sustainability Award recipients. This newly instituted category was created to promote and reward achievement in the increasingly important role of Sustainability in the world of higher education.

JouleX is excited about the work that we do with educational institutions around the world, to help them toward their sustainability and cost reduction goals, and we think it’s great to see recognition institutions are getting it right!

Congratulations to the five universities to receive the 2012 APPA Sustainability Award:

University of British Columbia - Their UBC Sustainability Initiative (USI) was established in 2010.
The University of California - Irvine – UC Irvine began implementing sustainability practices in 2003, and since then has won recognition for this program with over two dozen awards.
Emory University – Their Sustainability Initiative was officially begun in 2001, and has grown over the last decade to include energy and water conservation, green building, recycling, and four other defined focus areas.
American University – With the university president signing a carbon neutrality pledge in 2008, AU has been making great strides toward sustainability ever since and is one of the first schools in the nation to have achieved a STARS Gold rating (between 65 and 80 points) with a score of 69.90 in 2011.
University of Prince Edward Island – UPEI established an Office of Sustainability and Energy Management in 2007 that “works to coordinate sustainable practices and projects on campus that touches on all aspects of campus life”.

If you’re ready to take your institution’s sustainability initiatives beyond switching CFL light bulbs, you’re ready to see what JouleX Energy Manager can do for you. Contact us today to learn how we can help you save costs and gain efficiencies around your university or college campus.

*APPA, now simply identified by its former initials, was originally known as Association of Superintendents of Buildings and Grounds in 1914, but the name of the organization has changed over the decades to reflect evolution of both the organization and the institutions it serves. The APPA has also been known as Association of Physical Plant Administrators of Universities and Colleges, The Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers.

Friday Roundup - The Inevitability of Sustainability and Going Green

Ida Davidson — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Everywhere we look, we see corporations and consumers alike coming to the realization that Sustainability and Green Initiatives are here to stay, and in everyone's best interest. I hope that you'll enjoy this week's article roundup. Many of these articles discuss the inevitability of Green.

Whitepaper:

New White Paper - Bridging the Gap between Facilities and IT to Reduce Energy Costs across the Enterprise

Articles:

Travelers Prefer Green Hotels – Trip Advisor polls their customers on Green travel
Green Today, Gold Tomorrow: Investing in Green Tech - Green tech is changing the way companies do business
Smart Grids can save up to 50% on energy costs
Hundreds of Millions without Power in India: This is why the work we do at JouleX is so important
Brisbane Airport ditches IBM for Cisco UCS: “After virtualization, Brisbane Airport continued to look for cost savings, deciding it was time to splurge on new servers.”
Green Entrepreneurs see bright future for sustainability – “As the economy struggles to regain momentum, there is one segment that is emerging as a leader in the recovery. Green technology and sustainable practices are being utilized both in the U.S. and throughout the world. Environmental entrepreneurs are not only working to develop better technology, but existing businesses are beginning to transition to more sustainable practices.”
How big data simplifies sustainability cost scenarios – “Which clean energy projects make sense to install in different manufacturing or office locations? Which sustainability project will give your team the quickest payback when it comes to reducing environmental impact?”
Software defined networking , Cisco is also game for it - Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior discusses software defined networking
Some smart ways to cut down on the amount of electricity you use – Tips from The Green Familia
An energy revolution at the touch of a Green Button – “…a tool built on the simple idea that any consumer should be able to securely download their energy usage from their utility – and use that information to easily, automatically better manage their energy use and reduce their energy bills.”
Data Center Trends: Connectivity is key, Green is inevitable – Takeaways from DataCentre 2012
Load Adaptive Computing – The next frontier in Data Center Energy Management
PUE is DEAD – New metrics are found to be much more accurate

Surveys:

Where does your enterprise stand on sustainability?

Where does Your Enterprise Stand on Sustainability

Ida Davidson — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:20:00 GMT

Sustainability Initiatives have become a highly visible, often talked about, and frequently misunderstood topic for enterprises everywhere. We would love it if you would take just a few minutes and share your company's plans and views on Corporate Sustainability.

Thank you for sharing!

Travelers Prefer Green Hotels

Ida Davidson — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 05:00:00 GMT

If you travel with any regularity, you’ve probably seen the eco-friendly suggestions in your hotel room for years now. From requests to re-use your towels and forego daily housekeeping visits to suggestions to turn out the lights and raise the temperature in your room while you’re out, hotels have been getting more creative in their guest related sustainability efforts. That seems to be a strategy that is paying off for the hospitality industry around the world.

In a recent survey, the popular travel site TripAdvisor found that travelers are becoming more environmentally responsible when booking their hotel stays. “The green travel trend is gaining momentum among TripAdvisor members, as 71 percent said they plan to make more eco-friendly choices in the next 12 months compared to 65 percent that did so in the past 12 months.”

While many consumers believe that they are doing enough by choosing hotel chains that are employing sustainability practices, others are going above and beyond choosing a “green” hotel. According the TripAdvisor survey results, travelers' top 3 eco-friendly practices were:

Turned off lights when not in hotel room – 88%
Participated in hotel's linen/towel re-use program – 80%
Used recycling in the hotel – 57%

More than just accommodations that offer options for reducing their own footprint on the road, travelers are increasingly giving their business to hotels and hotel chains that are reducing their own carbon footprint.

Although it is a compelling reason, customer preference is not the only driver behind sustainability efforts in the hospitality industry. Marriott, for example, since 2007 has reduced Total Water Consumption(and costs) by 22.8%, Total Energy usage (and costs) by 12.7%, and Greenhouse Gases by 11.6%.

Whether your enterprise is becoming more sustainable to appeal to customer preference, or because it just makes sense to your bottom line, it's becoming clear that reducing your environmental impact is good for everyone.

If you're looking for a place to start, contact JouleX and we'll show you exactly where your energy dollars are going... and how to get them under control.

New White Paper - Bridging the Gap between Facilities & IT

Ida Davidson — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:21:00 GMT

As Energy Managers worldwide are looking at ways to implement energy saving strategies, and IT departments are trying to maximize the effectiveness of the energy they use, each of these departments are beginning to recognize the need to work with one another to achieve the results they are looking for.

From our extensive time collaborating with Facilities, Energy, and IT/Data Center managers, we have learned that although all of these departments have the same goals and needs, they are challenged with learning an entirely new way to work together and, often times, a whole new language to speak.

With the information we've gathered, our team has produced a new white paper focused on helping these departments learn to Bridge the Gap between Facilities and IT to Reduce Energy Costs across the Enterprise.

We value your feedback. Please leave us your suggestions for Bridging the Gap in the comments section.

Friday Roundup - All Things Energy

Ida Davidson — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 06:00:00 GMT

It's time for another Friday Roundup from the JouleX team. We share some of the great articles about JouleX and articles from around the web that we found to be informative. We hope you'll enjoy them.
Video:

New video demonstrates the JouleX Energy Manager in action- "NG Bailey ICT Energy Management solution featuring JouleX"

Articles:

Indian researcher says Japan is lagging on energy efficiency- "This article from Japan’s newservice, Asahi Shimbun, highlights some disturbing news if Japan is to fully transform its energy sector, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster."
5 fun data center facts from the Uptime Institute - "It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone."
Tackling Energy in the Data Center with Cisco UCS and the JouleX Energy Manager - "Today’s best server platforms are now being built with the ability to leverage power management on a granular level in the data center, making power just another managed resource to the blade chassis."
How Hilton measures sustainability - It's great to see hotels coming around to real sustainability initiatives.
Technology’s role in sustainable business carries more weight - "Well-designed IT infrastructure is an increasingly vital piece of the puzzle for managing energy costs and natural resources such as water. That reality is reflected in new predictions suggesting that big U.S. companies plan to spend at least $2.5 billion on technology consulting and systems integration related to sustainability by 2015."
No escaping network-based IT power management - "Cisco is pushing hard to get enterprises to start leveraging EnergyWise-based technologies. Cisco unveiled a Fast-Start EnergyWise program at Cisco Live recently. The program offers JouleX's product for free with Cisco's Catalyst 3K and 4K switches."
European data centres flourish, but power crisis lies ahead - "The importance of the "Big 4" European data centre markets... will increase over the next three years, with presence in all four markets becoming a major competitive differentiator by 2016, but power shortages could lead to problems in the future"
Top 50 Sustainability Have You's - "I think it is good that so many of us are talking about CSR Sustainability issues, challenges and experiences and churning out posts on our blogs. And while it is great to keep writing, to keep soliciting opinions, to keep debating, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t sometimes stop and make it simpler, so that a novice can get what we are trying to say and to be able to use that knowledge."

We'd love to know what articles caught your eye this week! Please share them in the comments section.

Team JouleX wishes you a great weekend!

Tackling Energy in the Data Center with Cisco UCS and the JouleX Energy Manager

Player Pate — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:05:00 GMT

With energy prices rising worldwide, and the ever growing compute demands placed on them, the need for comprehensive and centralized power management in the data center has taken center stage over the last few years.

Today’s best server platforms are now being built with the ability to do power management within the blade and server chassis. This gives you the ability to leverage power management on a granular level in the data center, making power just another managed resource to the blade chassis.

This newly available ability to power manage individual servers has become both a blessing and a curse to data center managers. Being able to assign rules on each server or chassis for certain times of day or with certain conditions being met is a powerful capability. With tens of thousands of machines in a data center, any benefits found by reducing power consumption are wasted on the labor needed to manage the process.

Cisco UCS takes control a step further with their integrated power management approach, providing you additional capabilities for things such as; integrated power data into building management systems, and allowing outside control vectors to control the way power is consumed inside the blade chassis.

The main advantage that UCS has over all other Intel OEM partners is that Cisco’s UCS power manager allows a centralized approach across the whole server deployment, while their competitors are limited to managing by chassis or by blade. This is a huge benefit for data centers when it comes to large scale deployments.

By pairing Cisco UCS with JouleX Energy Manager’s Load Adaptive Computing capabilities, these managed resources can be assigned rules so that at certain times of day or under certain conditions you can manage how much power is used. That ability will automatically effect how utilized the blades are by allowing you to better align processing loads to power utilization, better align power to my needs, and reduce overall power errors due to failures inside of the data center.

JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) really enables the load adaptive computing usability as you are able to:

Forecast how much energy / utilization you will need in the next minutes / hours.
JEM can not only include UCS systems but also other IP attached devices such as facility management systems, storage networking, and other data center assets.
JEM integrates with the virtual layer to provide additional insight to the virtualized assets with Load Adaptive Computing.
JEM provides additional analytics to go along with energy, such as utilization, fan speed, temperature, and other analytics.
JEM also integrates with networking platforms, such as Cisco’s EnergyWise and Nexus, to make the switches part of the overall data center energy view.

Want to learn more about the Cisco UCS integrated power management capabilities? Check out their new whitepaper.

New video demonstrates the JouleX Energy Manager in action

Player Pate — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Haven't had a chance to see the JouleX Energy Manager in action yet? Check out the new video produced by JouleX Premier Partner, NG Bailey. NG Bailey makes a compelling case for reducing energy across the enterprise using the JouleX Energy Manager.

JouleX is proud to be working with great partners like NG Bailey and we really appreciate them producing this great video!

JouleX Wins IBM SmartCamp Kickstart Award!

Ida Davidson — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:42:00 GMT

IBM SmartCamp, an exclusive global program bringing together entrepreneurs, investors and experienced mentors who want to build a Smarter Planet, announced this morning that JouleX is the SmartCamp KickStart Munich winner!

At the first ever IBM SmartCamp KickStart held in Germany, early stage companies in the field of Big Data and Business Analytics presented their business ideas. JouleX is proud to accept the SmartCamp KickStart award, and are looking forward to going to market with IBM.

Latest Shots from Cisco Live Bare All!

Ida Davidson — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

JouleX Energy Manager provides visibility into energy and utilization that people never see

Our Solutions Architect, David Prantl, was kind enough to share some of the reporting screen captures from the JouleX Energy Manager monitoring of the recent Cisco Live US event which were on display at the JouleX booth as well as in the Cisco Network Operations Center. The speed and efficiency with which this solution is deployed may just be another day at the office for our engineers, but it never fails to impress me.

In just a little over an hour, and from a single instance of JouleX Energy Manager, we were able to automatically discover and begin monitoring the real time energy consumption of all devices connected to the Cisco network from these four locations: San Diego Conference Center, the World of Solutions, San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina, and Hilton San Diego Bayfront. Because Cisco EnergyWise was enabled on the switches, we were able to attain 100% accuracy in energy measurement across a wide variety of devices.The image below is the fully customizable Overview page from JouleX Energy Manager, showing information for all four locations we monitored throughout the event.

We were able to show the specific energy usage of each individual device being monitored as well as its utilization percentage all in real time.

We received a lot of great questions and really positive feedback throughout the event, about JouleX Energy Manager’s visibility, speed of implementation, ease of use, and capabilities.

To find out how JouleX Energy Manager can change the way you view your enterprise’s energy usage in mere hours, contact us today.

Big Thanks from Team JouleX!

Ida Davidson — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Now that we’re all home, and still basking in the excitement and energy of the Cisco Live US event, let us take a moment and say Thank You. Not only do we appreciate Cisco’s commitment to hosting an informative and quality solutions focused show, but we enjoyed meeting and sharing great ideas with all of the attendees that came out. With more than 17,000 live attendees at the show and more than 125,000 virtual attendees, there are a lot of you to thank!

Thank you also to Matt Laherty, Cisco EnergyWise creator; John Parello, EnergyWise Architect; and Luis Suau, owner and operator of the Cisco Innervated Building Lab, for allowing our JouleX Energy Manager to play a role in the energy management discussions during your breakout sessions throughout the event.

Here is a brief recap of the articles surrounding Cisco Live US, in case you missed them.

Our CEO, Tom Noonan got to enjoy a little time to catch up with Cisco CEO, John Chambers during his visit to our booth.
We got some great photos from the event, both at our booth and the big screen at the NOC.
We were excited to announce that we’re offering JouleX for EnergyWise on the Cisco global pricelist as a free option for Cisco Catalyst 3K and 4K switches!

Next week, we’ll be sharing some really cool screen shots of JouleX Energy Manager monitoring the event’s energy usage. Not only did we monitor and display real time energy usage statistics of the event at the NOC, but we were also able to monitor the energy of some of the surrounding hotels.

Did we see you at Cisco Live US? Did you catch our demo? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the show!

IBM Names JouleX SmartCamp KickStart Award Finalist

Player Pate — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:31:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to be named a finalist for the IBM SmartCamp KickStart Award. IBM created the award to highlight innovative companies in the area of big data and business intelligence.

IBM nominated JouleX for leveraging big data in order to create business intelligence by aggregating and correlating the energy information from all IP-enabled devices to provide unprecedented visibility into the energy consumption and utilization of those devices throughout the distributed office, data center and facilities environments. JouleX takes this a step further by applying advanced analytics to identify energy, cost, and carbon savings opportunities and a management platform to implement policies to realize this savings. IBM will help the winner with go-to-market and selling efforts.

JouleX founders Josef Brunner and Rene Seeber will be participating in the June 27 event. Please join us if you are in the Munich area. Tickets are available through IBM at ibm.com/de/events/smartcamp-kickstart-munich.

You can read the entire IBM press release translated in English or the original in German.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems visits JouleX

Ida Davidson — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 16:41:00 GMT

The energy at Cisco Live is amazing. We are having great conversations with attendees about how they can leverage their Cisco infrastructure to reduce energy costs across their campus, data center and facilities environments. We love the feedback customers and attendees are giving us about the latest release of the JouleX Energy Manager.

The excitement around the energy management capabilities JouleX has created for Cisco Catalyst and Nexus switches, UCS servers, IP phones, access points, and VDI infrastructure caught the attention of Cisco CEO John Chambers. Chambers came by our booth to see JouleX in action and catch up with JouleX CEO Tom Noonan.

We appreciate the commitment by Cisco leadership to drive energy management from the core to the edge of the network and JouleX is proud to offer a management platform to help customers leverage this innovation to drive efficiency and reduce energy costs.

Photos from Cisco Live US

Ida Davidson — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 14:49:00 GMT

Our team is having a great time meeting all of you, and hearing your feedback, at Cisco Live US in San Diego this week. We've gotten some great pictures of the event so far, and our booth (1746) sure is packed!

Check out our Chief Architect & Co-founder, Josef Bruner, using JouleX Energy Manager on his iPad to demonstrate our NuLED lights! NuLED is one of our new JouleX-Ready Partners.

Here is our Solutions Architect, David Prantl, pointing out some of the great features displayed on the main NOC (network operation center) big screen, as we monitor the energy consumption of the entire event. In addition to the Cisco Live US venue, we are also monitoring the energy consumption of the connected hotels, including the Marriott.

We not only read the energy consumption of all switches, access points, and phones; but also the servers and video surveillance cameras.

Matt Laherty talks Cisco Live and EnergyWise

Ida Davidson — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With Cisco Live US starting in just a few days, we wanted to dust off and re-share a video and an interview we did last year with Matt Laherty, one of the creators of Cisco EnergyWise.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

1. Cisco launched EnergyWise in January 2009. What was the “Aha!” moment you had when you came up with the concept for EnergyWise?

There really wasn’t an “aha” moment. I’d been working at Cisco since 2000 and I worked on service provider platforms, routers that had power issues in central offices. We had to rethink how we designed power supplies and also how we addressed cooling. So, power has been at the forefront of a lot of the work I’ve done my entire time at Cisco.

In 2003/2004, I was working on the Catalyst 4500 Series, and we did the Power over Ethernet (PoE) launch. We spent a lot of time with customers talking about how to rewire wiring closets to produce enough electricity to run the PoE switch and I realized we needed a better strategy for managing energy on our platforms. This really evolved from a lot of different discussions but, it wasn’t until a little over four years ago that I was in a role that I could work with an engineering team that we could build some answers to those problems. That produced what we call EnergyWise today.

I think the biggest “aha” moment, or the closest thing to it, maybe 5 or 6 years ago thinking about how Cisco could help customers solve their energy challenges. We have a motto of “changing the way the world lives, works, plays, and learns.” Somebody has to dream up what that means and what those solutions look like. When I looked around Cisco, I realized a lot of us were working in our product silos and we weren’t thinking about the big ways to use the network. Some people were, but at one point I realized we need to start using the network to control energy or at least provide visibility to all of these systems within a facility, that the network is the unifying component, that it would be up to the network to help breakdown those barriers and move the solutions along.

Click here to read the full interview.

See you next week!

JouleX Adds Value to Cisco Investments

Ida Davidson — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) helps Cisco customers realize the full power of Cisco EnergyWise, in order to reduce energy costs and consumption across their organizations. Beyond Cisco EnergyWise, JEM enables you get the most from your other Cisco investments, by supporting advanced features such as IP phones (deep sleep feature), Unified Computing System (UCS) (Load Adaptive Computing™ feature) and support for uPoE & Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

The most direct benefits of JEM to Cisco customers are here:

30-60% energy savings in the campus and data center
3-6 month ROI
Support cost take-out initiatives!
Support corporate sustainability initiatives
Gain efficiency, agility and energy capacity in the data center

For a look at just how JEM provides these benefits, we've provided a list of Cisco offerings for which JouleX enhances the value:

Cisco Offering	How JouleX Adds Value
EnergyWise-enabled switches and routers	Lower your energy costs by reducing energy consumption through a full management system for all devices connected to Cisco EnergyWise-enabled switches and routers. Monitor, analyze and control energy down to the individual device level and report the savings in terms of costs, carbon and energy.
Unified Computing and Servers (UCS)	Reduce the energy consumption of your UCS by matching server utilization with energy consumption, capping and performance leveling the power to reduce energy waste.
Integrated Services Routers (ISR)	Save on energy costs of campus devices and systems by deploying JouleX with the UCS Express blade on the ISR.
uPoE Switches	Reduce the energy cost and consumption of uPoE switches by monitoring, analyzing and controlling the energy of these devices.
Nexus Switches	Gain unprecedented visibility into the energy consumption of your data center environment including their Cisco Nexus switches.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)	Monitor, analyze and control the energy consumption of your VDI environment to reduce costs and report on savings.
IP Phones	Further reduce the operating costs for IP Phones along with all other IP-connected devices in the enterprise. JouleX supports the deep sleep feature and provides full reporting to demonstrate savings.
Cius and mobile apps	Leverage Cisco Cius and other mobile devices (smart phones) to manage the energy consumption of their campus networks or personal work stations with JouleX mobile apps.
Building Management Systems	Extend Cisco EnergyWise to Building Management Systems such as those from Schneider and Johnson Controls and lighting systems from NuLEDS. JouleX provides a single enterprise energy management system for facilities (building management systems, lighting, etc ) as well as IT in the campus and data center.
Reference Architecture	Consolidate Cisco energy efficiency initiatives through a single management platform that spans the network, which is becoming the energy management backbone, by leveraging the Cisco EnergyWise protocol, and supporting the data center (UCS and VDI). It even extends to facilities through Building Management Systems.
Advanced Services	Gain true energy efficiency across the enterprise and data center through Cisco Advanced Services. Cisco Advanced Services uses JouleX in its customer engagements for enterprise, campus or data center energy efficiency projects.

For more information, or to get a live demonstration of everything the JouleX Energy Manager can do, join us at Cisco Live US in San Diego next week, June 10-14. We'll be giving demos at the JouleX Booth: Booth 1746, and will be featured in the Cisco EnergyWise Pavilion at Booth 2776.

We look forward to talking with you soon!

Friday Roundup: JouleX-Ready Partner Program Edition

Ida Davidson — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:56:00 GMT

This is a fantastic time to be a JouleXer! We had a great time at Cisco Expo in Berlin and then Uptime Institute a couple of weeks ago, and we just launched the JouleX-Ready Partner Program. Now we're gearing up for an AMAZING Cisco Live US from June 10-14.

While we're all over here, preparing for Cisco Live US, we'll leave these videos and articles for you to enjoy!
VIDEOS:

Cisco EnergyWise LED Demo by Joulex with NuLEDs Fixtures - With our Solutions Architect, David Prantl
TechWise Live at Interop - Jimmy Ray from TechWise TV receives a live demo on UPOE EnergyWise from Rich Zavala, Technical Marketing Engineer
Cisco UPOE - Pradeep Parmar, Senior Marketing Manager of Borderless Networks at Cisco, delivers a presentation on the business benefits of Cisco UPOE. He discusses how you can save more than a quarter million dollars for a 1,000-port deployment with Cisco UPOE and EnergyWise.
Scott Paisley at the Green IT and Cloud Summit - Our Americas Director, Scott Paisley was one of the speakers at this year's Green IT and Cloud Summit. Check out a small clip of his presentation.
Cisco Innovations Bus - Bringing Cisco solutions right to your doorstep.

ARTICLES:

Let's Turn Emissions into Something Useful
EU Carbon Emissions Rise, End Multi-year Decline - "Greenhouse gases from the European Union rose more than 2 percent in 2010 when a cold winter and a rebound in many economies drove up energy use, breaking a multi-year pattern of emissions declines.'
Logica Cuts Carbon Footprint with Managed Printing - Down to ‘just’ 133 tonnes in 2011
Blurring Communications Lines between IT and Facilities - "Sharing across silos means the cloud team should explain how their technology is helping consolidate and better utilize the existing data center. The IT and facilities teams should outline how better server technologies will reduce cooling costs. With server technologies continuing to advance and as cloud computing gains a bigger foothold on the industry, facilities management professionals must be kept in the loop of what other departments are doing. Good communication practices will help an organization stay fresh and aware of what is happening inside of their data center."

We hope you have an incredible weekend! Visit us at at Booth 1746 at Cisco Live US, and check out the Cisco EnergyWise Pavilion at Booth 2776.

Exploring the Cisco EnergyWise Solutions Lab w/ JouleX Energy Manager

Ida Davidson — Tue, 29 May 2012 12:19:00 GMT

Check out this video for a great glimpse at how Cisco's EnergyWise Solutions Lab utilizes JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) to monitor, analyze, and control the network connected devices in their environment.

This is a great high level overview of the way JEM works with Cisco EnergyWise. Not only does the JouleX Energy Manager platform help optimize your EnergyWise enabled equipment, it allows you to optimize and reduce energy consumption across the entire enterprise. Whether you want to improve energy efficiency in the data center, manage energy usage across facilities and distributed office environments, or automate corporate sustainability reporting, JouleX can help.

If you have questions or would like to see a comprehensive demonstration of all of the capabilities of JouleX Energy Manager, we invite you to stop by our our booth at Cisco Live US, in San Diego, from June 10-14, 2012.

We will present live demos throughout the event at Booth 1746, and will be featured in the Cisco EnergyWise Pavilion at Booth 2776.

If you aren't attending Cisco Live US, but would like to test drive the Joulex Energy Manager in your own environment, contact us today.

Join Us at Cisco Live US, in San Diego June 10-14, 2012

Ida Davidson — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

The JouleX Team would like to invite you to join us at Cisco Live US, in San Diego, from June 10-14, 2012.

We will present live demos throughout the event at Booth 1746, and will be featured in the Cisco EnergyWise Pavilion at Booth 2776.

We are also anticipating a great visit at from Cisco CEO, John Chambers, at our booth. More information on this as we get closer to the event.

Six of our knowledgable team members will be in attendance to show you the features and benefits of the JouleX Energy Manager platform, as well as ask any questions you may have.

Not registered to attend yet? Head over here to take care of that now.

We look forward to discussing your energy management challenges with you at Cisco Live US!

*If you're not attending Cisco Live US, but would like to learn more about JouleX Energy Manager and how we can solve your energy management problems, start by downloading our Data Center White Paper here.

Cisco Demos UPOE, EnergyWise and JouleX at Interop 2012

Ida Davidson — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:19:00 GMT

Over on the Cisco Borderless Networks blog, there are a couple of great videos covering Cisco UPOE and EnergyWise at Interop 2012 in Las Vegas. The management application on display is the JouleX Energy Manager.

In the first video, Jimmy Ray from TechWise TV receives a live demo from Rich Zavala, Technical Marketing Engineer. Rich is demonstrating how Cisco Energywise automates energy management for both IT and non-IT related equipment that are connected to Cisco UPOE switches.

At the 7 minute mark, Rich and Jimmy Ray talk about using JouleX for monitoring and control of network connected devices.

The second video shows Pradeep Parmar, Senior Marketing Manager of Borderless Networks at Cisco, delivering a presentation on the business benefits of Cisco UPOE. He discusses how you can save more than a quarter million dollars for a 1,000-port deployment with Cisco UPOE and EnergyWise.

All in all, this is a pretty great way to learn quite a bit about the benefits of Cisco UPOE in just under 20 minutes.

We hope you have a great weekend!

Video: Scott Paisley at Green IT and Cloud Summit 2012

Ida Davidson — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:20:00 GMT

We have received a lot of great feedback for Scott Paisley's, Americas Technology Director, presentation at the Green IT and Cloud Summit 2012* last month and we are pleased to share with you some video from his opening.

*Green IT & Cloud Summit 2012 is a one day conference on April 18 in Vienna, VA and brings together leaders from the private and public sectors to transform the ideas around sustainable information technology generated during the 2010 GreenGov Symposium into actionable plans. It also provides a forum to forge the strategic alliances and partnerships necessary to realize the promise of sustainable IT for federal, state and local agencies.

This day was packed full of great information by knowledgeable industry professionals, and we were thrilled to be able to participate in that. Take a look at the video clip below to see just a small portion of the information shared.

Data Center Challenges Survey

Ida Davidson — Wed, 09 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The challenges faced by data center managers today are unprecedented; rapidly expanding volumes of data and a growing number of mission-critical applications, managing highly complex and wildly heterogeneous environments, meeting more demanding service level agreements (SLAs), and implementing a variety of emerging "green" business initiatives in an environment of fiscal constraints that have resulted in reduced capital and operating budgets. JouleX is committed to helping you gain efficiencies in the data center so you can achieve the agility required to respond at the speed of business.

In order to understand more about the data center environment you’re currently operating in, we would like to invite you to participate in the following survey. All responses are anonymous, and we do not collect any personally identifiable information from any respondants. We will share the survey results in an upcoming blog entry.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us in our ongoing efforts to fully address the needs of our customers.

JEM Manages the Important Energy at Cisco Expo 2012 in Berlin

Ida Davidson — Wed, 02 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

As we mentioned last week, the JouleX Energy Manager(JEM) is being used to monitor, measure, and control the energy consumption of the venue, O₂ World Berlin, and all IP connected devices at Cisco Expo 2012 today and tomorrow.

To show you how JEM really works, we've decided to share with you the energy consumption of a process that is near and dear to all of our hearts here at JouleX... the beer coolers.

The image below shows that we are able to meter the energy needed to power the beer coolers.

The next image shows the Top Ten energy consumers at O₂ World Berlin. As you can see, beer cooling is ranked number 6 (…right after ventilation). Clearly, cold beer is almost as important as breathing.

Under the Reports tab, we chose the Consumption w/ Stats report to show how much energy has been needed to run the all laptops, desktops, and VoIP telephones running in the venue for the last seven days, then compared that to the amount of energy consumed to cool the beer. As you can see, the beer coolers are working much more diligently than all of the distributed office equipment combined.

The report below compares the energy consumption for powering the lights at the venue to the energy consumption for cooling the beer for that same seven day period. Although the lighting systems did consume more energy than the beer coolers, we would like to think that's simply because everyone needs to have the lights turned on to find the beer.

We hope that you'll stop by the JouleX team in Lounge 207 and let us show you all of the other cool things that you never knew you never knew about how energy is really consumed and managed.

Join us at Cisco Expo 2012 in Berlin May 2-3

Ida Davidson — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:14:00 GMT

JouleX is a proud Gold Sponsor of Cisco Expo 2012 at O₂ World Berlin. Since O₂World Berlin is a customer, and utilitizes the JouleX Energy Manager platform, we will be monitoring, analyzing and controlling the energy consumption of the venue through facility management integration and also monitoring the IT equipment. We invite you to visit us in Lounge 207 to see JouleX Energy Manager in action.

In addition to ongoing demonstrations and Q&A in Lounge 207, our team will be presenting these topics on the Unified Data Center and Borderless Network – Connecting the Cloud Securely tracks:

May 2 at 2:30PM: Increasing Data Center Capacity through Cisco UCS, Nexus and the JouleX Energy Manager
May 3 at 1:00PM: Reducing Energy Consumption from the Core to the Edge with JouleX and Cisco Energy Wise

We look forward to seeing you there and discussing how you can leverage JouleX with your Cisco infrastructure to gain efficiencies and savings!

Friday Roundup - Green Energy Edition

Ida Davidson — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:06:00 GMT

Happy Friday! We're happy to share that the third in our series on Facilities & IT was published this week. You can see that here: Facilities and IT: The Similarities.

You can find the first two articles here Energy Management: Building a Bridge Between Facilities and IT and here Facilities and IT: Learning to Speak the Language.

Since Sunday is Earth Day, most of the articles coming out around sustainable business are very Earth Day focused this week. Here are a few that we found useful or interesting.

10 Ways for Executives to Green Their Business "In honor of Earth Day, here are 10 ways that executive women can leverage their influence to make a difference."
Game Consoles Waste over $1B Worth of Electricity Per Year "Analysts at Carnegie Mellon University report that game consoles are wasting power at record levels: 10.8 terawatt-hours, by their estimate, costing U.S. homeowners some $1.24 billion a year."
Greenpeace's Clean Cloud Push "In its trademark smashmouth style, Greenpeace this week took cloud computing companies to task for using dirty energy -- and then came under fire itself over its methods and assertions. "
High Speed Rail Isn't the Most Efficient Way to Cut Carbon Emissions "The California High Speed Rail Authority claims that by 2030, if the train ran entirely on renewable energy, then it would start reducing the state’s carbon emissions by about 5.4 million metric tons per year. That would mean the rail network would cut California’s emissions at a cost of, at the very low end, $250 per ton of carbon dioxide over the ensuing 50 years, given the system’s current price tag"
Northeast States Bucking Carbon Emissions Trend "Study finds that cap-and-trade and other clean energy policies have helped Northeastern states cut CO2 emissions faster than the rest of the nation."
Business Roundtable: Create, Grow, Sustain 2012 Report "now in its fifth year, features narratives from 126 CEOs on how their companies are leading the way with solutions to make the U.S. economy more sustainable while also driving economic growth and job creation."

We hope you have a Great Weekend and a VERY Green Earth Day!

JouleX Participating at Green IT Summit

Player Pate — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:58:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to participate at today's Green IT Summit in Herndon, VA. JouleX Technical Director Scott Paisley is delivering a presentation this morning on the benefits of employing enterprise energy management solutions. JouleX has also been named a finalist for its Energy Management award.

If you are in the area, please drop by and say hello to Scott and to our Federal Director, Tom Ebert. They are demonstrating a host of new features in the JouleX Energy Manager platform. The event is showcasing great solutions and speakers from across the industry and we are proud to participate.

The event is hosted by the Green IT Council. The Green IT Council is a non-profit initiative started by leading experts in the IT Industry. The purpose of the Green IT Council is to educate IT professionals, managers, and government on the need for eco-friendly technology. The council works with leading experts to determine a standard for Eco-friendly technology, and the true environmental impact. It recognizes and awards companies showing a forward thinking view of technology and its environmental impact. www.greenITcouncil.org

Facilities and IT: The Similarities

Ida Davidson — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

This is the third in our series on brokering energy management collaboration between the Facilities and IT departments. You can see the first article here: Energy Management: Building a Bridge between Facilities and IT. The second article can be found here: Facilities and IT: Learning to Speak the Language.

We have covered the differences in both the focus areas and the terminology barriers between Facilities and IT. Now it’s time to take a look at the similarities between the two departments and the collaboration needed to successfully implement an enterprise-wide energy management solution. As with all other collaborative relationships, it is easiest to build a team effort on common ground.

Both Facilities and IT provide critical services to the rest of the organization and, although providing very different resources, each department works in a similar way. Often times, projects developed in other departments do not involve IT as an important part of the implementation until the last minute, leaving them scrambling for resources in the 11^th hour. Along the same vein, Facilities is only involved by IT when they run out of available power and the situation is critical. With data centers running out of space and power at a rapid rate, energy management has become a growing challenge for IT departments.

Because energy management solutions run on the network, Facilities may see it as an IT product. Because Facilities realize the budgetary relief of energy management, IT may view it as a Facilities product. However, it’s important to remember that energy management is not department specific. From facilities management devices ( HVAC and lighting) on the Facilities’ side, and computing devices (PCs, monitors, switches, routers, servers, VoIP phones, printers) on the IT side, enterprise energy management spans the entire organization.

Ensuring there is enough capacity to meet the demands of the IT organization for years to come is an effort that must be undertaken by both departments, as a team. Because managing energy efficiency is critical to IT’s ability to maintain SLAs, as well as Facilities’ ability to plan for and deliver sufficient power to the enterprise as a whole, neither department can afford to pass up the opportunity to collaborate in the implementation of an enterprise energy solution.

JouleX Proud to Participate in Sam Nunn Bank of America Policy Forum

Player Pate — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:22:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to participate in this year's Sam Nunn Bank of America Policy Forum at the Georgia Institute of Technology, themed Energy and Security: Global Challenges, Local Opportunities. The Sam Nunn Bank of America Policy Forum brings together noted academic, government, and private sector experts on technology, public policy, and international affairs to address issues of immediate importance to the nation.

We are excited to see the issue of energy being addressed by this group and proud that JouleX president and CEO, Thomas Noonan, was asked to contribute to the discussion.

Open to the public, the Policy Forum was developed from former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn’s vision of increasing understanding among policymakers, academic researchers, technologists, and citizens. Senator Nunn is a Distinguished Professor at The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech.

The Policy Forum is designed to connect the academic and policymaking communities to craft effective and creative responses to critical challenges confronting the United States in the twenty-first century. Transcending disciplinary boundaries and engaging scholars, practitioners, students, and interested citizens, the Policy Forum offers a significant venue for policy-relevant research and dialogue. Insights and findings produced at the forum are shared with policymakers and the broader public through congressional testimony, circulation of proceedings, policy papers, journal articles, and educational television and Internet broadcasts.

Friday Roundup - Green Energy Articles from Around the Web

Ida Davidson — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:06:00 GMT

With Earth Day approaching, the news and blog worlds are abuzz with articles about green energy, sustainable business, and ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Here are some of the most interesting articles we found, and the articles you may have missed on the JouleX blog!

From the JouleX Green IT Blog:

Case Study: PPC Reduces Data Center Energy, Costs, and Carbon

Ida Davidson — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

To say that the JouleX team is passionate about what we do is huge understatement. Our engineers eat, sleep, and breathe developing a first-in-class product line that provide unrivaled benefits to our customers. In fact, the only people who value the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) platform more than we do are our customers.

We recently had the opportunity to work with Project Performance Corporation (PPC) to document their implementation and success in using JEM to visualize, monitor, and control the energy usage in their data centers. PPC was able to achieve real benefits from JEM within hours of installation.

We're pleased to be able to offer our readers a free download of the resulting case study: Project Performance Corporation Reduces Data Center Energy, Costs, and Carbon Using the JouleX Energy Manager.

Once you've had a chance to read the case study, feel free to contact our team through the contact page, or by email at sales@joulex.net.

Facilities and IT - Learning to Speak the Language

Ida Davidson — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:52:00 GMT

This is the second in our series on brokering energy management collaboration between the Facilities and IT departments. You can see the first article here: Energy Management: Building a Bridge between Facilities and IT.

Though each of these departments has a different perspective on energy (facilities ensuring that costs are kept as low as possible, while still delivering the necessary amount of power to the company; IT delivering ever increasing computing capabilities to the business, while also maintaining service level agreements) they are not as incompatible as they appear on the surface. Bridging the gap between Facilities and IT begins with understanding that each speaks a different language.

While the term "Control Points" may be alien to the IT department, the IT equivalent "IP Addresses" is just as unfamiliar to the Facilities team. We believe that learning to speak the native language to the department being addressed will go a long way toward building a collaborative atmosphere between the two departments.

By simply understanding the vernacular, Facilities and IT teams can more easily collaborate and advance energy management initiatives for the organization. Below is a reference table to help Facilities and IT teams find common ground and start a meaningful conversation.

Term	Facilities	IT
Transport	Serial Interfaces RS242, 422, 485, etc	Ethernet
Control Systems	Building Mgmt, Facilities Mgmt	Systems Mgmt, Network Mgmt
Device References	Control Points	IP Addresses
Protocols	BACnet, Modbus and dozens of other open and proprietary protocols	TCP/IP
Environment	Hundreds that are more manually managed	Thousands of devices typically automated

One area of focus for the Facilities department that doesn't really have a corresponding IT term is Plug Load. Simply put, this is the amount of energy pulled from any electrical outlet in a building. In enterprise buildings, the plug load is typically utilized 40-60% of the entire energy usage and the remaining percentage is used by the building for lighting, and HVAC, etc. Of the plug load, 60-80% is utilized by IT devices.

Building Type	Facilities	Plug Load
Office	60%	40%
Data Center	40%	60%

By learning to understand the terms and primary concerns of each team, both Facilities and IT will have the basic building blocks to understand each other's roles and begin a dialogue to identify energy savings opportunities within the organization.

Energy Management: Building a Bridge Between Facilities and IT

Ida Davidson — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:47:00 GMT

This is the first in a series of articles addressing the challenges faced by Facilities and IT departments when working together to implement energy management solutions. You can see the second article here: Facilities and IT: Learning to Speak the Language

When it comes to implementing Enterprise Energy Management, it is essential to have collaboration between the Facilities and IT groups within an organization. Though these departments deliver different services to the organization, they operate very similarly. Yet they rarely have the opportunity to work with one another. The IT department focuses on delivering compute services to all of the people in the organization, whereas the Facilities department provides management of physical space and power.

Both departments strive to deliver a reliable and stable service to the rest of the enterprise. The energy concerns of each department are different, however. Facilities needs to ensure that costs are kept as low as possible, while still delivering the necessary amount of power to the company. IT is under pressure to deliver ever increasing computing capabilities to the business, while also maintaining service level agreements.

The challenge here lies in the fact that an energy management implementation requires that IT act as a service provider to Facilities, since the Facilities organization is typically the economic benefactor. Facilities hasn't traditionally had the opportunity to work with IT as a service provider, because they generally don't have many projects that require IT for implementation.

In order to begin building a bridge between IT and Facilities, it is important to understand some key differences between these groups.

Some of the key differences between these departments are:

Energy Capacity Planning

When Facilities plans for energy needs, the determination is based on Power Per Square Foot or Power Per User. They typically use a standard power calculation of X watts per square foot, based on office building or data center, etc. or allocation of power per user. This metric allows Facilities to determine the energy needs of a building.

IT generally does not worry about the amount of power needed until or unless they need more.

Device Management

Although building management systems automate many of the larger devices in the facility, the majority of devices in facilities are manually managed.

In IT, there is not a single device that isn’t managed by something. IT typically has thousands of devices to manage, but facilities have hundreds of large devices.

Budget

The network-connected energy management platform is an IT product, but Facilities typically gets the budget relief of any energy savings. In general, IT does not own the energy management budget in the company; Facilities does.

Since energy is provided, managed, and budgeted through Facilities, this department now has to utilize IT as a service organization the same way all of the other business units do. We believe that there is plenty of common ground between these departments, making this an opportunity to for both groups to collaborate on reducing energy consumption and providing a more sustainable IT infrastructure.

Is your company managing energy between these departments? To what degree do you find collaboration between IT and Facilities within your organization? Leave a comment below and tell us how it’s going.

Friday Roundup - What You Missed on JouleX Edition

Ida Davidson — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

It's Friday again, and we hope that you're putting your energy to good use before the weekend kicks off! To get you started, here are a few interesting articles we found from around the web, and things we posted on the Green IT Blog.

The Computerworld Honors Program: A search for new heroes “For over two decades, The Computerworld Honors Program has recognized individuals and organizations that create and use information technology to promote and advance public welfare, contribute to the greater good of society and change the world for the better.”
Uptime Institute announced the 7th Annual Uptime Institute Symposium: The symposium will be held May 14-17, 2012 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The theme is Digital Infrastructure Convergence™.
What do you spend on energy?: A more informed and conscientious energy customer has the ability to reduce their own energy costs, while as a whole helping reduce national energy use.
Optimizing energy use during the workday: Typical users only use a fraction of the processing power that their PCs actually need to operate during the work day. Before now, not only has this energy waste been left unaddressed, but also largely unrecognized.
Cisco UCS - Undisputed Computing Success: UCS now boasts 11,000 customers worldwide and an annual run rate of £822m making it the fastest growing product in Cisco’s history.
Scott Paisley, our Americas Technology Director, will be speaking at the Green IT | Cloud Computing 2.0 Summit: Check out more information about the event here.
Green Data Center Management: Power Efficiency Solutions with Dell, Intel, and Joulex

Optimizing Energy Use During the Workday

Ida Davidson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

At the top of every article about IT energy reduction, you will read “Turn PCs off at night and on weekends, when they aren’t in use.” Would you be surprised to learn that even when your enterprise’s PCs are in use, they’re wasting up to 30% of the energy being consumed? Typical users only use a fraction of the processing power that their PCs actually need to operate during the work day. Before now, not only has this energy waste been left unaddressed, but also largely unrecognized.

Traditional PC based power management has only looked at energy consumption during nights and weekends. It is quite simplistic: when the user is not there, power the devices off. Microsoft Windows capability has already incorporated a lot of that work for customers, devaluing the need for traditional PC power management. With power policies in Windows and more power efficient equipment that will automatically put itself in an idle mode to reduce power consumption, these devices draw much less energy than ever before. Automated sleep mode, after a defined period of inactivity, helps reduce that energy draw. This type of technology has been used in the data center and in distributed offices for some time. JouleX leverages these inherent features to deliver the ultimate in energy efficiency without affecting the end user experience. We call this capability Load Adaptive Computing.

The value that the JouleX Energy Manager platform provides to this type of distributed office environment is multifaceted. The JEM platform allows you to:

Manage devices that do not have built in power management capabilities
Better match a device’s energy consumption by the way the device is used through behavioral analysis called Load Adaptive Computing
Measure whether or not your devices actually shift to a lowered power state when not in use
Measure exactly how much energy your company is saving through these existing power management capabilities

That just scratches the surface of JEM’s unique capabilities and their benefits to your enterprise. Not only does JEM take your PC power management to the next level by enabling power management during the active day, but it also extends energy management to other network connected devices that do not have built-in power management capabilities such as monitors, printers, VoIP phones, etc.

The modern PC has hundreds of thousands of times the processing power than the computers that sent the first men to the moon. Our phones have hundreds of times the processing power than the computers that sent the men to the moon. Because of price points and Moore’s Law (every 18 months the processing power doubles at the same price point), we’re getting continually more powerful and capable PCs.

PC manufacturers and operating system vendors have developed policies that can make PCs more energy efficient. JouleX leverages those policies to dynamically adjust processor performance levels based upon how that pc is being utilized. If a PC is under heavy utilization, JEM will allow the PC to continue operating at full speed. But if, over time, monitoring shows that the PC has light or little utilization, you can enable JEM to adjust the power consumption ratio of that PC lower. This can save up to 30% of the machine’s energy without impacting the user experience.

The combination of Load Adaptive Computing and location based policy drives efficiency in the workspace by not only understanding how devices are being utilized, but also knowing WHEN devices are in use and adjusting performance and power respectively.

The Computerworld Honors Program: A Search for New Heroes

Ida Davidson — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 07:00:00 GMT

We recently announced JouleX’s inclusion in the Computerworld Honors Program. Knowing that the stated mission of this long standing program is “A Search for New Heroes”, this recognition is both humbling and exhilarating for all of us here at JouleX.While we would stop short of calling ourselves heroes, we do look forward to continuing our groundbreaking work in Enterprise Energy Management.

Our president and CEO, Tom Noonan, shared his thoughts about the award: “At JouleX, we are proud to play a vital role in providing organizations around the world with the visibility and analysis required to help them control their energy management across the enterprise and, ultimately, decrease energy consumption, support corporate sustainability initiatives, and reduce overall operating expenses. To have our JouleX Energy Manager technology recognized by The Computerworld Honors Program further validates both the business and environmental value we bring to the marketplace.”

Our congratulations go out to all of the other recognized Laureates and our heartfelt thanks go out to all of the judges at The Computerworld Honors Program.

From the Computerworld Honors Program press release:

“For over two decades, The Computerworld Honors Program has recognized individuals and organizations that create and use information technology to promote and advance public welfare, contribute to the greater good of society and change the world for the better.”

Scott Paisley Speaks at 2012 Building Energy Summit

Ida Davidson — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:19:00 GMT

JouleX's Americas Technology Director, Scott Paisley, will speak on Energy Management: Reducing Demand and Improving ROI at the 2012 Building Energy Summit in Washington DC on March 15.

Regarding the Summit, Paisley had this to say: “At JouleX, we are always excited to participate in events that bring attention to the challenges of Energy Management, like the DC Energy Summit. I enjoy the opportunity to meet with our customers, discuss their energy challenges and needs, and provide them with technology that helps reduce energy intensity and lower costs!”

If you are in the Washington, DC area, please come out to join us.

To learn about future events attended by JouleX team members, take a look at our News & Events page.

"The Summit will combine keynote presentations by industry leaders, educational breakout sessions for hands-on learning, case studies demonstrating real projects and real results, and networking opportunities to meet colleagues and solution providers. You’ll hear from owners of the most efficient buildings in town who have slashed energy costs up to 40 percent! Most importantly, you’ll leave with an action plan to achieve your energy conservation goals."

New Intel Video Features JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers

Player Pate — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:23:00 GMT

Intel released a new video demonstrating how Intel, Dell, VMware and JouleX technologies optimize and reduce energy consumption in the data center, even in virtualized environments.

Data center operators around the globe tell us energy capacity planning is major concern for them. They talk about their struggles in optimizing energy while protecting service levels, as availability is clearly priority number one.

Increasing energy capacity doesn't mean turning machines off, it’s about intelligently allocating the energy you have. Even in virtualized environments, Intel, Dell, VMware, and JouleX have practical solutions that help data center operators gain energy visibility and recapture more energy capacity, save significant energy costs, and extend the lives of their data centers. All while helping data center operators protect service levels.

Check out the video below to learn more.

Friday Link Roundup - Sustainability Edition

Ida Davidson — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:27:00 GMT

With all of the sustainability articles floating around, it's hard to tell what you should be spending your time reading. Here are a few articles that we felt were worth sharing. I hope you enjoy them!

5 Easy Online Tools to Reduce Personal Emissions - "How can we reduce emissions in our personal lives? Keeping it simple, reducing carbon and living a sustainable lifestyle is about making educated choices and taking eco actions that can be categorized in different areas of our lives."
Ebay Data Center A Case Study In Energy Savings - "EBay’s overall goal in its data storage project was to turn 11 centers into three, but there was another challenge: it needed to consolidate its data centers and deploy new servers in a very short timeframe."
New Cisco EnergyWise Video Showcases the JouleX Energy Manager - "Cisco recently released a great new video about showing some great features for how Cisco EnergyWise can help you monitor, analyze, and control energy usage and showcases the JouleX Energy Manager as a recommended energy management system for Cisco EnergyWise."
The 10 best practices for sustainability reporting - "Whether producing their first or their fifteenth sustainability report, many companies still struggle with how to create a credible report that supports the company business strategy, while effectively controlling the labor and costs associated with report development."
Green Server Wars Heat Up: Intel, AMD/SeaMIcro, and ARM - "Green IT needs a lot of new performance metrics to measure its commitment to energy efficiency. In server terms, performance per watt is an increasingly important statistic for data centers that are maxing out their available electricity."
Suncorp Banks on Desktop Virtualization - "Desktop Anywhere was deployed in October 2011 and had 2000 users as of March this year. Staff can access a full desktop experience, including video, wherever they are working."
Big Business on the Sustainability Offensive - "For decades, many companies have typically responded to sustainability challenges by pursuing incremental operational improvements. But we are beginning to see an interesting new trend – businesses using sustainability as a tactic for long-term offense, rather than just short-term defence."

New Cisco EnergyWise Video Showcases the JouleX Energy Manager

Ida Davidson — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:50:00 GMT

Cisco recently released a great new video about showing some great features for how Cisco EnergyWise can help you monitor, analyze, and control energy usage and showcases the JouleX Energy Manager as a recommended energy management system for Cisco EnergyWise.

The video demonstrates how, "IP connects every critical system, making the network a natural control plane for energy management."

Furthermore, it shows the power of using Cisco EnergyWise to instrument your network-connected devices with energy information and using the JouleX Energy Manager to easily create policies that save energy, save money, and reduce carbon emissions.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at the video here:

Visit our Resources section to view related videos, white papers, and data sheets.

Friday Link Roundup - Co-Founders edition

Ida Davidson — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:25:00 GMT

This week, I'm excited to share interviews with our two Co-Founders: Rene Seeber and Josef Brunner, and some interesting reading I found around the net. Happy Friday!

Always On! An Interview with Rene Seeber: Now that the big launch of JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) Version 3.0 is in full swing, we thought it would be a great time to touch base with Rene Seeber, CTO and Co-founder of JouleX.
Interview with Josef Brunner talking about JouleX's financial customers: Non-German speakers will want to use Google Translate
3 Ways Retailers Can Help Their Suppliers Tackle Sustainability: "Based on interviews with representatives from 20 different retail companies and 30 corporate sustainability reports from that sector, the report is an intriguing snapshot of the current priorities, challenges, and opportunities the retail sector faces."
Data centre week – green awareness is growing: "I don’t normally make predictions. ... But until now what’s made the IT operation more sustainable has been primarily the cost-cutting exercises by the IT department/data centre managers. Now, though, the green agenda is being adopted at the highest level within companies as an integral element of business strategy."
How Green is my IT: "Current data centers are becoming highly energy intensive and growing rapidly. At the current rate, the consumption could double in the next five years. According to a survey, IT is contributing 2% to global warming."
IBM, Cisco and the business of smart cities: How two of the IT industry's largest companies plan to rewire urban living
Rethinking Carbon Dioxide: From a Pollutant to an Asset

Always On - An Interview with Rene Seeber

Ida Davidson — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 06:01:00 GMT

Now that the big launch of JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) Version 3.0 is in full swing, we thought it would be a great time to touch base with Rene Seeber, CTO and Co-founder of JouleX. Rene is the driving force behind our incredible engineering team, and is “Always On!” That’s more than just a slogan for Rene, who has even been known to come into a meeting with a hand full of paper napkins covered in engineering notes because that was the only paper available during a dinner with colleagues the night before.

Describe what you do at JouleX.
Rene: My days at JouleX are always a good combination of strategic product planning and working directly on the product. I listen to customer needs and feedback, and work to find ways for JouleX to address those needs through product development. I spend a lot of time figuring out where we’re going in 1, 2, and 3 years but also ensuring that JouleX is a great platform today.

Tell me a little about the projects you’re currently working on:
Rene: Now that JEM Version 3.0 has been released, we’re working on putting concrete plans in place for the upcoming next two versions. Based on customer feedback and needs, we’re really working to make the next version even better than the great products we have today.

What in your past prepared you most for what you’re working on today?
Rene: Going through all of the ups and downs with a couple of startups before JouleX was probably the best experience I could have had for being successful with JouleX. My professional training obviously prepared me for the work we do, but I’ve been through everything in startups and that’s the best experience I’ve ever had.

Is there is any relation between how the technology you built at Cobion works and techniques used in JEM?
Rene: Absolutely. Cobion was one of the biggest influencers. Cobion processed images and data and indexed it. JouleX processes energy data and indexes it. All technology relates to others.

With Cobion, we approached “content security” as a large scale data processing problem, crawling billions of internet pages and images, doing distributed content analysis to classify web sites and created enterprise products out of the result.

With JouleX, it’s quite similar. We’re using advanced algorithms in combination with large-scale number crunching on a different kind of data source, in JouleX case it’s energy related sensor data (power, utilization, temperature, etc).

What moments stand out in your mind when thinking back over the young life of this (if we do say so ourselves!) pioneering company?
Rene: One moment that always stays with me was meeting with Tom Noonan (now JouleX president & CEO) and Tim McCormick (now JouleX vice president, sales & marketing) to present them with the idea for JouleX, and getting them excited about working together again with this new company. I will always remember that the day they said yes was one of the most perfect days.

Another was when we grew enough to start to hiring people we didn’t know and that we hadn’t worked with before. Taking that step was a huge moment for our company.

A little more than a year ago at the first company kick-off when everyone in the company was together for the first time. JouleX is unique in that our team members are all spread across the world, so it’s a big deal to have everyone together at once. It’s an incredibly precious time and it’s very exciting when we all come together.

How do want JouleX to be remembered 50 years from now?
Rene: In 48 years, I expect that JouleX as a company will be looking back on all of our accomplishments at our 50 year celebration. This company has the potential to be around for a long time. I don’t think of us as being remembered but still being very present in the world.

Finally, what kinds of hobbies fill your free time?
Rene: I don’t have free time. I only concentrate at one thing at a time and right now that’s JouleX. I have a wife and children and JouleX. Everything else is unimportant.

A Look Inside Joulex Energy Manager Version 3.0

Ida Davidson — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:13:00 GMT

Did you catch yesterday's announcement about the launch of JouleX Energy Manager Version 3.0? If not, let me introduce you to the most feature rich, intuitive, and interactive energy management platform on the market today.

JouleX recognizes that energy management challenges are a global problem, and multi-national corporations need an energy management platform that provides full functionality at both a local and centralized level. JEM 3.0 is optimized to provide for those needs locally and globally.

Some of the most popular features of JEM 3.0!

Centralized Reporting and Scalability

Architecture enhancements provide for single instance installations as well as for distributed deployments across multiple locations, creating a single repository of data that allows for centralized and localized reporting;
The JEM platform now scales to support one million devices.

Dashboard Enhancements and New Reports

New embeddable widgets, such as Heat Maps, Energy Geo Maps, Data Center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Centralized Server Statistics and Health Status, and Server Resource Charts, can be used exported to external websites, corporate intranets and sustainability leaderboards to share real time progress against corporate sustainability initiatives with customers and employees;
Improved screen layouts make viewing the dashboard and devices easier by moving from two columns to three and adding a wide-screen mode;
Reports are now available in six languages―English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese―and can be scheduled to be sent automatically.
All-new reports for:

Sustainable procurement include Model Analysis and Model Replacement;
Data centers include PUE, Under-utilized Servers, Idle Analysis, Hourly Consumption Analysis, Cost Analysis and Summary Reports;
Distributed offices include Business Hours/Non-business Hours Comparison, Consumption Analysis, On/Off Analysis and Devices On At Night/During Weekends.

Threshold Alerting and Auto Response

Users can define thresholds based on power, utilization, temperature and other indicators, and JEM can automatically send notifications or carry out automated actions;
New notification architecture triggers notifications based on policies or with the Alerts Application.

These are just some of the highlights. Contact our Sales Department for a full demonstration of what JouleX Energy Manager Version 3.0 can do for your enterprise!

In Case You Missed It - JouleX at Cisco Live London Part 2

Ida Davidson — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

We were excited to be afforded the opportunity for JouleX Energy Manager to monitor and report on the energy use of the entire Cisco network at Cisco Live London 2012. Attendees were able to see the real time energy usage of the entire network on large screens located in the Cisco Network Operations Center, the Cisco EnergyWise booth, and displayed in our own booth.

Having this visibility into the network of the Cisco Live London show gave many attendees their first real look into how energy is actually used in their own IT operations.

The image below shows the real time power consumption change as people arrived at the show in the morning. Applied to the enterprise, this capability would show you within a matter of weeks what your company’s day to day energy usage patterns are. If your energy usage isn’t changing when your employees get started every day, you’re wasting a LOT of energy during non-business hours.

JouleX Solutions Architect, David Prantl, was able to implement the JouleX Energy Manager for the Cisco network in less than two hours, which gave him plenty of time to visit with prospects and customers at the show.

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our booth to visit. For those who missed the London show, visit us at Cisco Live in San Diego in June.

Roundup 2/17/2012 - Sustainability, Green Tech, & Other Cool Stuff

Ida Davidson — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:40:00 GMT

This week's round up is a collaborative effort with several of our team members. We hope you enjoy the reads, and another fabulous Dilbert strip.

How EnergyStar is working on the Green Data Center of the Future- "Rolling out this year ... are two new certifications and a long-awaited updated to the servers spec, and to find out more about how they're progressing, I talked to R.J. Meyers, Energy Star's Data Center Products Lead, about how the EPA is working to green the data center from within."
7 Smart Grid Projects that are Turning Heads- "We’re at a juncture in the smart grid market where utilities are moving beyond the expected and taking next step with advanced technologies – from the flywheel systems protecting Austin Energy’s new control center to SAIC’s “Smart Grid as a Service” that supports critical energy management systems in remote Alaskan villages."
Coca Cola: Reasons to Believe- "In the company’s effort to increase transparency across its sustainability platform, this year’s report was created using stakeholder feedback and, for the first time, follows the disclosure and reporting requirements of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to achieve a self-declared grade level “B+.” "
Why Invest in Your Employees for a Sustainable Business Culture?- What is the correlation between employee investment and a sustainable business culture?
How the Military Uses Green Tech To Save Soldiers' Lives- "On the battlefield–”in theater” in military parlance–reducing energy consumption isn’t about saving money or the planet, and it’s got zero to do with anyone’s political beliefs."
Energy Department and Department of Commerce Announce $1.3 Million for Clean Energy Workforce- "As part of the President’s blueprint for an American economy built to last, the Energy Department and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program have announced up to $1.3 million for training programs to provide commercial building professionals with critical skills needed to optimize building efficiency, reduce waste, and save money"

Myth of the Month: Don't Turn Off Your PC

Ida Davidson — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:00:00 GMT

This is the second in our series of articles surrounding Energy Following the Productive User. See the first here:How Energy Efficient Is Your Video Conferencing?

During the course of our customer interactions, we’ve run across a few IT professionals who still adamantly subscribe to the theory that you shouldn’t power your computers down when they aren’t in use. They claim that computers that are left on at all times last longer than those powered down.

According to User Guide to Power Management for PCs and Monitors", Bruce Nordman, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, January, 1997, LBNL-39466

"The belief that frequent shutdowns are harmful persists from the days when hard disks did not automatically park their heads when shut off; frequent on-off cycling could damage such hard disks. Conventional wisdom, however, has not kept pace with the rapid technological change in the computer industry. Modern hard disks are not significantly affected by frequent shutdowns."

Though this may have been a problem in the early days of computers, it has long since ceased to be a realistic concern. In fact, According to the United States Department of Energy, there are no computers on the market today that last long enough to be negatively impacted by turning your computer on and off.

The following is a quote from Rocky Mountain Institute Home Energy Brief #7 Computers and Peripherals:

“Modern computers are designed to handle 40,000 on-off cycles before failure, and you're not likely to approach that number during the average computer's five- to seven-year life span. In fact, IBM and Hewlett Packard encourage their own employees to turn off idle computers, and some studies indicate it would require on-off cycling every five minutes to harm a hard drive."

To put this in perspective, if your computer is used every day for 5 years before you upgrade or retire that computer, you would have to turn it off and back on 21 TIMES PER DAY to reach 40,000 on-off cycles.

What It's Really Costing You

Turn it Off from Nigel Upchurch on Vimeo.

Now that you know that powering your computers off when they aren’t needed isn’t going to harm your equipment, let’s look at what leaving them on is costing your enterprise.

Each computer and monitor that is powered down when not in use (nights, weekends, vacations, and holidays) will save your company money. The chart below shows you just how much, based on an estimated power cost of $.12 kWh, your company could be saving in energy costs EVERY YEAR. In most parts of the world, the cost per kWh is much higher than $.12.

Number of PCs and Monitors - Assuming One Year at $.12 kWh
1	1,000	5,000	10,000	15,000	20,000
$ 34.09	$ 34,090.00	$170,450.00	$340,900.00	$511,350.00	$681,800.00

This doesn't include the amount of money that it is costing to leave on other office equipment, such as: printers, copiers, VoIP phones, video conferencing, thin clients, wireless access points, network switches, and distributed office servers.

Link Roundup: Data Center Edition

Ida Davidson — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

We hope you're enjoying the weekend! Enjoy a little Dilbert and check out the links we thought you'd like.

Data Center Articles:

Data Center Don't: Unplug First, Ask Questions Later - Sadly, this happens all the time. When your DCIM is based on a spreadsheet system, it's easy for incidents like this to happen. Check out JEM for Data Centers and see how we've addressed this challenge.
Need Another Way to Show Off Your Cisco UCS? - Congratulations to Cisco, who recently announced their 10,000th UCS customer.
Virtualization Could Save Feds $30 Billion by 2015 - "Government IT departments at all levels are embracing virtualization, mainly for data center consolidation, survey finds. But they'll have to jump implementation hurdles."
Intel Cloud Builders Guide:"The evolution of cloud computing has resulted in highly efficient and carefully optimized data centers with increased server density and capacity. It means there must be serious considerations made on energy consumption and other factors not as significant in the days of small data centers."

In the upcoming week, we'll have a new poll and talk about the debate around whether or not you should power down PCs.

In Case You Missed it - JouleX at Cisco Live London Part 1

Ida Davidson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:13:00 GMT

If you were not able to attend Cisco Live London last week, you missed a great conference. The place was abuzz with demos, conference sessions, and conversations around Cisco EnergyWise and energy management.

Josef Brunner, JouleX co-founder and chief architect, gave a Gold Theatre Presentation on Reducing Energy Consumption from the Core to the Edge and it was a huge hit. With seating for 40, Josef's presentation drew more than 200 attendees! For those of you who missed it, here's the presentation below. (To fully experience Josef's energy, charisma, and daft analogies you should catch his next live presentation. Those who saw his presentation will tell you, the powerpoint alone doesn't do it justice.)

To those we met at the conference, thank you again for your interest in JouleX, thank you for sharing the success stories you have had from using the JouleX Energy Manager products. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Reducing Energy Consumption from the Core to the Edge: The JouleX and Cisco EnergyWise Solution

Want to learn more?

A Great First Day at Cisco Live

Ida Davidson — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Our crew snapped a couple of pictures at the first day of Cisco Live London yesterday.

They're turning people on to the powerful capabilities of the JouleX Energy Manager and Cisco EnergyWise partnership, and having a great time doing it.

(Chatting with an attendee)

(The JouleX Energy Manager Dashboard)

We're looking forward to all the great stories from the show! If you're at Cisco Live London, stop by Booth G7 and say hello. The JouleX team would love to meet you.

Need another way to show off your Cisco UCS?

Ida Davidson — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:47:00 GMT

Cisco recently announced the 10,000th customer milestone for its UCS (Unified Computing System) offering, the fastest growing x86 blade server on the market. Cisco attributes this success to the increase in “data center happiness” caused by its blade server. One major source of data center happiness, brought about by the Cisco UCS, is its low consumption. Since reducing energy is our passion at JouleX, we thought we should show some other cool tricks you can implement by pairing the Cisco UCS with the JouleX Energy Manager (another fan favorite) to raise the mood level in your data center to pure ecstasy.

The JouleX Energy Manager brings unprecedented visibility into the energy savings realized by upgrading to Cisco UCS, solidifying your original business case, as well as the ongoing benefits of having this visibility, coupled with analysis of other energy, utilization, and temperature metrics. Greater still, is the ability to granularly control the amount of energy it uses to lower costs even further, while maintaining your services levels and reliability metrics.

It’s easy to understand that collapsing 25 end-of-life machines into a single UCS blade server will save power. The challenge is determining just how much power is the UCS actually saving. Moreover, how do you calculate the actual impact on operations costs in years to come?

Consider the HP Compaq Proliant 1850R: If you retire 25 Proliant 1850Rs and replace those with 1 Cisco UCS B200 series Blade Server, your estimated energy savings will be about $10,100 per year*. This does not include cooling, heat, or maintenance costs. Assuming a PUE of 2.0, the total energy savings will be close to be $20,200 per year*.

*at $.12 per kwh

JouleX Energy Manager provides potential for additional energy savings for Cisco UCS, through Load Adaptive Computing. While modern servers are MUCH more energy efficient than 5, 10 or even 2 years ago, there is still waste of energy in allowing a server to scale to maximum performance. In order to quickly achieve this performance level, the power usage levels are geared toward maximum performance, not minimum needed to do the job efficiently and without impacting SLAs. JouleX Energy Manager helps to address that.

With Load Adaptive Computing, you can:

Lower power consumption levels during low peak/off hours
Ensure power does not exceed a pre-set amount, to deal with challenges unique to the data center:
- Address demand response by lowering energy power consumption, when you are out of power or need to free up energy to power something else on
- You lose a chiller and the server room is heating up:
  - Shut down unnecessary servers
  - Power cap critical servers
JouleX Energy Manager will provide the capability to turn off specified machines and send an alert if the temperature reaches designated levels or critical power loads
Match data center energy use to server productivity ensuring THE most efficient data center not only from IT resources, but also from the amount of energy needed to run those IT resources.

Choosing Cisco UCS or any of our other server partners such as Dell and HP, is a step toward lowering energy costs and improving data center efficiency. Implementing JouleX Energy Manager as your energy management platform is the next logical step in making sure you can not only visualize the real savings numbers, but take control of the energy usage in your data center and put it to work in the most effective way possible.

Effortless Reporting with JEM for EnergyWise

Ida Davidson — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:00:00 GMT

One of the most compelling reasons for installing JouleX Energy Manager for EnergyWise is the reporting capability. JEM for EnergyWise provides both a comprehensive overview, and detailed reporting to help you demonstrate savings in a number of customizable ways that are meaningful to your enterprise, such as by location or business unit.

Some of our most popular reports are:

Average Time per Day: Shows total time spent in each EnergyWise level per day, based on all devices in chosen segment and date range. The shown value is the total over time, per day, of all devices in chosen segment.
Note: This report does not provide today's data.

Time Spent in Level: Represents the total time of all devices spent in each EnergyWise level.

Average Consumption per Day: Shows total consumption in each EnergyWise level per day, broken down by devices in chosen segment and date range. The shown value is the total consumption, per day, of all devices in chosen segment.
Note: This report does not provide today's data.

Consumption: Represents the total energy consumption of all devices spent in each EnergyWise level.

Power Demand: Visualizes the relative power demand broken down to each EnergyWise level. Each bar represents an hour/day (depends on date range).
Get better insight to a level by clicking its label in legend.

To learn about JouleX Energy Manager reporting and how to customize reports for your company, check out our Reports documentation here.

Don't forget to stop by our booth at Cisco Live London January 31-Feb3, 2012! We'll be in Booth G7.

JouleX Proudly Launches Website in Deutsch

Ida Davidson — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:46:00 GMT

JouleX startet deutsche Webseite

Das gesamte JouleX Team freut sich außerordentlich seinen Kunden und Partnern nun auch eine deutsche Version unserer Webseite zur Verfügung stellen zu können. Wie viele unserer Leser schon wissen, startete die JouleX Erfolgsgeschichte in Deutschland, wo JouleX mittlerweile Büros in München, Kassel und Hamburg unterhält. Das macht uns umso stolzer unseren Heimatmarkt jetzt auch in deutscher Sprache adressieren und bedienen zu können. Um zur deutschen Version unseres Internetauftritts zu gelangen, klicken Sie einfach auf die deutsche Flagge am rechten, oberen Rand unserer Webseite. Go JouleX!

JouleX Proudly Launches Website in German

JouleX is thrilled to now provide our website content in German. As you may know, we were founded in Germany and maintain a large presence there with sales and development offices in Hamburg, Kassel and Munich. We are excited to serve this market now in its native tongue. To visit the German language section of our website, simply visit JouleX.net and click the German flag in the top right corner of any page. Go JouleX!

1-12-2012 Poll - Data Center Priority

Ida Davidson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:01:00 GMT

We're bringing Polls to our readers to give you a chance to voice your opinions! We hope you'll enjoy this feature, and participate often.

Have Your Say:

*Submit your answer to display results.

JouleX and Cisco Live London!

Ida Davidson — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:00:00 GMT

We’re proud to announce Team JouleX will be participating in Cisco Live London, January 31-February 2, 2012. Stop by Booth G7 to speak with one of our crew, see JEM for EnergyWise in action, and learn how JouleX Energy Manager can empower your enterprise to become energy efficient as well as track and report the results of your efforts.

If you don’t want to wait until Cisco Live London, we encourage you to download your free 90 Day Trial of JouleX Energy Manager for EnergyWise today. The JouleX team is really excited about the number of customers worldwide who are now enjoying the ability to monitor, measure, and control their enterprise energy loads with JouleX Energy Manager for EnergyWise.

We are receiving great customer feedback regarding the progress being made in energy cost reduction, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility, through JEM for EnergyWise. One client was so happy with the trial that they upgraded to the full version within 7 days of installation. Try it yourself today, and see what is so amazing about JouleX Energy Manager.

Have questions or want more information? Visit our Contact page and send a message to one of our team members.

Link Roundup - 12/19/2011: Featuring News from Cisco & 451 Group

Ida Davidson — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:50:00 GMT

Since this is a light week for most people, we decided to save the Friday Roundup for today instead. These are the articles we found interesting enough in the last week or two to share with our readers. I hope you find them as interesting as we did.

NEWS

Data Center Detour: The Quickest Route to Energy Transparency and Efficiency - from Data Center Post
Cisco CSR Report Features Energy Management
IT Minds Quest for ‘Holy Grail’ of Data-Center Metrics - the Data Center Efficiency Metric debate continues
Toys That Every Data Center Manager Wants for the Holidays - Even data center managers have Christmas wish lists
Japan Group to Build Smart Power Grids That Treat Energy Like Network Data
Software Applications Poised for Growth in the Smart Grid
Efficient Data Center Transformation Requires Tracking Improvements Incrementally
Siemens Competitors Snapping Up Smart Grid Software
Japan May Introduce Carbon Tax to Curb Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Optimizing Blade Servers for Virtualization: Improve IT Efficiency, Stop Server Sprawl
451 Research Publishes Market-Sizing Report for the DCIM Software Market
Demand for Data Center Measurement Solutions Drives Future Facilities’ Expansion
Cisco Unified Data Center: Changing the Economics of the Data Center

VIDEOS:

A Global View of Energy Management - with John Parello

Profitable steps in Enterprise Energy and Carbon Management

Ida Davidson — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:31:00 GMT

In partnership with JouleX, A Clean Future has released a new whitepaper titled Profitable Steps in Enterprise-Wise Energy and Carbon Management. This whitepaper addresses carbon and energy reduction challenges and solutions for the entire enterprise, including its complete supply chain.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the whitepaper:

Cost Pressures can be addressed with a low carbon business model, as provn by pioneers that reported to CDP:

"... Energy represents a significant operational expense for companies and provides a key opportunity to reduce cost and increase operational effectiveness, while at the same time addressing resource scarcity. Even basic energy and carbon management will display exactly where those opportunities exist within a company's operational and value chains."

And

"A key technology that provides and innovative solution to modern enterprise energy management has been introduced by JouleX, a leading innovator in sustainable energy management systems for the enterprise, which was founded in 2009. Its flagship solution, the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM), provides the ability to monitor, analyze, and control energy usage for all network-connected devices and systems across an enterprise, including in distributed offices, data center, and facilities."

We encourage you to download and read the full whitepaper Profitable Steps in Enterprise-Wise Energy and Carbon Management.

Cisco CSR Report Features Energy Management

Ida Davidson — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:50:00 GMT

Cisco recently released its Corporate Social Responsibility Report for 2011. In it, Cisco shares the results of its sustainability efforts in the following areas: Governance & Ethics, Value Chain, People (employees), Socety, and Environment. As Cisco has emphasized for some time, energy management was one key area.

We encourage you to read the report, on the Cisco CSR 2011 page. While you’re there, make sure to watch the video A Global View on Energy Management with Jon Parello, a senior technical leader in the Ethernet Switching and Technology Group and the lead architect and co-inventor for Cisco EnergyWise, which is a crucial part of Cisco´s Green initiatives. JouleX is proud to be a featured solution in showcasing the power of Cisco EnergyWise, as seen in the video.

What we find most impressive about Cisco’s commitment to sustainability is that it encompasses everything they do. From the products they sell, to their corporate culture as a whole, Cisco is dedicated to promoting the same sustainable values internally that they encourage their customers to embrace through products like Cisco EnergyWise.

Verdantix Recognizes Top 15 Green Quadrant Energy Management Software

Ida Davidson — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:13:00 GMT

In a press release this morning, Verdantix announced the release of its report: Green Quadrant Energy Management Software (Global) 2011. JouleX is excited that our energy management platform, JouleX Energy Manager, was among the Top 15 in the industry.

Energy management has so often been evaluated in silos within an organization, we're glad to be one of the few that Verdantix recognizes as an enterprise wide solution. It's great to be recognized for our ability to address to the needs and expectations of the industry that we serve.

JouleX attributes the recognition we’ve received to our amazing team of developers, whose hard work and dedication is unparallelled; and to our customers, whose feedback and good will have certainly contributed to our success.

From the Press Release:
The report “provides an authoritative benchmark of fifteen enterprise-scale applications. These were selected for analysis from a global scan which identified more than 60 energy management applications. Verdantix forecasts the US market for energy software will be worth $558m in 2014 and will reach a 51% compound annual growth rate over the five years from 2010 to 2014.”

“Fast-moving new entrants to the enterprise-scale, energy management software market include C3, Hara, Infor, JouleX and SAP. These software suppliers, many of whom entered this market in the last 3 years, have strong product roadmaps and innovation strategies which bode well for the future.”

From the Vertantix Report:
“JouleX’s Energy Manager application achieved a best-in-class score (3.0) for automated data capture from IT, data centre and telecoms equipment as well as strong scores for commercial building data capture (2.6), manufacturing plant data capture (2.0), IT systems integration (2.2) and security and data audit.”

Energy Management Article Roundup - December 2, 2011

Ida Davidson — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:44:00 GMT

Welcome to the Friday Roundup, where we gather up the interesting links we've found over the course of the week. I hope you enjoy them as much as we have.

NEWS

New NTT Tokyo cloud data center: PUE 1.2 & "High-level countermeasures for disasters"
Data Center Dynamics London wrote "true efficiency is beyond PUE's reach". This definitely ties back to what our own Mark Davidson asserted in his article PUE is Dead.
From Business Ethics: Harvard Business School Study Finds Sustainable Companies Significantly Outperform Financially
Cisco UPOE and the Art of Saving 2x the Power Output of Hoover Dam
How Does Energy Efficiency Create Jobs, from The Grist
Control Energy Anywhere, Anytime - From a Handheld Device from Matt Laherty

VIDEOS:

From Cisco: A Global View on Energy Management

AWARDS:

We're proud to be included on the 2011 Red Herring Global Finalists
Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw - Green IT Best Practices
JouleX was also listed by GizMag as among the Top Ten of the Cleantech 100 for 2011

EVENTS:

Join Intel and JouleX at the Gartner Data Center Conference

Congratulations Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw

Ida Davidson — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:57:00 GMT

JouleX congratulates banking customer Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw for winning this year’s Green IT Best Practices award!

At the Green IT Summit, held by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in Berlin, Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw was awarded the Green IT Best Practices award for its sustainability initiatives to address energy and cost inefficiencies of its Self Service devices (ATM machines, statement printers).

Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw has 150 bank branches, 174 ATM machines, and 170 statement printers. With no visibility or reporting capabilities, Sparkasse was challenged by the inability to prove success or failure of their energy saving initiatives. They sought a solution that could capture the energy consumption of the entire IT network, while adhering to strict security requirements that disallowed software installation or hardware meters on individual end devices.

JouleX is thrilled to be part of the solution to these challenges, and part of the overall Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw sustainability initiative. As a direct result of the JouleX implementation, over the course of 400 days, Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw has realized a savings of 40 MWh reduction in energy consumption from:

50-80% for the ATMs and Statement Printers
67% for Windows PCs
33% for servers
Additional electricity savings on cooling, due to less heat generated by devices

Additionally, they found savings in terms of

24.5 tons reduction of CO₂emissions
Extended life of power managed devices
Reduction in maintenance operations costs

The JouleX Team commends Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw for their accomplishments achieved through their sustainability initiatives. Most of all, we are proud to be part of their solution.

A Holiday Reminder - Power Down Your Devices

Ida Davidson — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:26:00 GMT

The entire JouleX team would like to wish our US readers a happy and bountiful Thanksgiving!

DON'T FORGET: Do your part to save energy and reduce carbon emissions. When you prepare to leave the office for the holiday, turn off your computers, monitors, printers, copiers, and any other equipment that isn't needed during non-business hours.

Join Intel and JouleX at the Gartner Data Center Conference

Ida Davidson — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:00:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to participate with our strategic partner Intel at the next Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, NV December 5-8, 2011.

Look for us at the Intel booth, Booth J. JouleX America’s Technical Director, Scott Paisley, will be on hand to provide live demonstrations of JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers leveraging the capabilities of Intel Data Center Manager (DCM) technology. Using Intel DCM, Scott will show how you can easily perform Load Adaptive Computing actions to power cap servers. This capability allows you to match the amount of energy your servers are drawing to their utilization, reducing your energy consumption while protecting service levels.

We look forward to showing you all of the benefits and answering any questions you may have about JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers and Intel DCM. See you there!

DCIM is NOT the answer to your energy problems

Ida Davidson — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:00:00 GMT

As the demands on data centers dramatically increase, energy has become a growing concern for data center operators. For many data centers, it’s a top concern; for many others who have reached maximum energy capacity and “out of power”, it is a critical concern. As a result, an extraordinary amount of focus has been put on Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). With many different types of vendors in the marketplace rebranding themselves as DCIM providers, there is some confusion surrounding what the difference is between them and how do they help solve the real issues of data center operators.

Energy management is not the primary function for DCIM and its energy capabilities are typically very limited, if they exist at all. DCIM is a planning tool for the all of the needs of the data center (In which slot, in which rack, should my next server go?). If you’re a data center operator planning for the needs of your data center in the future, DCIM is what you’re looking for. However, if your real concerns are addressing the challenges you face with energy usage (How do you get your energy usage under control with the servers you already have?), Data Center Energy Management or DCEM is what you truly need.

The recently released Data Center Market Insight Report on DataCenterKnowledge.com contained a list of the Top Ten Concerns/Challenges of Data Center Operators. Of the Top Ten, four of the concerns are classically considered to be the domain of DCIM but are very directly addressed by effective DCEM implementations in the data center.

Scalability
Capacity Planning
Running out of power
Running out of space

DCEM allows you to quickly address current challenges of your data center while also giving you the data to assist with future planning, whereas DCIM is primarily dedicated to future planning. JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers has been developed with FULL integration into DCIM in mind. With JouleX Energy Manager you can automatically track energy usage and server utilization. But our solution goes much further than that by providing the ability to control the energy of the devices in your data center, enabling reclamation and recovery of wasted energy use.

Capacity Planning is a main component of all DCIM solutions. It’s important to remember, however, that energy plays a large role in Capacity Planning. Data center operators need to know the true energy draws of the all assets in the data center in order to accurately address future capacity needs. Through DCEM, the ability to get full visibility and control over energy usage, server utilization, virtualization, and asset retirement/upgrades makes capacity planning more effective and efficient.

Reclaiming and recovering inefficiently utilized energy, server capacity, and existing space within the data center is a key component of DCIM. This aids in Scalability and Capacity Planning, in addition to addressing insufficient power and space availability. When looking at solutions for the challenges in your data center environment, never confuse DCEM with DCIM. Fully optimized DCEM solutions will not only help address current concerns of data center operators, but will also contribute to the effectiveness of any DCIM implementation.

JouleX and Cisco at Cisco Plus in Tokyo

Ida Davidson — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:15:00 GMT

JouleX announced the opening of its Tokyo office on May 25, 2011. Only 6 months later, the JouleX team stands proud of the difference we are making by helping Japanese organizations meet the energy reduction requirements imposed as a result of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Today, JouleX is participating with our partner Cisco at the Cisco Plus Expo in Tokyo, where we are demonstrating the energy savings opportunities for Cisco customers using EnergyWise enabled devices. The ability to measure, monitor, and control provided by Cisco EnergyWise and JouleX Energy Manager is truly groundbreaking innovation in a time when energy challenges are at the top of every large company's list of concerns.

The JouleX team is committed to helping companies from all around the world meet their energy challenges head on! Contact us today to see how Joulex can change the entire way your company views energy.

For a free 90 Day Trial of JouleX Energy Manager for EnergyWise, click the button below.

ROI Imperative in Green IT Transition

Ida Davidson — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Everywhere you turn; it seems that the entire world is talking about Green IT, Sustainability, and Corporate Social Responsibility. Enterprises are now inundated with information about products and services that span the spectrum from poorly disguised Greenwashing to industry changing innovation. Clearly, all of these products and services are not created equal. For companies dedicated to improving their ecological footprint as well as their fiscal responsibility, money is the REAL Green in Green IT.

Energy Management companies are a primary example of this. To know if an energy management product or service is right for your enterprise, it is imperative that you know what benefits you should be receiving from it.

Any technology used to manage energy in the enterprise should be able to clearly and quickly demonstrate a Return on Investment (ROI) in a reasonable amount of time. Without an accurate reporting mechanism to demonstrate ROI, there is no way to determine the success of energy management programs or make the financial case for implementation of programs.

Just as important is the knowledge that standard ROI calculations only tell part of the story. Organizations should look beyond ROI into other savings opportunities to see the full picture.

The Big Picture in Energy Management ROI:

Energy Savings – The first and obvious ROI calculation in Energy Management is the reduction in energy spending. However, most solutions don’t provide a way to break out the energy usage of a company by department, cost center, or any other factor. To determine the success or failure of energy management initiatives, this data is a key factor.

When you take a step back and look at the larger picture, you see that the right energy management platform can change the entire ROI landscape of the enterprise’s sustainability initiatives.

Sustainable Procurement – The ability to factor the Total Cost of Ownership (energy consumption, asset utilization, and capital equipment costs) into the purchase decision of IT Equipment, in an automated way, can significantly improve the procurement process for IT departments and CFOs alike. When the IT department can immediately calculate that the amount of energy being drawn by a legacy server costs more than the costs to procure and power a new server over the life of the product, ROI is boosted even further.

Virtualization – Automatic identification of ideal candidates for consolidation, virtualization, and cloud projects can take the efficiency of your enterprise to a whole new level. By identifying equipment for retirement, upgrade, or virtualization, it’s easy to see the achievable savings almost immediately.

Capacity Planning – The ability to fully visualize and utilize the IT infrastructure capacity that you currently have eases capacity planning challenges. This means that enterprises no longer have to struggle with over-building to ensure service levels are met.

These are just a few, but very critical factors in the Energy Management ROI picture. If the solutions you're looking at don't provide these benefits at a bare minimum, contact JouleX and see the whole picture.

Happy Halloween from JouleX

Ida Davidson — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:31:00 GMT

DON'T LET YOUR ENERGY BILLS BE THE
SCARIEST THING YOU SEE THIS HALLOWEEN!

How Energy Efficient Is Your Video Conferencing?

Ida Davidson — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:00:00 GMT

This is the first in our series of articles surrounding Energy Following the Productive User. When your devices only consume energy when they're needed, your company's bottom line wins.

Companies around the world have found Video Conferencing to be an excellent tool for reducing the costs and environmental impact of traveling to conduct business while maintaining the Face to Face connections needed to do business in today’s global economy. Between the reductions in cost, environmental impact, and productive employee time lost to travel (airport waiting, in flight time, drive time), large businesses believe they’re getting a bargain by investing in Video Conferencing room setups.

While reducing the number of flights, cab rides, and over the road driving is better for the corporate bottom line, the addition of energy intensive Video Conferencing devices have erased some of those gains in the form of higher energy bills and carbon emissions.

Since most video conferencing rooms are powered up at all times, JouleX believes that these companies can realize even more cost savings (and reduction in carbon emissions). By using JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) for Distributed Offices, Video Conferencing equipment can be power managed in a number of ways.

PoE Devices: Video Conferencing devices that are powered over Ethernet can be powered up or down based on calendar events (scheduled meetings), saving money in power and equipment degeneration.

Other Network Connected Devices: While not all video conferencing equipment is powered over Ethernet, all devices connected to your network can be managed through JEM.

Companies who take this a step further and use JEM to manage Conference Bridge Servers will enjoy an even further reduction in energy consumption, associated costs, and carbon emissions. Combining all of these solutions means that your video conferencing equipment is as efficient as the rest of your sustainability initiatives.

Tom Noonan on what drives the Energy Market

Ida Davidson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Why is energy important? What’s really driving this market?

If you look backwards into time, we clearly have built and delivered an IT infrastructure that’s always on; we have built building management systems that are disconnected from the rest of the corporation; data centers have been traditionally standalone energy hogs; and we haven’t been managing energy across the enterprise.

What’s driving this market today is the fact that energy is becoming an incredibly expensive operating component of the overall operating model for businesses. In many cases, businesses are energy constrained. Even if they can buy more, they can’t in certain data centers and locations. Our infrastructure and our processes, quite frankly, haven’t been optimized for energy. We’ve optimized for speed, for throughput, for cost, for all kinds of things.

The regulatory environment is changing dramatically. From country to country, carbon taxes, carbon regulations, and all kinds of environmental regulations are driving corporations to pay attention to this.

Lastly, it’s pure economics. If a business can save 10, 20, 40, as much as 50% of their wasted energy consumption and not impact productivity, then it makes sense. Making energy an important part of your sales cycle, and it’s what the market demands because the world has changed.

Load Adaptive Computing - Data Centers' Best Solution

Ida Davidson — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:17:00 GMT

Enterprises have become experts at cutting waste from their processes. Endless focus is put on maximizing product or service delivery to the customer, while also minimizing the associated costs and waste. In every industry, analysis is done to ensure appropriate product, staffing, and service availability to ensure that customers receive optimal service levels. Until now, however, it’s been difficult to apply those same principles to the Data Center.

Ask yourself: What if your data center was able to always use only the minimum amount of energy required to efficiently and automatically match service levels needed at that moment, no matter when that moment comes? That capability is here. It’s called Load Adaptive Computing™, and JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers provides it.

What is Load Adaptive Computing? It is the ability to automatically balance data center energy use, by balancing the processing power needed to deliver applications via dynamic power capping and virtual load balancing, in order to better identify and remove energy waste in the data center.

Types of Load Adapting Computing Functions:

1) Power Capping: On servers that support it (latest generation of Dell, IBM, HP, etc.), Power Capping is the ability to match energy use by the amount of resources needed to complete a task. It’s no longer necessary to waste energy resources while your servers are not in use. Power capping allows you to automatically increase energy when it is needed to process data and lower energy when it isn’t.

2) Virtual Load Balancing: The ability to shift workloads in a virtual environment so that you can balance energy usage by the amount of work to be done. Virtual Load Balancing can allow you to utilize only the number of physical servers that are necessary to do the real time work load, maximizing power and computing resources and minimizing energy needed to complete current tasks at all times.

3) Power/Temp Guarding: The ability to, through automation, throttle back energy and computing resources during peak power loads (brown outs, etc) and preventing thermal issues from overheating your data center.

Load Adaptive Computing is poised to change the way Data Centers consistently and efficiently manage power usage needs, while still delivering optimal service to your customers. If you’re ready to see real reduction in your energy use in the data center, increasing your PUE effectiveness, without a large investment of money in your infrastructure, JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers is ready to get you there.

Eliminating Massive Amounts of Energy Micro-Waste

Ida Davidson — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 12:40:00 GMT

This article was written by Dan Safarik and originally posted on the CITO Research Website. We would like to thank Intel for allowing us to share this article here with our customers.

CIOs and facilities managers are suffering from a crisis of wasted energy across the enterprise. Most enterprises are almost completely unaware of how much power their data centers consume, and have no way to segment the data they do have. Even on sophisticated devices such as enterprise-class servers, there’s no information on energy consumption or its relationship to computing power utilization.

Introduction

Atlanta-based JouleX has risen to the challenge of providing energy intelligence on the full range of instrumented IT, covering everything from data center servers and HVAC equipment to office PCs, edge routers, and other networking devices. The company’s roots in network security set it apart from other energy management solutions because of its capability to listen to a much wider range of devices. The software, called JouleX Energy Management (JEM), uses network security protocols, interfaces with device management systems, and power management software such as Intel Data Center Manager (DCM), providing an unprecedented level of visibility into the relationship between energy consumption and device utilization and significantly reducing the overall energy costs of its customers.

JouleX: Tackling the “Massive Amounts of Micro-Waste”

JouleX’s approach to energy management is predicated on the idea that what CEO Thomas Noonan calls “massive amounts of micro-waste” are accumulating on virtually every device that is part of the IT landscape, from servers all the way down to screen savers on PCs, HVAC equipment, and VoIP telephones.

“Today, we live in a world that is all about optimization,” Noonan says. “We don’t live in a world that is ‘on’ or ‘off’ anymore. If a device is operating at 20 or 30 percent utilization, there is no reason that it needs to be consuming full power. We can easily and automatically reduce a device’s energy consumption by 30 to 35 percent and not affect the performance, saving a lot of money and reducing a corporation’s carbon footprint. Our field customer data shows that we’re saving as much as 50 percent in some applications, with no impact to productivity.” One customer is saving more than €600,000 annually due to steps taken based on JouleX Energy Manager’s (JEM) intelligence.

JouleX, whose founders come from the information security world, takes the patterns of information capture and analysis from network security and applies them to the problem of energy management. Rather than try to replace existing management and control platforms, JEM complements and enhances management and control functions by adding a layer of information about the energy profile of all the equipment in the data center (and often beyond). Through an “agentless,” network-based implementation, JEM interfaces with devices in three primary ways:

• Through the device’s native interface
• Through the device’s management system. This is usually the ideal approach because the management system also provides critical device information about firmware updates, CPU utilization, and the allocation of resources against applications
• Natively through network protocols such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), SSH (Secure Shell), and others

“The ideology of ‘always on’ simply can’t exist in the future, because we are wasting an enormous amount of power,” says Noonan. “We’re out there helping people make the IT infrastructure be ‘always available, but energy-optimized.’” Micro-waste is rampant in energy-intensive data centers, where as much as 30 percent of the servers are “dead”—defined as using less than 15 percent of computing capacity but consuming 70 percent or more or their rated energy capacity, Noonan says.

But micro-waste also lurks in corners far below the threshold of perception for most facilities or IT managers, says Noonan, citing evidence such as one client’s $118,000 in annual power bills, attributed solely to screen savers running at night. Another client’s virus scan software was waking up machines to do system checks and neglecting to put them to sleep—$78,000 per year. Noonan says there is no way either client would have discovered this waste without JEM.

The Role and Benefits of Intel DCM

Intel DCM adds another level of granular information about and management control over the equipment JEM monitors in the data center. Using Intel DCM’s dynamic control capabilities, JEM customers observe the real-time power profiles of individual nodes, machines, or groups of servers and can vary the core voltage of processors anywhere along the power scale from 0 to 100 percent, dramatically improving energy efficiency. This can be done across tens of thousands of servers, in multiple locations worldwide, from a single “pane of glass” or management console. For servers with power capping technologies, JEM customers use Intel DCM to dynamically implement automated policies that are time-, location-, or event-based, allowing holistic monitoring, management, and control across a range of devices, optimizing energy and computing performance across time zones, device types, and application profiles.

Since 60 percent or more of the energy consumption of a server is in the processor, any solution made to monitor and control energy in the data center would require a high degree of visibility into the thermal, power consumption, and utilization conditions of processors. Well before the company launched in 2010, JouleX’s founding engineers started a dialogue with Intel, knowing that any solution that offered visibility into the performance of Intel hardware would be critical to the success of JouleX’s overall offering, Noonan says. Recognizing the demands that would be made for a high level of instrumentation on chips, Intel engaged with JouleX in development discussions around Intel DCM.

Participation in development discussions for Intel DCM, “gave us a granular control plane to both extract accurate energy consumption data, and at the same time deliver variable levels of control, Noonan says. In the data center, the last thing anyone wants to hear is that someone is going to “turn something off”…energy optimization in the data center requires acute visibility into power consumption and utilization at a very granular level and demands sophisticated control to reduce energy consumption without impacting performance.”

Intel DCM helps partners such as JouleX help their customers measure energy usage by device, plan for future power capacity needs, proactively identify failure situations and inefficient power consumption, and dynamically control the power draw of any number of devices, from one to tens of thousands, through a single console. With Intel DCM embedded in JEM, JouleX is able to offer one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated energy intelligence platforms available in a simple, easy to use network-based software application.

Is Nuclear Power On Its Way Out?

Ida Davidson — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:43:00 GMT

Nuclear power is fast losing its popularity among governments around the world. Germany recently shut down the 8 oldest of their 17 nuclear reactors, and passed a law to phase out the remaining 9 by 2022. Switzerland has decided to phase out all of its nuclear reactors by 2034, and Japan’s leaders are calling for a phase out of their nuclear reactors as well. On the path to phasing out nuclear power, Japan has already passed a new Renewable Energy Law.

According to the World Nuclear Association, these countries get between 25%-40% of their power from Nuclear power plants.

Country	% Of Power from Nuclear Plants
Germany	25
Japan	30*
Switzerland	40

*According to the World Nuclear Association, this is expected to increase to at least 40% by 2017.

For every news article that mentions the dangers related to nuclear power plants (failures, radiation, unresolved nuclear waste issues), there are several more that discuss the concerns over blackouts, astronomical price increases, and a large jump in CO2 emissions from additional non-renewable energy sources.

Based on the information provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 85% of the energy usage in the world is used by businesses. Through the use of JouleX Energy Manager, our client companies are realizing energy savings between 30% and 60%. That's a significant reduction of waste.

Across The Board Estimated Reduction Levels	% Of Country-Wide Energy Use Reduced
30% (easy)	25.5%
45% (moderate)	38%
60% (aggressive)	51%

If active energy management measures were used in Germany to decrease the “across the board” business energy use by 30% (25.5% of the country’s energy use), the immediate decrease in energy usage could offset 100% of the energy lost to disabling the German nuclear power plants. This means that there would be no need for additional energy sources, price increases, blackouts, or more CO2 emissions. And that's simply from reducing energy waste...having no loss of productivity or affect on operations.

By implementing policies that reduce energy use even further, socially responsible enterprises have the ability to lower the country’s dependence on nuclear power even more, incidently while improving their organization's bottom line.

Today is Power IT Down Day!

Ida Davidson — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:00:00 GMT

This afternoon kicks off the 4th Annual Power IT Down Day, an even that "encourages public sector agencies, and the industries that serve them, to power down their computers, printers, monitors and other peripherals at the end of the work day on August 26 in an effort to help the government reduce its energy consumption."

For the second year in a row Power IT Down falls on a Friday, providing a great opportunity for an even larger reduction in energy usage.

We encourage all enterprises to participate in Power IT Down Day. Go to their website and sign up!

When you power everything back up on Monday... come take a look at the JouleX Energy Manager and learn how you can automate the reduction of energy waste every day.

How are Carbon Taxes impacting your business?

Ida Davidson — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Global Energy Demand will soon outpace the Global Energy Supply. During the summer months, the demand for energy is already greater than the supply in places like Texas, California and New York City, resulting in rolling blackouts during peak times. This would also be a problem in Japan, if not for the extreme conservation efforts of the country’s businesses and citizens.

Global Energy Demand

Global Energy Supply

As governments around the world are beginning to recognize the need to address our dwindling energy supply, as well as the need to reduce harmful effects of carbon emissions on the Earth’s environment, those governments have begun implementing Carbon Taxes. Many countries, especially in the EU, that have not implemented the Carbon Tax are well on the path to doing so.

To date, the following governments have already implemented some sort of Carbon Tax:

Finland – 1990
Norway - 1991
Sweden – 1991
The Netherlands – 1992
Denmark - 1992
Costa Rica - 1997
United Kingdom - 2001
New Zealand – 2005
Boulder, Colorado - 2007
Quebec - 2007
British Columbia – 2008
Switzerland - 2008
India - 2010
Ireland - 2010

Multi-national enterprises operating in these countries are already being impacted by Carbon Tax laws and, if they have not already, should begin tracking their Carbon Emissions. Unfortunately, until now, tracking the carbon effects of IT devices has been difficult, if not impossible. Today, JouleX can break down tracking and reporting to a very granular level. Do you need to track and report by Country? Location? Or even Business Units? Do you need to charge back Carbon Taxes or Carbon Credits to those same groups? We can help you with that.

JouleX Energy Manager gives companies the ability to report the carbon emissions produced by PCs, distributed office devices, and data center and facilities equipment throughout the enterprise. Moreover, we also help organizations track the savings (in Carbon Emissions, energy usage, and energy costs) over time to help them demonstrate progress in their actions to government regulatory agencies, customers, employees, and shareholders.

Responsible enterprises around the world are already beginning to track and reduce their carbon emissions, to support their sustainability programs and green initiatives. With businesses worldwide responsible for 85% of all energy consumption, there is a huge opportunity for those businesses to reduce amount of carbon emissions. We estimate between 30-60% of energy waste could be eliminated, and keep corporations “ahead of the curve” on the costs that come about from Carbon Taxes.

We expect the trend of Carbon Taxation and/or Carbon Credits to grow, especially as the amount of energy available decreases over time. Take the steps necessary to report, monitor, and reduce your CO2E (Carbon Dioxide Emissions) today by contacting JouleX for a demonstration.

Questions Answered about Agentless vs Agent Based

Mark Davidson — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Our article Agentless or Agent Based - What's the difference? prompted a comment from Guy Kawasaki with some great questions. The responses to those questions are pretty in-depth, so we wanted to answer them in full here.

1. Would you mind to elaborate on how "agent based software uses additional energy on every single device it’s installed on"?

Let me just say that in reality it depends upon the agent itself. For the sake of discussion let’s break them down into several categories:

Shared Agent Resources: Many energy management agents are not true “energy management” agents. There are agents that do many things, of which energy management is just one aspect. For example, some software distribution and patch management systems do some energy management in addition to their “day” job. Patchlink will do energy management, but there is overhead in the agent to do patch and software analysis, so that overhead does have an impact to the overall energy use of the device. We recently did testing at an insurance customer that was using an antivirus agent, which also had some power management capabilities. What we found was that the AV scans for this agent actually were burning over $55K worth of energy per year at just over $.03 per kwh…JUST for the virus scans. That is a LOT of energy for just 5000 desktops computers. Even the energy management capability of that agent couldn’t help them due to the overhead of the scans.

Heavy Agent Resources: There are also energy management agents that are “heavy” in the way the gather energy analytics. They can add overhead to the operating system through additional drivers and interfaces needed to gather energy analytics. There is overhead to do these calculations on the endpoint, queue data, and communicate that data back to the analysis server. An example of this type of technology is used in 1E and Verdiem.

Embedded Agents: Another way to retrieve energy information is to utilize existing hardware and OS resources. You call out several examples in your next statement. SNMP, WMI, vPRO, NodeManager, iLO, DRAC, DCMI and IPMI are all different ways to retrieve energy analytics. Some of these interfaces are out of band to the host platform itself and require absolutely no overhead to the system. Some do have a small amount of system overhead to retrieve and communicate, but there is no additional agent overhead other than the OS or hardware itself. JouleX fits in this category.

2. When you don't have agent, you actually use an "embedded agent" (call it SNMP, Windows WMI, or whatever). Enabling and using that function is the same as installing an agent.

You’re absolutely correct. These interfaces are in fact embedded agents. However, there are several distinctive advantages to not having YAA! (Yet Another Agent!) for our corporate customers to manage. The basic problem with agent technology is really less the overhead of the agents to the systems themselves, but it is the overhead of the management of agents in a large corporate environment. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons:

Reducing Management Costs – For our customers, most of whom have 10’s of thousands of desktop computers or servers to manage, the cost of deploying, testing, and managing another agent with a vertical value is extremely high. One of the driving costs of virtualization in today’s companies is the need to reduce complexity of the client machines configurations and testing. Our agentless solution means that we can connect to a company’s existing environment with minimal regression testing, unlike a standard agent which requires testing to see if the energy management agent is working with other desktop configuration changes. Since we are only using standard system interfaces to query that energy data, there is minimal need for testing.

Another major problem with agent technology is tracking OS releases and patches, along with the agent updates themselves. Most customers are forced to do regression testing before they can release patches and updates, to ensure that there are no issues with the various applications and management agents running on these desktops. Using the standard OS interfaces to query energy data minimizes the time needed for testing and deployment. This enables us to get mission critical security patches out faster, reducing overall security posture, and at the same time lowering the cost of management of those devices.

Quick Time to Value – By using a standard system interface such as vPRO, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Windows Remote Management (WinRM), SNMP, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), Data Center Manageability Interface (DCMI) or even Server Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) and Desktop Architecture for System Hardware (DASH), you do not have to create software distribution packages to distribute your energy management agents to the thousands of machines in your corporation. In some corporate environments, just getting through change management processes and procedures can take weeks or months for approving agents to run on production assets. In most cases, the JEM platform can be installed and retrieving energy information from thousands of devices in less than an hour with no impact to the change management process. Try doing that with an agent based technology.

Technological Shifts in Computing – There is a shift occurring in today’s campus computing environments. Virtualization and Tablet computing is taking root at companies across the globe, reducing costs and complexity for the average desktop user. One of the challenges faced by agent-based energy management technology is how to address THIS problem. Agents become totally useless when the machine has been virtualized on a tablet or thin client.

Until you are able to retrieve energy information from other sources such as the virtual infrastructure, the Power over Ethernet (PoE) switching infrastructure or the VDI/tablet appliances, your technology has become obsolete. JouleX developers have realized this from the beginning and have created a platform that can already handle these environments the same as any other environment.

Companies like Cisco are even beginning to deliver up to 80 Watts of power over standard Cat5 ethernet cables. These will be the “power plugs” of the future office. Unless you have already integrated energy metering and control into the switching fabric, you will not be able to retrieve, much less control, energy usage for those corporate users at all.

3. Lastly, I wonder how enabling Windows Management Interface (WMI) on Windows (and leaving that port open) is perceived as more secure that an agent based solution?

This is an interesting question and I am very glad you brought it up. One can argue that WMI has been the root of many interesting security exploits. However, as long as you are a Windows shop running Active Directory services, you are pretty much required to use WMI for management. While many long for a change in corporate computing, Microsoft still maintains a hefty dominance in the corporate world.

Domain controllers leverage WMI today for policy objects and other management structures. Microsoft has seen this issue and has re-engineered the management infrastructure moving away from RPC-based WMI to a web-services based WinRM. This reduces the threat landscape dramatically for those customers that use it. Here is the catch: Who is actually using WinRM instead of WMI? We have only seen ONE customer who has shifted to WinRM over WMI.

Since we have to support both the legacy environment AND the new environment, JouleX supports both infrastructures. Additionally, JouleX is also able to use standard non-privileged user credentials and lock down the access to just the WMI entries we need to calculate energy information reducing the threat landscape even more.

Thanks again for the GREAT comments. I appreciate the opportunity to delve deeper into this topic. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.

The JouleX Energy Calculator

Ida Davidson — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:00:00 GMT

We’re so passionate about helping enterprises reduce their energy use that we’ve put the JouleX Energy Calculator right on the home page.

The JouleX Energy Calculator provides a running tally for the world’s Year to Date energy usage as reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. According to the EIA, 86% of all energy consumed worldwide is used the enterprise.

From this data, the JouleX Energy Calculator also shows you how much money spent on energy that businesses could collectively save by implementing sustainability measures to reduce their energy usage by 30%. JouleX estimates that enterprises fully utilizing JouleX Energy Manager could achieve up to double that amount (between 30-60% savings).

A typical New England enterprise pays on average $.15 kwh for energy. In the first 8 ½ months of 2011, based on that rate, a 30% savings results in a potential Enterprise Savings of almost half a TRILLION dollars worldwide.

What would an energy cost reduction of 30%-60% mean to your enterprise’s bottom line? JouleX wants to know what good your company could do with that extra cash. Please share your comments with us!

Sheraton Urges Guests to Save Energy

Ida Davidson — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:29:00 GMT

During a recent trip Josef Brunner, JouleX Chief Architect and co-founder, noticed that the Four Points Sheraton in San Francisco has added an energy conservation notice to their in-room information book.

"A NOTE ABOUT OUR ENERGY CRISIS AND THE TEMPORARY ENERGY SURCHARGE

Recently energy costs in the U.S. have increased dramatically, especially in the State of California where there have been supply shortages. From time to time, California’s demand for electricity has exceeded the available supply. In order to avoid a failure of the States’ electric distribution system, the Independent Systems Operator has been forced to temporarily cut electric supply to regions within our state. These are the “rolling black-outs” you have heard about.

While we hope that you do not experience a rolling black-out during your stay, it is possible. For your information, the Indepentend Systems Operator (ISO) issues advisories letting Californians know that they, the ISO, are expecting a shortfall. These ISO warnings are categorized as either state 1, 2, or 3 emergencies, with stage 3 indicating the institution of rolling black-outs is either highly likely or imminent. On alert days, we must do our part to conserve energy.

During your stay you may want to pay more attention to our news broadcasts to become aware of any possible rolling black-outs. If operating computer equipment, you may want to take precautions such as use your battery for power supply or make frequent sa ves to your hard disk.

We would like to engage the efforts of our guests to help us conserve energy in guest rooms whenever possible.

Turn off all lights when you leave the room
Turn off TV and radio while you’re out of the room
Adjust the thermostat to conserve energy
Keep windows closed while air conditioner or heater is on

Rolling black-outs and desperate need for energy conservation are not new to California, but it is a relatively new situation for the rest of the industrialized world. Now, more than ever, corporations and individuals alike need to focus on energy efficiency in our daily lives and extend those practices to their work lives as well. JouleX commends corporations like Sheraton who are doing their part to help reduce energy use.

Vodafone on Green IT and JouleX: part 1

Player Pate — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:00:00 GMT

JouleX co-founder and chief architect, Josef Brunner, recently participated in a Vodafone video webcast on Green IT. It was a great discussion. Here's part one. Enjoy!

Sustainable IT Procurement

Ida Davidson — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Energy use is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words “Sustainable Procurement”. If you’re replacing IT equipment, however, it probably should be. Until now, the IT procurement process has often meant purchasing the least expensive device that delivered all of the features and functions required for the business’ needs.

Now that you can measure energy consumption using our agentless approach, all of the guesswork can be taken out of the IT procurement process. Measuring the energy consumption allows you to apply the utilization of the IT asset (how busy has that asset been), and the actual energy draw of the device under your normal applications and workflow, to your decision making process for procurement.

Using that data, we can compare current usage to what a new device would use. You can usually see the deltas in energy cost almost immediately, and from those deltas calculate what a lifespan cost of ownership would be for that device. With this information, you can easily see if it makes business sense to upgrade a particular device using energy costs as one of the measurable factors.

Quick Example:

New or Current Device	Annual Cost to Operate	Total Cost – Year 1	Total Cost – 3 Yr Lifespan
$100	$100	$200	$400
$125	$50	$175	$275
$0 (current)	$150	$150	$450

Obviously the example above is very simplistic, but you can see that gathering this information before making purchasing decisions provides you with valuable information you wouldn’t otherwise have. In a sustainable procurement model, that more expensive asset ends up being the better option over the life of the device.

We’ve actually seen this play out in businesses we work with. We installed JEM at one of our financial services customers, and immediately located several devices pulling in extraordinary amounts of energy, more than twice the normal rate per device. These were high end multi-monitor, multi-graphics head, dual core processor desktop PCs, but they were also quite old. They were running Pentium 4 processors. Equally powerful machines with today’s processors are much more energy efficient.

Being a financial services company in a down market, the IT department had not been allowed to upgrade those machines, even though they were well past the life span of typical IT assets. By measuring the energy use, we were able to almost immediately show that these computers were pulling over 200 watts per hour. An equivalent new machine would pull less than 80 watts. In operating expense savings alone, the new device would pay for itself in less than 2 years.

Our client was able to take this data and make a financial case to upgrade those old machines, which were costing the company even more money in service and support because they failed so frequently, based on the case of energy savings alone because it was measurable and could be shown.

This same measurement principle can be used for any IT device your enterprise employs. You can now compare old devices and new devices and make a valid business decision on when it makes the most sense to upgrade that device.

Over time, our clients are finding more and more practical business applications for this new ability to measure, monitor, and control their enterprise’s energy use. The procurement process is just one more place in your enterprise where having granular visibility into your IT energy use can save your company money in the short and long term.

Agentless or Agent Based - What's the difference?

Ida Davidson — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:23:00 GMT

Enterprises trying to find the right energy management solution for their businesses need to know what the agent based/agentless difference actually means to their bottom line. We know that both solutions are equally accurate for gathering PC and physical server energy data. Beyond that, the benefits and capabilities of the agentless solution outshine agent based in every area.

Agent Based energy management solutions require that software be installed on every device to measure the energy from it. For example, to measure and report the energy from a PC, an agent based solution would have to be installed on that PC. Then you can query the software and it would return the energy usage of the device. Since the only devices you can realistically install monitoring software on are PCs and servers, NO agent based energy management solution is able to measure, monitor or manage the full scope of your enterprise’s devices.

In most companies, servers and PCs are only 50% - 70% of their IT infrastructure. You can’t load software on the peripheral equipment, such as switches, routers, wireless access points, and printers; therefore you have no ability to get energy data using a software agent. With the JEM agentless energy management approach, these barriers don’t exist.

Agent Based Devices Managed:	JouleX Energy Manager Devices Managed:
PCs Physical Servers	PCs Macs Thin clients Servers Physical Virtual VoIP phones Monitors Printers Copiers Scanners Network switches and routers Wireless access points Heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and lighting systems And more

Even if agent based solutions could be installed on every peripheral device in an enterprise, there are other significant challenges to that approach.

COST- It costs time and money to install and manage agents on every desktop. If, for example, your company has 50,000 PCs in its environment, the costs grow exponentially. Consider the amount of time (X 50,000) to:
- Download and install
- Deploy and test
- Monitor and measure
- Patch and update
- Upgrade
SECURITY– An agent requires software to run in a privileged mode. If there is a vulnerability or problem with the agent itself, the machine is exposed to additional security vulnerability, whereas the agentless approach uses the existing supported Operating System based metrics. This means, the system is not unnecessarily exposed to additional security vulnerabilities.
DEVICE SUPPORT – By leveraging that core operating system functionality, with the agentless approach, tracking agent and operating system releases and hardware releases is not necessary.
DISCOVERY – The JEM agentless system collects an inventory of all assets that are drawing energy on your network. Basically that means “it just works.” There is no guess work or double checking to ensure that none of the machines are overlooked or forgotten.

One last, but key, distinction between the agentless and agent based solutions is this: Agent based software uses additional energy on every single device it’s installed on, increasing the very costs your company is trying to measure, monitor, and control.

When you look beyond the surface it's plain that these solutions are only similar in name, but not in capabilities and effectiveness for the enerprise.

For more information, read: Questions Answered about Agentless vs Agent Based

Japanese People Unite to Conserve Energy

Ida Davidson — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Since the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan, and caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, the Japanese people have become unified in their passion for conservation of energy. According to an article in the New York Times, individuals and businesses alike are striving to keep energy usage to minimal levels in order to avoid the rolling blackouts common in the weeks following March 11^th.

The rest of the world could learn so much from the Japanese about being disciplined in saving energy. From keeping their home temperatures set a little higher to keeping the lights turned off unless you need them, it’s clear that millions of people doing small things in their daily lives can add up to make a huge difference.

Josef Brunner, the Chief Architect here at JouleX, returned from a recent trip to Japan inspired by how the people have made energy conservation into a part of everyday life. When speaking about his trip, Josef said that what he saw in Japan made him even happier about our commitment to donate 30% of JouleX K.K.’s profits through the end of the fiscal year to the Japanese Red Cross relief efforts.

Photos by Josef Brunner

Josef also stressed how proud he is that JouleX is playing an increasingly important part in saving energy in the facilities space in addition to the IT industry. As energy concerns continue to grow in Asia, especially in China and India, JouleX is poised to lead the way in sustainability for the facilities and IT management of corporations all over the world.

How Much Energy Does Fantasy Football Take?

Ida Davidson — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:00:00 GMT

It’s almost Football Season! Now that the contract disputes are all sorted out and we're sure that there will be NFL football for the 2011 season. Nobody (well, other than the teams themselves) will be happier to see football season come than the Fantasy Football players… all 32 MILLION of them.

Since we’re in the business of energy management, we wondered exactly how much energy Fantasy Football, as an entertainment outlet, uses in a typical season. You might be surprised at the outcome. We certainly were.

Estimated Players:	32 MILLION
Average Hours per Week	3
Pre/Regular/Post Season Length	24 weeks
Total Computing Hours per Season	2.4 BILLION
Estimated kwh of Energy Used per Season (Assuming 200 watt hours per PC/Monitor)	480 MILLION kwh
Total Cost of Energy Used (Assuming $.09 kwh)	$43,200,000.00

We took the information above, and ran it through the Equivalency tool on the EPA website to see what this looks like in tangible terms.

480 million kwh of electricity produces 330,987 Metric Tons of Carbon Emissions. What does that mean in terms that everyone can understand?

EPA Equivalency Results – 480 MILLION kwh of Energy impacts the environment the same as:

Annual greenhouse gas emissions from 64,899 passenger vehicles

CO₂ emissions from 37,106,134 gallons of gasoline consumed

CO₂ emissions from 769,737 barrels of oil consumed

CO₂ emissions from 4,365 tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline

CO₂ emissions from the electricity use of 41,270 homes for one year

Carbon sequestered by 8,486,839 tree seedlings grown for 10 years

CO₂ emissions from 13,791,113 propane cylinders used for home barbeques

That is an awful lot of football love! Maybe the Fantasy Football companies should add a carbon offset option to their packaging. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to buy carbon offsets for the energy used on those weekly trades, roster changes, or all those forum posts? We think so.

4th Annual Power IT Down Day

Ida Davidson — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:00:00 GMT

The 4th Annual Power IT Down Day, held on August 26, 2011, "encourages public sector agencies, and the industries that serve them, to power down their computers, printers, monitors and other peripherals at the end of the work day on August 26 in an effort to help the government reduce its energy consumption."

For the second year in a row Power IT Down falls on a Friday, providing a great opportunity for an even larger reduction in energy usage.

While powering down the office computers over a weekend is a fabulous gesture, Power IT Down Day is really more about bringing attention to the problem as a whole. Leaving computers, monitors, printers, and other office devices powered on during non-business hours is simply a waste of your company's resources.

On the other hand, your IT department needs those devices available after hours for system updates, virus scans, and maintenance that occurs during "non production" hours. Until now, that has been an insurmountable problem for enterprises.

We encourage all enterprises to participate in Power IT Down Day. When you power everything back up on Monday... come take a look at the JouleX Energy Manager and learn how you can automate the reduction of energy waste every day.

PUE is DEAD

Ida Davidson — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Long Live Performance per Watt!

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been called The Holy Grail of Data Center Energy Metrics so often that we actually found it impossible to find out who coined the term. As time, technology, and sustainability efforts evolve, the PUE metric is no longer the stopping point for energy efficiency measurement but has become just one more piece in the larger picture.

What does PUE do? It measures how much of the energy entering a data center facility is used to power the computing devices within, versus the amount used for cooling and overhead of the facility. That’s it.

In an ideal world the PUE is 1.0, which means that 100% of the energy is used by the computing devices in the data center. Since 1.0 is an impossible to achieve ideal, the standard goal for most data centers is a PUE of less than 2.0, which means that for every 1 Watt of energy used by the computing devices, an additional 1 Watt is used for facilities overhead such as air conditioning and lighting.

At first glance, this is a very direct metric. It’s easy to understand and easy to follow. The problem with relying solely on PUE is that it in no way measures the efficiency of the IT devices themselves.

Data center managers today are under pressure to deliver increasingly higher energy efficiency and lower costs. In order to understand the true efficiency levels and progress toward enterprise sustainability goals, managers MUST have access to an accurate performance measurement of each device in the facility.

The measurement recommended by JouleX is Performance per Watt (PPW). What’s the difference? The PPW metric measures the actual energy efficiency of every device in the data center and PUE measures the efficiency of the data center facility.

What can the PPW measurement tell you?

Are the servers using twice the electricity needed for the jobs they’re doing?
Are you wasting electricity powering dead servers?
Are the old switches and routers costing you more in power than it would cost you to replace them?
Would virtualization of newer, more energy efficient servers, allow you to retire old servers completely?

Being able to measure Performance per Watt will help data center managers identify devices that are wasting energy, and as we’ve always said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.

Video: The Value of Cisco EnergyWise and JouleX for Energy Management

Player Pate — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Matt Laherty, the creator of Cisco EnergyWise, interviewed JouleX founder, Josef Brunner, on camera at Cisco Live last week for his blog. Josef talks with Matt about the value JouleX customers are getting from the Cisco EnergyWise-JouleX solution and shares some very interesting customer stories. We hope you enjoy it.

Matt Laherty from Cisco Live!

Ida Davidson — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:01:00 GMT

This is a brief video of Matt Laherty discussing the value of Cisco EnergyWise and what JouleX brings to the table for enterprises trying to leverage the network to gain visibility into and control of their energy usage.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Matt!

EnergyWise + JouleX Technology = Easier Energy Management Deployment

Player Pate — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:15:00 GMT

We're having an amazing time at Cisco Live. We're hearing great stories from our customers about the way they are leveraging JouleX Energy Manager with Cisco EnergyWise to measure and reduce energy consumption across their enterprise.

Today, Cisco published an article that illustrates the power of this solution. It's a great read and I know you'll enjoy it.

Many thanks to you all for stopping by our booth and sharing your success stories. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Interview with Matt Laherty, creator of Cisco EnergyWise

Ida Davidson — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:00:00 GMT

1. Cisco launched EnergyWise in January 2009. What was the “Aha!” moment you had when you came up with the concept for EnergyWise?

2. Did it go back that far? 2003/2004 that you began thinking about energy?

Yes. With PoE, I ran into a customer that was converting a call center. They were building a new facility and building out a large call center in the facility. They came to us and said the way the PoE gets configured on a switch, we have to reserve the power whether it’s being used or not. We need to be able to statistically multiplex energy and know exactly how much energy was really going to be required. They needed granular control at the port level. The reason they needed this is when they added up all of what we call Reserved Power, they discovered they were going to have to pull more power into the building, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. Yet, on the product team, we knew they didn’t really need that much power. So we had to start building features that gave them visibility. We started the process with PoE.

3. What would you say your vision for EnergyWise was when you set out to create it? Has that evolved since then and if so how?

Once I got started on this, the vision quickly became if energy is the largest unmanaged expense then the end state is everything with a power cord. You should be able to measure it, whether the device reports the energy consumption or whether the outlet reports the energy consumption, you should have an idea how much energy is being used. You should understand how important that device is, and you should be able to control it in some way.

That’s what we set out to do and I think we’re moving in that direction. Ultimately, I think standards will evolve that will leverage the concepts, but that’s the goal. Now, it doesn’t make economic sense to enervate, or give energy intelligence to, some devices. Do you really need to know if there is a cell phone being charged off of an outlet if it’s only a couple of watts? Maybe not. But anything with intelligence or chips and firmware, we should give it a shot.

4. What IS Cisco EnergyWise and what is it NOT?

Cisco EnergyWise is a framework that leverages the network as a control plane for energy information and device information. It’s really just a way of collecting information about end devices in a simple way and passing that information up to a management API.

EnergyWise is a framework that allows the creativity of our ecosystem partners to really shine. It allows partners to build some great and innovative solutions. We can’t think of everything, and we’re certainly not going to try, but there are a lot of partners out there that can build great solutions for their markets. EnergyWise is a way to help them do that.

EnergyWise also allows disparate connected devices to report into a common framework up to a management station. So it acts, in a way, as a clearinghouse to help partners normalize energy information. Today there are very few standards in networking regarding power, so this is kind of a de facto standard or a way to help solve the problem before the standards actually get developed.

5. There has been a lot of discussion are frameworks and standards relating to energy measurement? Care to comment on any of the efforts underway?

I work in the standards space. I work on the NIST and I’ve worked some on the IEEE stuff. The NIST standard is focused on what I call the “Smart Load”. So, the ASHRAE/NEMA SPC 201 spec that is in development is really focused on helping building owners and building operators create an autonomous island of energy information. The building consumes energy and they consume it, report it, and control it in an autonomous way. And when the Smart Grid is ready, they can attach their information to the grid. If there’s real time pricing, they can make decisions based on that real time price, but what we’re doing is enervating the building. I keep saying Enervating. What I mean is that we’re giving it a central nervous system so that it becomes energy aware within the facility so that people can make better choices about the energy they are consuming.

That standard is still months away from being a standard. It’s more of an information model. EnergyWise is solving a problem that hasn’t been addressed. Within networking, there wasn’t a good way to do this in an effective way that normalized all of the information. EnergyWise solves that problem. I think there’s a lot of innovation that still has to take place. We have some ideas about some of this will shape up and what it will look like, but we’re constantly surprised by some of the things partners and customers come up with using it. That is then going to inform the group that makes the standards.

Everybody has to understand where it’s going before they build the roadmap and the standard is kind of the roadmap. I think for probably many more years we are going to be out ahead of the standard development because we’re going to be innovating and making up solutions as we go along.

6. Talk a little about the value of having visibility into energy usage?

The short answer is “You can’t control what you can’t see”. Energy is the largest unmanaged expense in an organization. We talk to customers and describe what’s possible with savings. In many commercial buildings you could probably save 20% by just having better visibility into where you’re wasting energy. Just having that visibility is so important. It’s the first step of energy management.

I think a lot of customers assume that if the building isn’t hot and it isn’t cold so it must be working just fine. As we’ve gotten into this, we’ve discovered there are all kinds of nuance around running a building that you can heat and cool at the same time so the occupant is comfortable and thinks everything is fine but the building is literally using 30-40% more energy than it needs to. So visibility is the start of every kind of sustainability program. Every sustainability program has to start with a view of where you’re starting.

7. In addition to visibility, you ensured that control was a capability of the EnergyWise protocol?

Reducing energy consumption was the ultimate goal. We started by looking at what the future would look like, and then we worked backward. If I think about a home or a commercial building or a data center, the future is about using energy in the most efficient way. In order to maximize the productive capacity of the facility and minimize the price or the cost of energy, you have to know what uses energy, when it uses it, why it uses it, how important it is so that you can start to time shift processes. You can also start to make better decisions about when you use energy.

Look at South Africa a few years ago or Japan today. Japan Today is a good example of a country that doesn’t have enough energy because of the shutdown of several nuclear plants. They don’t have enough electricity. As a society they have to start making tradeoffs. Do they run neon lights or do they run their trains? Do they run hospitals or do they run their train schedule the same way they did 6 months ago?

By having that granular visibility and also control, you can make decisions about tradeoffs. We don’t have unlimited energy. EnergyWise was really about ultimately giving people a way of identifying what was using energy, so key words, roles, being able to classify the devices and to be able to control them and tell them to shut off. If you don’t have enough electricity, do you really need that much light in the lobbies? Do you need to have spotlights on outside all the time? Probably not. The whole idea of EnergyWise was to be able to balance loads with available generation and to do it in real time in an automated way. That’s the end state. We’re working backward and trying to instrument everything. But, it is possible to do that with the technology.

8. What are the advantages to leveraging the network to instrument energy data? How is that better than using software agents or meters on every device?

There are many ways to do this. I would say the right way is the way that makes the best sense for a given customer. EnergyWise is a way of getting a lot of visibility. It’s a way of doing auto detect, auto configuration, keywords, importance. It’s a robust way to do it.

When I think of JouleX, building a management application, you are able to give management control to a device that typically wouldn’t have it. It’s a one to many, so the network can send out a query and say “send me your power state information” and all of the devices will send it back immediately, as opposed to one to one. It’s a way to certainly make it faster and easier and more scalable. From a metering perspective, a lot of hardware already has power measurement capabilities built in. It may be untapped or there’s no way to get it out to a centralized management station. This is a way of combining hundreds of different device types from hundreds of different manufacturers and passing it northbound through the API to a single management interfaces. It makes it easier in many cases. There are a lot of different ways to do it. We think this is a good, useful way of polling all of that information by leveraging the network.

We should have a common pane of glass when it comes to energy and energy related dashboards. You should be able to see all of the different systems in a building reported, from a power state, on a single pane of glass. That doesn’t mean an IT guy is going to control and set policies for all of those different domains, whether it’s the HVAC or lighting, etc., but they are going to see the energy because that’s how the executives are going to be able to have a consistent dashboard view so they can make better decisions. I still think it’s going to be up to the individual domains to set the policies. So we’ll have multiple policy engines but a single pane of glass when it comes to collecting energy use information.

9. How do you see JouleX fitting into this ecosystem Cisco has created for vendors with EnergyWise?

The switching team, the folks who made EnergyWise, we have a lot of ideas but we are not a network management organization. We built the API because we figured that there are people out there, much smarter than us, who can take the data and convert it into useful information. The framework from day one was built with a company like JouleX in mind to take the data and do something with it.

EnergyWise by itself in IOS is not a solution. It requires a client on the devices or at least awareness at the port level and it requires a management solution. So it's a critical piece of the total solution for customers.

10. What would you tell customers looking for a management platform for Cisco EnergyWise to consider before making a purchasing decision?

What I’d tell a customer is “Spend a lot of time thinking about what you want. What do you want to do? What information do you want to share?” It’s useful to think about having a way to show whole building energy consumption and then having a way to break it down into the subcomponents you can see and sub-meter by device. You should be able to group information by domain. You should be able to see how marketing compares to sales to finance to whatever. So you need a solution that is flexible and can leverage the capabilities that are embedded certainly in EnergyWise and anything else you might have in the system. Think about how you use that information to build leaderboards and to do benchmarking across facilities and to use all the functionality that’s there.

11. Finally, where do you see Cisco EnergyWise in the future? Say 10 years from now?

I see more and more customers deploying it so they have expanded visibility and also a deeper granular view of what’s going on. But I see EnergyWise as helping IT gain energy literacy and play an important role in expense management for the C level. Typically IT and network guys, when they’re doing their job well, nobody knows. Energy and energy visibility, it’s a way for them to show people “look, we’re saving you X”. It’s a way from them to show people what a great job they’re doing.

Ten years from now? I see buildings as power plants, net zero buildings, renewables, and buildings perfectly balanced with the grid, with more reliable power. I don’t know what role EnergyWise will play. I would imagine that we’ll have a standard by then. I don’t think anyone is going to throw away the work they’ve done. I think it’ll be an issue of translating the issue to whatever the standard is.

A Detailed Overview of Cisco EnergyWise

Ida Davidson — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:31:00 GMT

This week we're gearing up for next week's Cisco Live show in Las Vegas, and all of the great things we are doing with Cisco EnergyWise at JouleX. We're really looking forward to sharing our upcoming interview with Matt Laherty, the creator of Cisco EnergyWise. Until then, take a look at this great video Matt shared when Cisco launched EnergyWise.

Join Us at Cisco Live!

Ida Davidson — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 19:42:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to be participating in Cisco Live 2011. Our team will run a theater presentation throughout the day and give live demonstrations of the power of the JouleX and Cisco EnergyWise solution, the solution that helps our clients reduce energy consumption by up to 60%. Stop by and allow us to share how your company can leverage JouleX and Cisco EnergyWise to reduce energy consumption throughout your organization.

Is your business already leveraging JouleX and Cisco EnergyWise to reduce your energy consumption? Our team would love to meet you personally!

Be part of the fun. JouleX is also one of the sponsors of the Cisco Live Geo Location Challenge. The winner will receive an opportunity to win a meeting with William Shatner (yes, that William Shatner) and other great prizes.

This year’s show is being held at Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, July 10-14 2011. You’ll find the JouleX team at Booth 983.

Show hours are:

Monday 4:30 – 7:30
Tuesday 11-7
Wednesday 11-6
Thursday 11-2

We look forward to seeing you there!

The Three Rs - Reducing Waste in the Office

Ida Davidson — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:13:00 GMT

If you’re just getting started with the Going Green effort at your company, you may not have heard of the Three Rs of the Environment: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. At its core, the Three R movement is focused on creating less waste in our everyday lives.

PAPER:

While our focus at JouleX is on helping corporations reduce wasted energy, we also believe that all of our resources are precious. Since about 70% of all physical office waste is paper, this is the ideal place to start your Non-Energy-Related efforts.

Reduce:

Don’t print emails unless you really need to. (If it helps, write “Do I Really Need To Print This” on a sticky note and put it on your monitor!)
Choose Duplex Printing whenever you do print.
Stop unsolicited catalogs and magazines.
Buy in bulk to reduce packaging waste.
Limit any unavoidable paper memos, letters, and other correspondence to one page, as often as possible.

Reuse:

Large envelopes are easily relabeled for a second use, or for collecting things such as receipts for reimbursable expenses.
Stock fax machines with paper that has already been printed on one side and print to the other side.
Use the back sides of discarded printed pages for scratch paper or taking notes.

Recycle:

Set up a recycling area and encourage everyone to use it.
1. Make sure that even your shredded paper is placed into the recycling bins for pickup.
2. If recycling is not offered as part of your office trash service, partner with a local school PTA or PTO to pick up the recyclables from your office on a regular basis. These organizations recycle as part of their fundraising efforts.
3. Purchase paper with at least 30% post-consumer recycled materials.

While you may get a warm fuzzy feeling from knowing that your efforts are helping to save the planet, there are far more practical benefits to the Three Rs than you might guess at first.

Cost Savings on:
- Energy (powering printers/copiers/fax machines)
- Paper
- Toner cartridges
- Staples and paperclips
- Printer maintenance
- File folders
- Increased Productivity due to less time spent shuffling and processing unnecessary paper.

For more information on The Three Rs, check out these resources:

The JouleX Team believes that by creating a corporate culture that values identifying and reducing waste in all forms, your business will benefit in more ways than you expect. You may find employees, empowered by the focus your enterprise has placed on sustainability, voluntarily turning off light switches, laptops and monitors when not in use, and offering up their own suggestions for waste reduction.

Going Green: Good for the Environment and Your Profitability

Player Pate — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 04:48:00 GMT

It’s a popular misconception in the corporate world that being Environmentally Responsible means having to sacrifice profitability. As JouleX customer Ray Anderson, Founder and Chairman of Interface Global can attest, being fiscally responsible and environmentally responsible go hand in hand.

In this video, Mr. Anderson says that “From the day one, we were ahead of the cost curve because of the waste elimination effort. And the Waste Elimination today is cumulatively over 400 Million Dollars and that has more than offset everything we’ve spent. Sustainability has been self-funding for us.”

Interface Global is a model for demonstrating the power of leveraging sustainability in order to improve the profitability of their business as well as the environment. JouleX is proud to support their efforts in eliminating energy waste, improving their profits and reducing their carbon footprint.

What is your company doing to minimize your impact on the environment and lower your costs? Leave a comment and let us know!

Demonstrating Energy Management with Cisco EnergyWise and JouleX

Player Pate — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:16:00 GMT

Matt Laherty recently published a blog that describes his experience using the JouleX Mobile application with Cisco EnergyWise to regulate the energy consumption of his office devices from anywhere, at anytime. Complete with photos of the solution in action, it's great read.

I encourage anyone interested in a simple, practical example for reducing energy consumption within their organization to read this.

JouleX Selected as 2011 Red Herring Top 100 Award Winner

Player Pate — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:29:00 GMT

WE WON!!! JouleX is proud to share that the Red Herring editorial team has named JouleX a 2011 Red Herring Top 100 North America Award recipient in the CleanTech category. JouleX was selected by Red Herring as one of 100 companies identified as the most innovative from a pool of hundreds from across North America.

"Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across North America to the Top 100 winners. We believe JouleX embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. JouleX should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong."

Red Herring's editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the "buzz" and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in North America.

We are proud of this accomplishment and the recognition received from the editorial staff at the Red Herring.

Click here to see the full list of finalists.

JouleX Raises $17 Million in Investment Capital for Global Expansion

Player Pate — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:42:00 GMT

To continue our expansion into growth markets around the world, we’re pleased to announce today a $17 million infusion of investment capital from new investors Sigma Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners and Intel Capital, in addition to existing investors Target Partners and TechOperators. Our plan? To use it to expand development and sales support on a global scale to address the widespread need for enterprises around the world to better measure and manage energy usage.

More specifically, this investment will allow us to accelerate the introduction of our JouleX Energy Manager family of products into regions around the world where optimizing energy usage and driving energy efficiency are mission-critical for conducting business.

In a previous post, “VC Investments in Energy Efficiency Snagging Fair Share of Greentech Funding,” JouleX’s CEO Tom Noonan talked about funding being available from a variety of sources for companies with good ideas and experienced management teams, that are capital efficient with attractive customer ROI models, and can demonstrate the ability to grow and generate a profit. That’s JouleX to a “T.”

We certainly appreciate our investors’ support and confidence in our company and, more importantly, in helping us to continue to the lead the way in enterprise energy management. We look forward to expanding the adoption of the JEM products and growing our customer and partner bases.

The Internet is not as Green as you think

Player Pate — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:28:00 GMT

Sure, the Internet helps reduce pollution by speeding data around the globe without the use of gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting planes, trains and automobiles. But what about the Web’s carbon footprint? It’s actually bigger than you think…a lot bigger according to a recent article in The Vancouver Sun, which ranks the Internet’s appetite for power right up there with the aviation industry.

The Internet’s voracious energy consumption may come as a surprise to the average person. But we suspect CIOs, data center managers and IT professionals have been struggling with this dirty little secret for some time. It takes large data centers, routers and switches to support the highly efficient Internet economy—and this equipment doesn’t run on hamster power. According to The Vancouver Sun:

Apple's 46,000-square-metre iDataCenter is set to open in North Carolina this spring with a price tag of $1 billion U.S.. It will use an estimated 100 megawatts of power — as much as about 100,000 Canadian homes.

Apple's mega-facility is part of a cluster of gigantic new data centres coming on line in North Carolina that are powered largely by cheap and highly polluting coal power. Google has a 44,000-square-metre data centre in the state that eventually will consume an estimated 60 to 100 MW. Facebook has a 28,000-square-metre facility under construction there that will eat up 40 MW.

Finding sustainable, renewable energy sources is a global challenge. But how can we as IT professionals contribute closer to home? We can’t roll back the rising tides of data, but we can address and reduce energy waste in our own data centers.

According to Forrester Research, nearly 30 percent of servers are “dead” or underutilized. In addition, the average server utilization is a mere eight to 12 percent. We believe solving these problems is achievable with accurate measurement, intelligent analysis and proactive, policy-based control.

What do you think? Do you know what the greatest culprit of energy waste is within your organization? Comment below. We would love to get your thoughts.

JouleX Applauds Lenovo for New Energy Aware Features

Player Pate — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:32:00 GMT

The latest release of Lenovo Power Manager (V3.52) introduces new features which enables JouleX Energy Manager products to monitor, measure and control energy consumption using Cisco EnergyWise.

We applaud Lenovo for extending energy control to Cisco EnergyWise. As the industry’s leading management platform for EnergyWise, JouleX customers will be able to leverage these new features to :

Remotely measure Lenovo energy consumption with 100% accuracy
Power manage Lenovo devices remotely through the agentless and out-of-band abilities of Cisco EnergyWise (Standby, Hibernate, Power Off)
Address your corporate sustainability objectives through Lenovo’s use of the Cisco Energywise rich energy catagorization tools

Additional information below on how to empower JouleX Energy Manager with Cisco EnergyWise and the new Lenovo features:

The following EnergyWise levels are supported:

EnergyWise Level	Device State
0	Power Off
1	Hibernate
2	Standby

Installation of Lenovo Power Manager
Download the latest version (Version 3.52) of the Lenovo Power Manager from the Lenovo Website and install the update.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70601

After the installation, you need to configure Cisco EnergyWise support. To do this, open the folder ThinkPad > Utilities in your programs folder and start the EnergyWise configuration tool:

<programs>/ThinkPad/Utilities/PWMEWCFG.EXE

Enter the EnergyWise domain and secret information.

Supported ThinkPad Systems (from Lenovo Website)

Edge 11, Edge 13, Edge 14, Edge 15
Edge E10, Edge E30, Edge E40, Edge E50
Edge E220s, Edge E420, Edge E420s, Edge E520
L410, L412, L420, L421, L510, L512, L520
Reserve Edition
R51e, R52, R60, R60e, R61, R61e, R61i
R400, R500
SL300, SL400, SL400c, SL410,SL500, SL500c, SL510
T43, T43p, T60, T60p, T61, T61p
T400, T400s, T410, T410i, T410s, T410si, T420, T420i, T420s, T420si
T500, T510, T510i, T520, T520i
W500, W510, W520, W700, W700ds, W701, W701ds
X32, X40, X41, X41 Tablet
X60, X60s, X60 Tablet, X61, X61s, X61 Tablet
X100e, X120e, X200, X200s, X200 Tablet
X201, X201i, X201s, X201 Tablet,
X220, X220i, X220 Tablet, X220i Tablet, X300, X301
Z60m, Z60t, Z61e, Z61m, Z61p, Z61t

Supported Operating Systems (from Lenovo Website)

Windows 7 32-bit, 64-bit
Windows Vista 32-bit, 64-bit

JouleX: Now Open in Japan

Player Pate — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:58:00 GMT

With proven track records in enterprise energy management in both Europe and North America, we’re now extending our global reach over the Pacific. We’re excited to announce today the opening our newest office in Tokyo, Japan.

Japan’s growing IT infrastructure coupled with the lasting effects of the Tohoku-Pacific Ocean Earthquake and new power consumption regulations have created a sense of urgency among Japanese enterprises to grasp and strategically manage their total energy usage. And, while JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) products will certainly be able to help companies negotiate the new landscape of power consumption in their country, we wanted our efforts to take on a larger role. As part of what we feel is our bigger corporate responsibility, we are also donating 30 percent of our profits from the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012, to the Japanese Red Cross relief efforts for the earthquake victims.

The Tokyo office will be in the very capable hands of one of our long-time colleagues. Ja Hong Lin has been named vice president in charge of the company’s Asia-Pacific operations and president and CEO of JouleX K.K., a subsidiary of JouleX.

It is with a heavy heart that we enter this market. We look forward to doing our part to help alleviate the strain of the energy crisis one enterprise at a time.

JouleX Named 2011 Cool Vendor by Global Analyst Firm

Player Pate — Mon, 23 May 2011 15:17:00 GMT

We are starting off the week with much enthusiasm around the hallways here at JouleX as we have reached another milestone. We are proud to share that JouleX has been named a “Cool Vendor” in the “Cool Vendors in Green IT and Sustainability, 2011”[i] report by Gartner, Inc. This report highlights companies that develop “technologies and services that enable organizations to improve agility and business performance by pursuing sustainability strategies.” There are only a handful of companies that make it into this report, and inclusion is certainly a distinguished honor and acknowledgement of the success we are having in helping our customers reach their energy reduction and sustainability goals.

According to Gartner, “There has been a shift away from tools that singularly consider the reporting or analysis of carbon toward technologies that visualize and more efficiently manage energy, and provide more holistic analysis of sustainable performance and asset management. Midsize to large organizations should be developing a more integrated approach to energy management across all major energy-consuming classes of assets.”[ii]

“We consider our inclusion in the Cool Vendor report by Gartner confirmation of our mission to enable enterprises to automate energy management and drive energy efficiency from the core to the edge of their networks,” said Tom Noonan, president and CEO at JouleX. “Companies are struggling to understand their energy consumption—and waste—as they look to minimize the effect of rising energy costs, trim operating expenses, optimize resources and reduce their carbon footprints. We will continue to innovate and evolve our product to address these issues and to solve specific energy management challenges in data centers, distributed office environments, and facilities.”

We invite you to check out a complimentary copy of the full report.

[i] Gartner, Inc., “Cool Vendors in Green IT and Sustainability, 2011” by Simon Mingay, Stephen Stokes and Milind Govekar, April 15, 2011.

[ii] Ibid

JouleX Named Finalist for 2011 Red Herring Top 100

Player Pate — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:52:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to share that the Red Herring editorial team as has named JouleX as a finalist for the 2011 Red Herring Top 100 North America Award in the CleanTech category. The finalists selected represent “the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across North America.” To make it into the finalist circle, we were evaluated on a number of quantitative and qualitative criteria, including financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and disruption into our respective industry. We met with the members from the nomination committee a while back to share with all of this, and received great response to what we have accomplished in a little over a year and the impact we are making in helping companies meet their sustainability and energy cost reduction goals .

"This year was very rewarding," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "The global economic situation has abated and there are many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products. We had a very difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. Now we're faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring North America. We know that the 2011 crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to make an impact."

As part of the decision process, our CEO Tom Noonan will be giving a live presentation at the Red Herring North America Forum in Hollywood, California, taking place June 13-15 where the winners will be announced at a special awards dinner on June 15. We are proud and honored of this accomplishment.

JouleX wins BT Green Economy Award at Success for Future gala

Player Pate — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:49:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to be the inaugural recipient of the BT Green Economy Award for its enterprise energy management solution, JouleX Energy Manager. BT presented JouleX with the award during last week’s Success for Future Awards gala in Munich. The Success for Future Awards honor projects that promote sustainability and economic success in the world of tomorrow. JouleX is proud to support this initiative and is honored to have been chosen by the 17-member jury.

"Acting sustainably is a matter for all of us and has been a key part of BT's business strategy for the last 20 years. In initiating the Success for Future Award, we want to show that there are lots of fine examples of companies where sustainability and business success go hand in hand. The JouleX solution was a big hit with the jury and I am very pleased that we are able to award the BT Green Economy Award to a company which is a real game-changer in the area of sustainability and energy efficiency. We hope that the prize will also encourage other organizations and companies to get more closely involved with pioneering solutions,” explains BT Germany CEO Karsten Lereuth.

JouleX was chosen for pioneering a whole new approach to enterprise energy efficiency management. The company is dedicated to helping its enterprise clients optimize energy management and realize significant cost savings in the data center, distributed office, facilities and in their PC environments.

“The award shows that there is more and more interest in topics such as green IT and deploying sustainable solutions, from both the general public and from business organizations. An increasing number of companies are recognizing that protecting the environment and being successful in business are no longer incompatible – on the contrary, cutting rising energy consumption and effectively reducing costs requires ecological innovation,” explained JouleX co-founder and chief architect, Josef Brunner.

Read the full release

Juniper Showcases JouleX Energy Manager at Partner Conference

Player Pate — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:04:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to have been featured at Juniper’s 7th Annual Americas Partner Conference this week in Phoenix. Tom Noonan, JouleX CEO, and Kevin Johnson, Juniper CEO, shared the stage to show the ease at pulling energy consumption and utilization information from all network-connected devices and systems (particularly Juniper devices) and the ease at which it is possible by integrating through the Juniper Junos Space Software Development Kit (SDK).

Tom demonstrated how the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) agentless technology acts as a virtual energy meter, and with it a company does not have to install smart meters or physical meters to retrieve energy data on IP-connected devices. JEM runs entirely as a network application and does not require agents or other software on any endpoint that is measured. To achieve this, JouleX has worked closely with manufacturers, such as Juniper to integrate with its newly released Junos Space SDK. Junos Space provides energy data to the JouleX Energy Manager. The energy data reported by Junos Space can be easily integrated with other device energy data.

With JEM, you can view energy information in context to your business:

By application
By facility or location
By rack in a datacenter
By make or model of device
By organization or business unit
Or a variety of other means

Juniper’s rich set of services with Junos Space SDK allows JEM to quickly integrate and collect energy information in a matter of minutes. Just by adding the Junos Space Asset Connector, JEM immediately begins monitoring the energy on any device being managed by Junos Space.

The ability to view energy is important to our customers. The integration of Junos Space SDK and JEM allows our joint customers to closely monitor energy in the datacenter and throughout their enterprise networks - giving them the ability to better manage their procurement processes and achieve corporate sustainability goals.

Can I turn a parasitic energy loss into a gain?

Player Pate — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:53:00 GMT

Wiki defines parasitic loss as often applied to devices that take energy from the engine in order to enhance the engine's ability to create more energy.

When thinking about parasitic losses (in terms of energy), I tend to reflect on three things;

1) Could this loss provide some sort of benefit to the system?

2) Is the loss just a complete waste of energy or perhaps a luxury?

3) Could there be a way to convert a wasteful loss into a beneficial loss?

An oil pump on an engine is considered to be very necessary, but it takes horsepower away from the engine! However, it’s benefit is far greater than the loss of power, as it provides lubrication for the engine, and that in turn provides more horsepower. So while there is a cost to run the oil pump, it in turn provides an efficient benefit that would otherwise be lost as heat!

Most of us consider brakes very necessary (at least I hope we think of brakes as necessary) to the car, but they were designed to slow the car with no thought to the energy lost when we stop. Very wasteful indeed! Brakes use friction to stop the car, and all that energy that was spent to put the car in motion now is lost as heat. Not only that, but you have to pay to get moving again!

But what if we could turn a parasitic loss into something useful? Or reusable? Hybrid cars now turn that heat from braking into a way to charge the car’s batteries. Rather than waste the energy that was once lost as heat, we can put that energy back where we need it! Nothing is 100% efficient of course, but if there’s anyplace to recapture heat and put it back as energy that’s something that can provide some nice efficiencies!

Do you leave your car running when you come home? I would certainly hope not… So why do many of us simply walk away from our computers and leave them on? They burn power all night, and in the summer, they produce heat that the air conditioners have to continuously cool. If we could recapture this loss, we could reduce an unnecessary waste into something profitable!

Convenience is big key to enabling power savings, and an important aspect to turn parasitic loss into a profit. Of course it just easier to get up and walk away from the computer, but if we could automate control and turn unnecessary energy use into savings, the dollars can really add up!

So where are the parasitic energy losses in your environment? I’ve outlined a few that come to mind:

Servers that are on but not being utilized or even used
Computers that are on when the end user isn’t using them
Network devices that are on with no traffic
VoIP phones that are on 100% of the time
Printers when not in use
Lighting systems on with no one home
AC and Heating systems over cooling or over heating.

What other areas do you see that could be parasitic draws?

Earth Hour – When the Lights Come Back On

Player Pate — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:07:00 GMT

If you’ve picked up a newspaper, visited a news website, read your friend feed on Facebook, or taken a look at trending topics on Twitter, you’ve probably seen the buzz about Earth Hour. In the strictest sense, Earth Hour is the hour between 8:30pm and 9:30pm (local time) on March 26, 2011 during which hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of businesses, and more than 125 countries around the world pledge to turn off their lights to take a symbolic stand against climate change.

At JouleX, Inc., we are encouraged, inspired, and challenged by the principles behind Earth Hour. This year’s new Earth Hour initiative, Beyond the Hour, is the epitome of the JouleX message for the corporate world. Conservation of energy resources is not something that can be accomplished one hour a year.

It’s easy for a company to sign on for Earth Hour and vow to turn their lights off for an hour when that hour is on a Saturday, when most corporate offices are closed and those lights weren’t going to be on anyway. After all, it’s a great way to generate some free positive press and public opinion with no effort and no real change to the impact on the environment.

When the lights come back on at 9:31pm on March 26, most of the world will be going back to business as usual and Earth Hour will have simply been 60 minutes with the lights off. However, for these corporations, it will have been 60 more tiny drops in the bucket compared to the initiatives they have already taken to improve the Earth’s environment and the lives of everyone on it.

INTEL has taken a multi-pronged approach to their environmental initiatives. By designing energy efficient products, cutting energy (carbon emissions) and water usage during production, and creating a corporate culture that promotes companywide innovation to their sustainability efforts, Intel has jumped to the forefront of companies working to change our environment.

HSBC was the first of the FTSE 100 to become Carbon Neutral, in 2005. Through programs such as the HSBC Climate Partnership, whose goal is “to reduce the impact of climate change on people, forests, freshwater and cities, and accelerate the adoption of low-carbon policies” and the HSBD Eco-School Climate Initiative, which aims to “inspire action on climate change by improving schools’ environmental efficiency”, HSBC stands out as a company that is working both locally and globally to improve the world.

COCA COLA has created the Live Positively initiative, which “focuses on seven core areas key to our business sustainability with measurable goals and metrics for the Company and the Coca-Cola system”. Through more eco-friendly packaging, transportation, refrigeration, and water stewardship, Coca Cola is working diligently toward their stated goal of being the “beverage industry leader in energy efficiency and climate protection.”

GOOGLE made the decision to become Carbon Neutral in 2007. Since then, they have taken a “three-step approach” to reducing their environmental footprint. Through efficient data centers, using renewable sources of energy as often as possible, creating green workplaces for employees, and purchasing high quality carbon offsets, Google has remained true to the core values of its founders.

CISCO has systematically implemented more environmentally beneficial work practices, built more energy efficient data centers, and developed more overall environmentally friendly products. CISCO is also the driving force behind One Million Acts of Green, a growing worldwide effort to help the planet, one act at a time.

We encourage you to participate in Earth Hour 2011 and consider committing actions that extend beyond the sixty minutes.

Please let us know any other activities you’re planning for Earth Hour 2011.

VC Investments in Energy Efficiency Snagging Greentech Funding

Player Pate — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:28:00 GMT

It’s “game on” for greentech venture funding. The early part of this year is proving to be a watershed for greentech companies looking for VC investors. According to a recent article by GreenTech Media, approximately $1.7 billion has been raised in just the first two months of 2011, and a sizeable chunk of that funding is going to VC investments in energy efficiency along with smart grid, smart building, solar and lighting as well.

Raising venture capital for more than 20 years, JouleX’s CEO Tom Noonan has seen the number of greentech investors grow exponentially from only a handful in the early 2000s. In a recent interview at DataCenter Dynamics Atlanta, Tom goes on to say that funding today is available from a variety of sources for companies with good ideas and experienced management teams, that are capital efficient with attractive customer ROI models, and can demonstrate the ability to grow and generate a profit. The advent of strategic investors such as GE, Intel and Cisco—all with vested interests in energy management and efficiencies as they look to incorporate these capabilities into their mainstream products—only reinforces the interest and demand for this cross section of greentech.

Drill down even further, and you’ll find energy management technologies aimed at power-hungry data centers getting lots of attention as well.

What types of green technologies are you most excited about for your company?

Viewing of March Madness = Carbon Emissions of Grilling 9.6M Steaks

Player Pate — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:34:00 GMT

(or 19.8 million Veggie Burgers for our vegetarian followers)

A report by Challenger, Gray, and Christmas suggests the annual NCAA men’s basketball tournament will result in 14 million hours of online viewership. Chief Operating Officers everywhere shouldn't be surprised to learn that 8.4 million of those hours will be used during normal business hours. Since it is hard to put these kind of statistics into an easily understood format for the general public, we took on the task of crunching the numbers for you.

14 Million Hours of Online Viewship =

$560,000 US	Energy costs powering online viewing of the tournament
2.8 Mega watts	Amount of energy used for online viewing
1,932.5	Metric tons of carbon emissions produced

Here’s what else you could power with that much energy:

235 homes for an entire year
1,592 computers and monitors for an entire year
4 million servers for an hour
456 servers for an entire year

Here are the equivalents to emitting that much carbon:

378 passenger vehicles on the road for an entire year
4,493 burning barrels of oil
80,234 propane canisters - Which translates to grilling 9.6 million steaks (or 19.8 million veggie burgers)!!

Please don’t misunderstand. We love the tourney as much as anyone. Sure our brackets look as bad as anyone’s after the first round, but that doesn’t mean we wrote this as sour grapes. However, tournament committee, we’d really appreciate Georgia Tech getting a bid next year.

How many of you plan to watch March Madness online this year?

Calculations based on 14 million hours of viewing on a computer and monitor that draws 200 watts, at an average of $.20/kwh.

Energy information sourced from the United States Environmental Protection Agency

JouleX Mobile Hits iTunes App Store

Player Pate — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 03:47:00 GMT

JouleX is pleased to inform clients they can now access the JouleX Mobile application from iTunes. JouleX Mobile is patent-pending technology that works exclusively with the JouleX Energy Manager enterprise product to automatically control power to your computer workstation and help your organization save energy, money and carbon emissions. JouleX Mobile's location-based service uses the GPS system of your iPhone or smart phone and your proximity to your workplace to power-on and power-off your workstation computer devices. Based on user-defined settings, you can power-on your computer devices when you are a certain distance from your office and it can power-down when you leave your office, saving the organization wasted energy.

Learn more about JouleX Mobile and JouleX Energy Manager.

JouleX clients can download JouleX Mobile from iTunes in the App Store, under Business apps or just search JouleX Mobile.

EnBW EnergyWatchers Delivers New Offering Based on JouleX

Player Pate — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:45:00 GMT

Today we proudly announced that EnBW EnergyWatchers, an EnBW company, is using JouleX to build a sustainability offering that delivers energy efficiency to its enterprise and industrial customers. EnBW is the third-largest energy company in Germany, who focuses on the electricity and gas business as well as energy and environmental services.

“In considering our own sustainability goals, as well as the needs of our customers, we wanted a holistic and enterprise-wide energy management solution that can be easily integrated into our processes,” said Melanie Bunke, EnBW EnergyWatchers Managing Director. "JouleX’s ability to monitor, analyze and control all IP-enabled devices will help us rapidly and significantly reduce customers' energy gap, an important reason we chose JouleX.”

The energy gap is the delta between the amount of energy that is necessary to productively power devices and systems and the superfluous amount of energy they consume, which results in wasted energy and cost. The new offering, based on JouleX Energy Manager, will now be available for EnBW customers.

"We are very excited that JouleX is now part of the EnBW family of offerings," said Josef Brunner, JouleX Chief Architect and Co-Founder. "This first class engagement with EnBW EnergyWatchers illustrates the importance of energy efficiency to the global economy. Furthermore this offering will help customers achieve long-lasting environmental and sustainability goals."

For more information, visit EnBW EnergyWatchers.

Junos Space: Sustainability, Energy Efficiency, & Carbon Reductions

Tim McCormick — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:37:00 GMT

Juniper today announced the availability of its Junos® Space SDK of which JouleX is proud to be an early adopter. JouleX uses the Junos Space SDK to integrate into the JouleX Energy Manager platform, providing Juniper clients new opportunities to support their sustainability objectives, increase energy efficiency, reduce their carbon footprint and realize significant cost savings through unprecedented visibility into the energy consumption and utilization of all devices connected to their network. The JouleX Energy Manager utilizes Junos Space to retrieve actual energy consumption data from the Juniper switching and routing infrastructure. JouleX Energy Manager remotely monitors each network-connected device and provides a policy/rules engine to actively power-down devices and systems when they are not needed or idle un-productive or under-utilized computing resources. The JouleX reporting and decision support system provides energy management reporting and tracking for energy consumption, carbon emissions, and costs as well as savings by device, department, cost center, division, location and the enterprise.

JouleX applauds Juniper for their work with the Junos Space SDK as it provides clients with tremendous opportunity to gain more control over energy consumption and utilization throughout their data center, distributed office, PC environment and entire enterprise through the JouleX application.

Read the entire Juniper press release.

Join JouleX at e-World to discuss Sustainable Energy Management

Tim McCormick — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:22:00 GMT

e-World attendees: join JouleX for a discussion on Sustainable Energy Management. JouleX is proud to be featured at the e-World energy & water 2011 conference at Messe Essen, Germany. Josef Brunner, JouleX Chief Architect & Co-Founder, will deliver a talk on Sustainable Energy Management for the Enterprise on 8 and 9 February at the Deutsche Telekom theatre located in Hall 7, stand 111. There you will also be able to see the new JouleX Energy Manager in action and learn more about ways to monitor, analyze and manage energy throughout your enterprise.

JouleX is proud to support e-World 2011, thanks Deutsche Telekom for featuring JouleX and looks forward to seeing you there. For more information about the conference, visit www.e-world-2011.com

JouleX nominated for BT’s Success for Future Award

Glenn Gaudet — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:56:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to be nominated for BT’s inaugural Success for Future Award. This first year award will be given to the project that best promotes sustainability and economic success in the world of tomorrow. JouleX is pioneering a whole new approach to enterprise energy efficiency management and is a top contender for the award. JouleX is proud to support this initiative as it is dedicated to helping its enterprise clients optimize energy management and realize significant cost savings in the data center, distributed enterprise and in their PC environments. Winners will be announced in April 2011 in Munich.

To cast your vote for JouleX and learn more about the award, visit http://www.successforfuture.de/

JouleX has an App for that!

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:46:00 GMT

JouleX is excited to announce a system-wide upgrade to its innovative JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) product. Among the new powerful enterprise energy management functionality features JEM 2.5 will be delivering is the addition of JouleX Mobile^TM– a location-based “smart” mobile application for a company’s employees to manage the power usage of all their personal productivity devices, from PCs and MACs to printers and VOIP phones.

But, wait, there’s more. We’ve greatly expanded support for the IT infrastructure with native integration with Cisco EnergyWise API, Intel’s Data Center Manager/NodeManager and VMWare’s vCenter. With JEM 2.5, we’re also introducing our innovative load-adaptive computing^TMthat accurately measures system and application utilization and power loads while dynamically allocating computing resources as they are needed. Big stuff!

More still… JEM version 2.5 will offer more energy intelligence and visibility than ever before through a variety of interactive, drill-down reporting, including the ability to identify top “power hogs” among all network-connected devices and systems.

Not enough? Get even more details here.

Josef Brunner Appointed to Green Venture Summit Advisory Board

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:16:00 GMT

The Green Venture Summit is a new event and media platform created to highlight and foster the Green Economy. Our own JouleX co-founder Josef Brunner has accepted an appointment to the advisory board of the Green Venture Summit. Joining Brunner on the board are representatives from top tier companies such as Cisco, Nokia and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

According to Brunner, "I am thrilled to be part of such a gathering of great people and companies to help guide an event that will guide the $7 trillion a year industry that is evolving."

Tom Noonan Presented with the 2010 ATP Industry Innovation Award

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:31:00 GMT

The Association of Telecom Professionals (ATP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the continued professional development and network growth of the telecommunications community, presented Tom Noonan, President and CEO, JouleX the 2010 ATP Industry Innovation Award.

JouleX joins Green IT - BB Network

Glenn Gaudet — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:00:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to announce it has joined the Green IT - BB Network. The network connects decision-makers from business, academia and politics to share information on strategies to reduce IT energy usage. Together, the members of the network develop innovative green techniques and technologies for both IT and communication equipment. JouleX joins this group of prestigious companies that includes Microsoft, HP & Axel Springer.

Intelligence in the Electric Grid

Glenn Gaudet — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:58:00 GMT

On October 13, 2010, the MIT Enterprise Forum Atlanta presented a panel called "Bringing Intelligence to the Electric Grid. At the event, Our own Tom Noonan, President and CEO of JouleX joined a panel to discuss how entrepreneurial companies are driving technology and business to transform the electric grid.

Watch it here.

Top Ten Ways to Go Green at Work

Glenn Gaudet — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:32:00 GMT

Earlier this year, the Sierra Club published their "Top Ten Ways to Go Green at Work". They are worth repeating:

1. Be bright about light Artificial lighting accounts for 44 percent of the electricity use in office buildings.

2. Maximize computer efficiency Computers in the business sector unnecessarily waste $1 billion worth of electricity a year.

3. Print smarter - The average U.S. office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of copy paper a year.

4. Go paperless when possible

5. Ramp up your recycling

6. Close the loop - Buy products made from recycled materials.

7. Watch what (and how) you eat

8. Rethink your travel

9. Reconsider your commute

10. Create a healthy office environment

To get the detailed PDF of these tips, visit the Sierra Club.

JouleX has ways to help in a number of these areas. Check out our JouleX Energy Manager.

The 2010 EPA Green Power Partners of the Year

Ida Davidson — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:51:00 GMT

Congratulations to the following companies for being recognized for the 2010 Green Power Partner of the Year honor.

Kohl’s Department Stores
Motorola
TD Bank
Whole Foods Market

They will receive the award at the Green Power Leadership Awards held in Portland, Ore. as part of the annual Renewable Energy Markets Conference. The awards are co-sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Energy and the Center for Resource Solutions and recognize the country's leading green power purchasers for their commitment and contribution to helping advance the development of green power sources. The Green Power Partner of the Year award recognizes partners who distinguish themselves through their green power purchase, leadership, overall strategy and overall impact on the green power market.

JouleX Presents Case Studies at Green IT Best Practice Award

Glenn Gaudet — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:21:00 GMT

Join JouleX at this year's Green IT Best Practice Award in Berlin, Germany. The event will focus on data center efficiency and best practices. JouleX Co-Founder and Chief Architect Josef Brunner will be presenting the session entitled Next Generation Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Management. In this session, Brunner will present case studies that discuss strategies used to achieve increased data center efficiency. A great lineup of other speakers at the event include CIOs of Bosch and Siemens.

Deutsche Telekom Innovation Day 2010

Glenn Gaudet — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:13:00 GMT

Josef Brunner presenting at Deutsche Telekom

This year's Deutsche Telekom Innovation Day had over 500 of the company’s innovators and partners attend a full day conference to obtain information and discuss current Deutsche Telekom initiatives. JouleX was there in full force with our Co-founder and Chief Architect Josef Brunner leading a session on how JouleX is helping Deutsche Telekom with a major project to help reduce energy consumption.

Edward Kozel, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Deutsche Telekom, provided great insight into where Deutsche Telekoms will focus efforts over the next year in strategy and investments. Mr. Kozel declared that energy will be one of the four core areas Deutsche Telekom will heavily invest in and focus on.

JouleX continues to expand its working relationship with Deutsche Telekom to help them achieve their energy savings and management goals. In addition, we introduced to Deutsche Telekom and their guests our JouleX/Cisco partnership that allows the integration of Cisco EnergyWise into our established projects at Deutsche Telekom.

All of us here at JouleX wish to thank Deutsche Telekom for such a great event!

For more information on JouleX solutions, click here.

Google and Renewable Energy

Glenn Gaudet — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:39:00 GMT

Heather Clancy just posted a great article on ZDNet about wind power and Google.

One quote from Google's Green Business Operations Director Rick Needham jumped out at me.

"We believe in investing in projects that make good business sense and further the developments of renewable energy. We’re willing to take calculated risks on early stage ideas and projects that can have dramatic impacts while offering attractive returns. This willingness to be ahead of the industry and invest in largescale innovative projects is our success as a company.”

Google is not alone at making these investments, but they are unique in that they have significant weight from both a cash and a visibility perspective. Google has the clout to make an impact by bringing attention to what they invest in.

9 Items to Consider When Adopting Green Tech in the Enterprise

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:35:00 GMT

More than ever, public pressures have created a growing movement among businesses and individuals to find ways to reduce the demand on energy in small and large ways. This movement has been largely ignored in previous decades because the cost of energy and related impacts have been relatively low or un-noticed. However, as global demand for energy increases and the impacts of carbon-based energy sources continue to be made public, managing energy consumption becomes more than a public relations goal. Managing energy consumption is now critical to the bottom line.

Selecting the right solution for managing energy consumption in the enterprise IT infrastructure can be a daunting task. It seems like almost every vendor is offering something that provides ways to “Green” up energy management. The key to success in selection is understanding how the solution will work from a number of components:

Installation Considerations
Asset Synchronization
Remote Energy Management
Legacy Devices
Policy Management
Controlling Power State
Exception Management
Energy Simulation
Reporting

Each component addresses specific areas of interest within the enterprise IT infrastructure. By understanding how these components are addressed by the solution, IT managers will be able to understand the impact to their organization even before a solution is tested in-house.

To get a FREE copy of JouleX's Device Energy Management Buyer’s Guide. Click here.

JouleX Wins Clean Tech Media Award

Glenn Gaudet — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:49:00 GMT

We at JouleX are proud to announce that we received the 2010 Clean Tech Media Award in the Energy category during a non-profit event held in Germany and initiated by Clean Tech Media GmbH Co. KG and Marco Voigt and Sven Krüger, heads of the strategic government policy advice- and technology-consultancy VKPartner.

Since 2008, the non-profit project has paid tribute to the pioneers in the field of environmental technologies, heralding those who have transformed their passion for green technologies into action, those who in innovative ways are increasing awareness and promoting the new technologies. Awards also honor the celebrities and public figures who embrace an ecological life-style, thereby encouraging a further acceptance and popularity of sustainable technologies.

Smart Energy - Energy that follows the user ...

Glenn Gaudet — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:20:00 GMT

Join JouleX Chief Architect Josef Brunner at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Day where he will present:

Smart Energy - Energy that follows the user and adjusts to bandwidth requirements.

In this session, you will discover answers to the questions that will transform corporate energy usage:

How do you build the world’s most energy efficient, scalable and high performance ISP network?
How do you save millions in energy costs and carbon emissions?
How do you establish a holistic, vendor independent energy management solution for all IP enabled devices including networking infrastructure, office communication equipment, data centers and facility management tools?

For more information click here.

FREE Clean Tech World Tickets

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:22:00 GMT

Join JouleX at Clean Tech World in Berlin 17-19 September 2010. JouleX has FREE passes to attend the Exhibition. If you are in the area and would like to join us, email our Chief Architect Josef Brunner

"Clean Tech World aims to transform the fascination and enthusiasm for technology into a social highlight and strives to achieve the widest possible media reach by establishing popular event formats. Clean Tech World is the next logical step taken from the great public interest and the increased economic and social significance of the environmental technology sector."

For more information on Clean Tech World, click here.

Deutsche Telekom's Annual Innovation Day

Glenn Gaudet — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:18:00 GMT

Congratulations to JouleX Co-Founder and Chief Architect Josef Brunner who is invited to the Deutsche Telekom Innovation Day to discuss and present the several projects regarding JouleX and Deutsche Telekom working together to develop significantly lower energy costs and to enhance the sustainability efforts at Deutsche Telekom.

The Innovation Day is more than an event; it is an incubator for cooperation with strategic partners from all over the world.

Power IT Down Day

Ida Davidson — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:35:00 GMT

This week, on August 27, 2010, over 4,800 people have already pledged to turn off their IT devices to help save energy. You can sign up to participate at http://poweritdown.org.

The organizers point out that “Just by turning off your computer, monitor and printer — and any other peripherals — when you leave work for the day, you can help save tens of thousands of costly kilowatt hours.”

All of us here at JouleX support the efforts of Power IT Down Day. We invite all of our blog readers to join in on Friday. We also want to add some other ideas to help reduce the IT energy consumption in the enterprise:

The Top 10 Power Management Tips to help enterprises power down IT and save energy are as follows:

Baseline Power Consumption. Identify and pinpoint the top enterprise network power consumers and then accelerate a hardware refresh program based on the energy savings.
Implement Energy Automation: Automatically power down all end-user devices such as PCs, MACs, IP phones, and monitors.
Reduce Carbon Footprint of Printers. By using a carbon footprint calculator for printing, estimate printer energy, paper usage, consolidation opportunities and estimate carbon and cost implications. Hewlett-Packard offers a free calculator.
Identify Under-utilized Equipment: Identify under-utilized PCs and servers consuming the most power. These PCs and servers represent an excellent opportunity for virtualization.
Boost LEED Certification. Increase LEED certification by actively monitoring energy consumption of the current IT infrastructure.
Decrease Power Usage in Embedded Systems. Work to design systems, such as those with Intel’s latest embedded processors and chipsets, to automatically adjust the power state to use only the energy required by the workload.
Implement Location-based Policies: Automatically power up and down all end-user devices using location-based policies such as by GPS location or via a building’s security badge management system.
Power Down Idle Presentation Servers During Off Business Hours. Simply powering off these servers during "off business hours" can save 30 to 50 percent of server farm power consumption. Companies can take advantage of a free Citrix PowerSmart Utility to do this.
Set Carbon Reduction Goals: As a company, identify a goal for reducing energy costs and carbon footprint within a certain time period.
Get a free demo of JouleX Energy Manager. Take the first step in understanding toward responsible energy consumption by gaining real-time understanding of energy usage and wasted costs.

Leveraging these ideas will help corporate IT staffs to gain control of their energy consumption and save both on carbon emissions and energy costs.

Sustainability — The Next Driver For Innovation And Growth

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:19:00 GMT

Daniel Krauss of Forrester recently blogged about an upcoming reserach report and released some interesting information:

"My next report will give a comprehensive overview of the sustainability consulting services landscape for which I interviewed 25 service providers. As part of this research, I asked the providers about the split of their revenues and clients, both now and what they expect in the future, by each of the key segments we identified above. On average, about 50% of current revenues and client projects are comprised of green IT, nearly 30% in IT for green, and 20% in green business. Interesting however is the change which the providers see in the next three years, with the percentage of green IT falling to about 40%, and gradual increases in IT for green and green business (see figure below)."

To read his full blog post, click here.

Top 10 Green Power Purchasers in the USA

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:58:00 GMT

According to a report released July 2010 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the following 10 companies are the largest purchasers of Green energy:

Intel Corporation - 1,433,200,000 (kWh)
Kohl's Department Stores - 1,367,376,000 (kWh)
Whole Foods Market - 817,657,623 (kWh)
City of Houston, TX - 438,000,000 (kWh)
Dell Inc. - 431,058,000 (kWh)
Johnson & Johnson - 416,510,688 (kWh)
Cisco Systems, Inc. - 400,996,000 (kWh)
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania - 400,000,000 (kWh)
U.S. Air Force - 339,660,392 (kWh)
City of Dallas, TX - 333,659,840 (kWh)

To read the full report click here.

Google Reduces Their Carbon Footprint

Mike Noonan — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:06:00 GMT

Google is taking on the elimination of their own carbon footprint. According to a recent blog post from Google,

"We just completed a substantial 20-year green Power Purchase Agreement that allows us to take responsibility for our footprint and foster true growth in the renewable energy sector. On July 30 we will begin purchasing the clean energy from 114 megawatts of wind generation at the NextEra Energy Resources Story County II facility in Iowa at a predetermined rate for 20 years. Incorporating such a large amount of wind power into our portfolio is tricky, but this power is enough to supply several data centers."

Read the full blog post.

JouleX and Cisco Partner Up

Glenn Gaudet — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:12:00 GMT

JouleX is proud to announce that is has joined forces with Cisco and has become a Registered Cisco Developer. As a member of the Cisco Developer Network, JouleX is provided more open access to Cisco technologies as well as expanded and enhanced resources to help support every phase of the JouleX development and business cycles. The partnership also provides JouleX with better Cisco-related development systems and processes, and clear paths for access to resources and advancement.

To learn more about other JouleX partnerships, click here.

Watch JouleX Energy Manager in Action!

Ida Davidson — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:04:00 GMT

Take a look inside this informative video demonstrating the features of JouleX Energy Manager (JEM). Our Sustainability Officer, Mark Davidson discusses what JEM is and how it works with Glenn Gaudet.

This video is an excellent option for companies that want to get a feel for JouleX Energy Manager’s powerful capabilities before committing to a trial installation.

The video contains information on:

Understanding how JEM works
Exploring the admin GUI
Discovering and manage devices
Setting up policies
Creating reports
And much more!

Warning! Many people get hooked on JEM within minutes. However, with the up to 60% of savings JEM brings to your company's IT energy bill, we think it is worth the addiction!

Click Here to visit our demo video page

Device Energy Management Buyer's Guide Now Available

Ida Davidson — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:34:00 GMT

As Sustainability and Green IT have become buzzwords across industries worldwide, they have become a significant focus for most executive management, corporate IT, and facilities departments. As corporate management and government agencies explore the business case for implementing sustainability strategies, it is becoming common knowledge that the benefits of these initiatives reach far beyond Corporate Social Responsibility public relations.

Effective Green IT initiatives have the power to significantly reduce energy consumption, carbon emissions, and capital expenditures, providing an immediate and sustained positive impact on the corporate bottom line. With JouleX Energy Manager, enterprises will see these benefits and more.

To answer any questions that Sustainability Officers may have about the JouleX Energy Manager solution, and how much benefit can be gained by your enterprise, JouleX is pleased to provide this FREE Buyer’s Guide. With this guide, companies will better understand how to select energy management solutions, such as JouleX Energy Manager, in order to fully utilize energy monitoring and reporting, as well as reduce energy consumption up to 60%.

This 21 page Buyer's Guide includes:

Installation Considerations
Asset Synchronization
Remote Energy Management
Legacy Devices
Policy Management
Controlling Power State
Exception Management
Energy Simulation
Reporting
And, much more

Please download this Buyer's Guide and take a look through it. If you have any questions or to schedule a live demo, contact us today!

10 Things to Know About PC Power Management

Glenn Gaudet — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:35:00 GMT

Yesterday, Matthew Wheeland wrote a great article on Power PC Management in GreenBiz.com called, 10 Things to Know About PC Power Management. In it he lays out ten things that all IT managers should know. While we at JouleX do not believe that all PC Power Management solutions are the same, Matthew makes some excellent points. Here is is list of ten:

Screen savers are not power management.
PC power management can save you big money.
Installing a power management system can be free. Although it sounds too good to be true, there are a number of rebate programs available -- mostly through utility companies -- that will earn you a set amount of money for each PC you install power management software on.
PC power management starts saving money right away.
There are many different vendors.
PC power management is a "set it and forget it" project.
Power management works without disturbing end users.
Start small, then move big.
Executive support is critical to successful PC power management.
You can do it yourself, but there's a catch. Every operating system comes with energy management tools pre-installed -- although only recently have they been shipped with those controls activated.

For larger companies, the savings are immense when a PC Power Management solution is deployed. JouleX takes this a step further by managing the power of not just PCs but also all of the devices and systems connected to the corporate network.

Green Tech Question: Can the Data Center be an Energy Plant?

Glenn Gaudet — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:10:00 GMT

There is a great article by Scott Dodd of OnEarth. His article Heat + New Gizmo = Power lays out what is being done to try to harness the heat created from corporate resources such as data centers and turning the heat back into electricity.

"In 1882 Thomas Edison built the nation's first power plant in Lower Manhattan, selling electricity to New York City's rich and powerful. Edison himself flipped the first light switch in the Wall Street offices of J. P. Morgan. But Pearl Street station, equipped with six 27-ton dynamos, also produced tremendous amounts of heat. Edison, always the problem solver, used that heat to make steam, which he then sold to nearby businesses, where it was used to power factories and warm buildings during the winter."

Green Tech may not just about conservation anymore. He discusses a chip that is in design that will convert heat into electricity...

"The concept is simple: a device made of a semiconducting material is sandwiched between two strong conductors. When one side gets hot, electrons begin to flow toward the cooler side. The semiconductor channels them into a wire, creating a flow of electricity that can be directed back into the original gadget, engine, or other heat-generating device, acting as an additional power source."

Read the full story here.

Green Tech Funding Increases Five-Fold

Glenn Gaudet — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:08:00 GMT

Funding for Green Tech companies is seeing a steady increase. According to a recent article in the Financial Times:

The number of funds investing in private-equity clean tech – including renewable energy, recycling, anti-pollution, conservation and power supply – is up more than fivefold from 90 five years ago to 530 this year, according to Preqin, the research house.

“These businesses are growing at 20 to 30 per cent a year,” says Shai Weiss, a London-based partner at Virgin Green Fund, a $220m fund backed by Sir Richard Branson and other big investors including Macquarie, Credit Suisse and Calpers.

Read the full article here.

Explosive Growth Predicted in Carbon Reporting Solutions

Ida Davidson — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:21:00 GMT

According to a recent report published by Groom Energy Research, more than $46 million in venture capital was invested in Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA) startup companies in 2009. ECA companies collect, condense, and report corporate carbon footprint data.

Since carbon footprint reporting is quickly evolving from optional to a required part of enterprise sustainability plans, investors who are looking to get in on the ground floor are scrambling to take advantage of the innovation in the marketplace.

Major points of the study claim:

Protecting and enhancing company image, rather than pending GHG regulation, is the top driver among purchasers.
Supply chain initiatives like the Wal-Mart Supplier Assessment Program will motivate purchases in 2010 and 2011.
Five acquisitions were completed and venture capital investment totaling more than $46M in startup companies took place in 2009.
Despite the early stage of the current ECA market, 60 vendors offer software
products. Market consolidation is expected to occur in the next two years.
The number of organizations using ECA software is expected to increase 600% by 2011; investment will be made by companies that have not traditionally invested in environmental software.

As rising energy costs, corporate carbon footprints, and overall environmental impact become more important to the global business community, we expect that investment in this sector will continue to see strong growth over the coming years.

Tony Blair Joins Clean Tech World with Khosla Ventures

Glenn Gaudet — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:37:00 GMT

Silicon Valley's famous venture capitalist Vinod Khosla announced at an invitation only event in Sausalito, CA that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has joined Khosla Ventures as a senior advisor. According to MercuryNews.com, Khosla Ventures has invested more than $1 billion in clean technologies.

Tony Blair:

"I'm absolutely thrilled, honored and delighted to team up with Vinod and the people he has working for him," Blair said Monday, before taking the stage for a "fireside chat" with executives from six companies in Khosla Ventures' vast portfolio. "Vinod is one of the most creative, dynamic and extraordinary people I've ever met in my life. "... the answers to climate change and energy security lies in the technological innovations. I am thrilled to play whatever small part I can."

This announcement speaks volumes about the gaining momentum of clean technologies. Thought leaders at every level are acknowledging that sustainability in business is the next wave of innovation. Green Tech and Green IT are large components of this category.

Carbon Footprint Reporting - The Missing Standard

Ida Davidson — Sat, 15 May 2010 00:10:00 GMT

Over the past year, we have seen a common missing element in the conversations that we are having with companies about how to reduce their energy consumption. The common missing element is a standard to measure and report on carbon that is released due to energy consumption. Many call this a company's "Carbon Footprint".

Although there are a lot of discussions going on in both the US and the European Union, there is no standard for Carbon Footprint reporting. That said, many different bodies are approaching this issue:

In Europe, the German Think-tank Company “Thema 1” is doing some great work towards Carbon Footprint reporting that we are watching very closely.
Cap and Trade in the US is also very much aligned with Carbon Footprint and emission reduction but there is not standard on how to report.
The European Union Emission Trading System is identifying needs from their perspective.

How to measure, control and report a Carbon Footprint remains a significant challence for most companies.

Our Chief Architect, Josef Brunner is leading conversations with government organizations, companies and consulting firms with the goal of establishing carbon footprint reporting standards. JouleX is a key player in driving these standards for both our customers and the industry. If you have any input, please contact Josef Brunner at josef.brunner@joulex.net.

Does Green IT Have a Moore's Law Equivalent?

Ida Davidson — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:00:00 GMT

Today, on CNET News, Martin LaMonica reports that some experts insist Green IT has a Moore's Law equivalent:

"As businesses try to innovate around energy and the environment, the IT industry has become a model for innovation, said Joel Makower, the executive editor of Greener World Media and panel moderator. Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors a chip can hold will double every 18 months, has set the rapid pace of technology turnover in the IT industry, which is measured in months rather than years or decades as in energy.

Although it's not a perfect fit, a version of Moore's Law has been taking hold in clean-energy technologies, said Steve Fludder, vice president of Ecomagination at GE. It's also a guiding principle for employees within a company."

When asked the question “Does Green IT have a Moore’s Law equivalent?”, our Sustainability Officer, Mark Davidson had this to say:

“My gut says no. But it really depends on how you’re applying Moore’s Law to the Green IT field. Moore’s law claims that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every 16 months. However, there isn't a similar "metric" for Green IT unless you mean things like green semiconductors or something like that. Green encompasses so much more. The grid, for example, can be green but is nothing like microchips.”

Carbon Emissions Marketplace Grows In Response to Regulations

Ida Davidson — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:29:00 GMT

It’s no secret that as the costs (both monetary and environmental) of natural resources are skyrocketing, governments around the globe are developing regulations to address these issues at a rapid rate. Carbon Emissions are a large focus area for these environmental regulations. Reuters reports that companies like The Green Exchange are coming to the forefront to help corporations remain compliant with the new carbon emissions regulations.

According to the article:

"NYMEX's carbon emissions marketplace Green Exchange LLC has opened a new office in London and hired key staff from competitors in a push to gain market share in the $100 billion European carbon market.

Green Exchange said on Tuesday it had hired Les Male, former commercial director at Anglo-Dutch energy exchange APX-ENDEX, as head of its London office and Henry Bakker, formerly of market leader and rival European Climate Exchange, as director of communications.

Green Exchange has also hired Henrik Hasselknippe, former global head of carbon analysis at carbon market analysts Point Carbon, as managing director of global product development, the company said.

Green Exchange is a joint venture among major carbon market players which include Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley."

At JouleX, our goal is to help corporations monitor and control their energy usage (thereby reducing carbon emissions), but believe that carbon exchange is definitely part of a full overall Sustainability plan.

US Cap and Trade Could Be Coming Sooner Than You Think

Glenn Gaudet — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:12:00 GMT

President Obama Visits Wind Turbine Blade Plant
April 27, 2010

President Obama visited a Siemens wind turbine blade manufacturing plant in Fort Madison, IA and speaks about how his Administrations investments in clean energy are creating jobs and new industries.

In the United States, Cap & Trade legislation was nearly dead while the country was focused on health care reform. Now that that is of the radar, more attention is being turned to a comprehensive energy plan that includes a Cap and Trade on carbon based emissions. This will impact just about every business in the United States.

According to a recent article in Business Week;

"The bullets are already flying—but mainly over details of the plan, not the general idea. While there are still fierce opponents of emissions limits, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, much of business is supportive. The Obama Administration "is very close to right on the climate plan," says John W. Rowe, chief executive of Exelon, a Chicago-based utility."

Whether you agree with this or not, businesses should start to explore how they will be able to deal with the reporting requirements that will no doubt be part of any plan.

Industry Comes Together at the JouleX Launch Party

Ida Davidson — Sat, 01 May 2010 15:07:00 GMT

View the pictures individually on Flickr

Team JouleX held its official company launch party at Interop Las Vegas 2010. We were thrilled to have over 100 of our partners, current & prospective customers, and supporters join us for the unveiling of JouleX Energy Manager. We firmly believe JEM, an agentless solution that reduces energy costs by monitoring, analyzing and controlling energy usage of all network-connected devices and systems, is the future of Energy Sustainability.

The positive energy and support from everyone in attendance was truly inspiring to all of us at JouleX. The feedback on our services and product demos were invaluable. We can’t thank you enough.

Do you want to know more about JouleX Energy Manager? Tell us how to contact you, and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.

Greening Up The Supply Chain

Ida Davidson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:13:00 GMT

At the end of Interop Las Vegas Expo Opening Day, we asked Mark Davidson, our Sustainability Officer, to share his thoughts about the convention. Here’s what he had to say:

It’s the end of the first day of Interop 2010, the first big event and official launch for JouleX. Were you surprised by the number of attendees who were on the Green IT track?

I was surprised at how few attendees were on the Green IT track. Unlike Data Center World, the General IT and Networking world have not embraced sustainability and Green IT as a focus area. I’m starting to see companies deliver technologies in their networking devices such as Cisco’s EnergyWise, but in general, it’s a relatively new set of features and technologies for the networking world.

Do you think there were enough exhibitors and panels dedicated to the Green IT movement?
- Yes. I think so. Interop has a dedicated track for Green IT this year. While most exhibitors put an emphasis on green technology features embedded in current products, there were a few Green IT focused exhibitors, such as JouleX.
What was the biggest concern expressed by attendees you met with at the JouleX booth?
- Several manufacturing companies asked us specifically about how to report energy reduction targets up to their customers. A specific example is Wal-Mart. Several potential clients communicated that Wal-Mart had mandated sustainability goals, and they were looking for a system to help them achieve and report their reduction goals.
How is JouleX Energy Manager able to address those concerns?
- JEM is able to address those concerns by:
What advice would you give to any corporation facing these same issues?
- MONITOR. You can’t control or understand what you can’t see. You can’t get a full view of your energy usage just by looking at your company’s power bill. Put a reporting and management system into place to help you get the full picture of what you’re using and what you’re wasting, and take your actions from a position of knowledge.
Now that JouleX has made a big splash at Interop, what do you see on the horizon for Team JouleX?
- In most companies, energy is the last resource that isn’t being managed. I believe we’re going to see a trend, as energy prices rise and availability is scarce, that systems like JouleX will be a required component of business infrastructure in the future.

"The Sustainability Imperative" - Harvard Business Review

Ida Davidson — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:33:00 GMT

In an article titled The Sustainability Imperative, found in the May 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, authors, David A. Lubin and Daniel C. Esty, discuss the emerging megatrend that is the Sustainability Movement.

Lubin and Esty make the point that corporations are “flailing around, launching a hodgepodge of initiatives without any overarching vision or plan” because executives believe there is not yet a clear roadmap for these initiatives. Lubin and Esty go on to point out that there IS a roadmap to implementing sustainability initiatives, by following the well-traveled steps of implementation measures from past megatrends. The sustainability movement itself is emerging, but adoption of new technologies and best practices is not.

According to the article:

"Soon companies will have a clear sense of what it means to manage sustainability as a business megatrend. Best practices will emerge, and sustainability scorecards will allow companies to track cost and risk reduction as well as evaluate value-creation activities. As environmental data become richer and more accurate, companies will be able to chart their impacts in financial terms—making it easier for market analysts to identify the firms positioned to deliver an eco-premium. In this new world, the sustainability strategy imperative will be systematized and integrated into the day-to-day practices of firms of all sizes in all industries. Like the IT and quality megatrends, sustainability will touch every function, every business line, every employee. On the way to this future, firms with a clear vision and the execution capabilities to navigate the megatrend will come out ahead. Those that don’t will be left by the wayside."

Since energy is the single-largest operating expense in a typical business that remains unmanaged, JouleX is at the ready to help forward thinking enterprises lead the charge into Sustainability Best Practices surrounding energy consumption. Get visibility and control of that operating expense by implementing the JouleX Energy Management System.

Team JouleX Converges Upon Interop in Las Vegas

Ida Davidson — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:26:00 GMT

Team JouleX arrives in Las Vegas for Interop today. We're really excited about connecting with members of the press, partners and prospective customers! We're also looking forward to spending time on the show floor, learning about the newest innovations that will impact Green IT strategies. Check back here for updates on what is new and hot in the IT world.

Are you attending Interop this week? Join team JouleX at our Launch Party on Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at the JouleX Suite in the Mandalay Bay Hotel from 4:30pm - 7:30pm. ~~RSVP here now before tickets are gone.~~ Thanks to everyone who came! We had a FABULOUS launch.

We Are JouleX

Glenn Gaudet — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:11:00 GMT

After running in quiet mode since September of 2009, we have come out to the world with a new name and a new CEO. Today, Greenology officially became JouleX and we have brought on board Tom Noonan as our President & CEO. It is hard to not get excited when Tom talks about our future in the industry so let's let him tell you himself:

Below is the full transcript from this video:

Hi. I’m Tom Noonan, President and CEO of JouleX, an exciting new startup company based here in Atlanta and we’re leading the way in sustainability energy management systems for the enterprise.

Since leaving Internet Security Systems about a year and a half ago, life has been very exciting. As many of you know, we started Tech Operators, a venture firm focused with a different model; on investing in young and early stage companies here in Atlanta, but playing a more manifest operating role in the company.

The energy industry, at over 6 Trillion dollars annually, is ripe for innovation. In fact, Clean Tech could be the single biggest economic opportunity in the 21^st Century. Through Tech Operators, we’ve had the opportunity to evaluate thousands of interesting early stage companies, and JouleX really represents all of the things we’re looking for in a company:

A very large market - Energy today is a $6 Trillion market
Green Technology - corporations are looking for ways to be more sustainable, to reduce their energy costs, to meet tighter regulatory standards
And most importantly Innovation

And JouleX is pioneering the way with an advanced system that monitors, analyzes, and manages all interconnected devices across the network to reduce the power consumption as much as 60% within our IT enterprises.

Energy Management is a very competitive and fragmented industry, and it’s really at its earliest stages. Looking at the Green IT industry, there are solutions that are first and second generation for power management, but JouleX truly represents a third generation energy efficiency management solution. The opportunity to monitor, analyze, and manage the consumption of power across the IT environment, throughout the datacenter, and across the building, lighting, and HVAC management systems is an exciting new opportunity for corporations to have an enterprise view of their IT energy consumption.

It’s clear that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and JouleX is pioneering the way toward managing energy consumption across the enterprise wide IT Environment.

Clearly large corporations are a target market for us, and within those corporations the executive all are chartered with corporate sustainability, with reducing costs, and with operating their environments more efficiently. So today, CIOs, CFOs, Corporate Sustainability Officers, as well as the Network and IT managers are all very excited about JouleX technology. We provide the opportunity not only to reduce energy consumption dramatically, but we provide cost savings, reduction of carbon footprint, and reduction of greenhouse gasses which is all good from a social responsibility perspective, and most importantly impacts the shareholder on the bottom line through energy savings.

30% to 40% of building energy costs are consumed by the IT environment. If you think about it, today there are over a billion PCs and many billion internetworked devices (switches, routers, printers, copiers, etc.) this number is growing dramatically. So energy consumption is a large component of the cost of most business enterprises. We believe that with JouleX we can save 40% to 60% of the corporations’ energy consumption that is consumed by the IT environment, through the innovative application of our JouleX Energy Manager.

This stuff is exciting. This is big. It’s a hundred times bigger than security. It’s got a bigger impact on our children, on our environment, and most importantly there’s a hard ROI of every customer we serve.

What's Sustainable About a Light Bulb?

Ida Davidson — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:20:00 GMT

When the sustainability conversation turns to energy consumption, light bulbs will inevitably make an appearance. Why? Because it’s an easy change to implement and results are immediate.

The calculations in the chart below are based on a 12 hour day and $.09 per kwh of energy*. This is a typical load for most enterprises.

Bulb	Lifespan	Average Cost per bulb	Cost to power per standard work year	Total Cost Per Year
Incandescent (60 Watt)	Up to 1000 hours (or 0.32 work years)	$ 0.50	$ 17.04	$ 18.60
CFL (18 Watt)	Up to 6,000 hours (or 1.92 work years)	$ 2.50	$ 5.16	$ 6.64
LED (8 Watt)	Up to 36,000 hours (or 11.54 work years)	$ 40.00	$ 2.25	$ 5.71

In the corporate facility, it is possible to reduce your energy consumption by thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands of kwh just by replacing your burned out incandescent bulbs with CFL or LED bulbs. Assume that you are considering a change in light bulbs for an office building with 100 offices. In this building, there are:

100 offices = 100 bulbs
Hallways = 20 bulbs
Restrooms = 8 bulbs
Break areas = 6 bulbs

Using the chart above, over the course of 11 years (the approximate life span of an LED light bulb), total energy consumption would break down like this:

Incandescent Bulbs (60 Watt) – $27, 416 (304,622 kwh)
CFL Bulbs (18 Watt) – $9,787 (108,744 kwh)
LED Bulbs (8 Watt) – $8,416 (93,511 kwh)

In the world of corporate sustainability, even something as small as a light bulb can have a huge impact on your overall business.

*This does not include disposal costs or maintenance hours dedicated to replacing bulbs.

Welcome to the JouleX Green IT Blog

Player Pate — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:48:00 GMT

As always, the JouleX mission is to help large, commercial enterprises and government agencies to reduce their energy costs associated with idle and non-productive network-connected devices and systems while decreasing carbon emissions.

Through this blog, we will discuss current and upcoming technology, methods, and challenges in developing and implementing sustainability strategies for the enterprise.

What is Sustainability?

According to the EPA

“The traditional definition of sustainability calls for policies and strategies that meet society’s present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs… From a business perspective, the goal of sustainability is to increase long-term shareholder and social value, while decreasing industry’s use of materials and reducing negative impacts on the environment.“

Why Is Sustainability Important To Your Enterprise?

Reducing your energy usage through sustainability measures benefit your enterprise in several key areas: Lower energy costs, Regulatory compliance, Shareholder returns, Environmental responsibility, and Customer loyalty are only a few.

Feel free to access all of our articles by clicking any of the Tags to the right, or selecting one of our Most Popular Posts. To receive real time updates, simply provide your email address in the subscription field.