Blade.org, the industry group driving innovation in blade-based solutions, today announced at the Next Generation Data Center conference increased traction in energy-efficient blade solutions that address the growing concern of rising energy costs across the industry. Additionally, Blade.org’s Power & Cooling Committee is announcing an energy webinar series focused on helping clients understand how to apply blade-based solutions to boost performance while decreasing energy consumption and costs.

“We’ve seen tremendous interest in blades as corporations increasingly face a need to improve their computing capabilities per watt consumed,” said John Tuccillo, chairman of Blade.org's Power & Cooling Committee, and vice president of industry alliances at APC-MGE. “Blades offer tremendous advantages as available power and energy costs become increasing challenges worldwide. Blade.org member collaboration has resulted in the development of a host of new solutions that can help improve data center energy efficiency. Our newly announced energy webinar series will continue to address this trend by providing clients with insight into the latest blade strategies to maximize energy and cost savings.”

The Blade.org energy webinars will take place this fall and will provide attendees with insights into a variety of topics, including power and cooling strategies, virtualization and how to maximize energy efficiency within data centers.

Blade.org members have brought over 100 blade solutions to market since its formation in February 2006. The latest efficiency-focused solutions from Blade.org members’ include:

• NetEffect has announced a new 10GB Ethernet Mezzanine Card, the NE020BCH, that delivers high throughput and low latency with the lowest energy usage of any 10GB Ethernet adapter available.
• APC and IBM have partnered to create an energy-efficient green data center for Bryant University to offer a cost-saving solution using the latest blade technology. Bryant implemented the IBM Scalable Modular Data Center in order to meet the requirements of the school’s growing enrollment while simultaneously being energy conscious by implementing a "green data center." The IBM Scalable Modular Data Center is a cost saving, energy efficient solution that was rapidly deployed as a pre-engineered data center, using IBM Global Services' capabilities, coupled with APC's InfraStruXure® data center architecture. The joint solution enabled the university to reduce their server count from 75 to 40, and helps save them 30 to 40 percent in overhead expenditures for data occupancy, power and cooling.
• Mellanox has introduced their ConnectX™ IB and EN Dual-Port 10 and 20Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter chips and cards, which optimize data center productivity and performance while reducing data center infrastructure power.
• Double-Take Software helped Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt LPP by providing solid disaster recovery software that enables companies to successfully migrate servers to a virtual environment. The result translated into decreased energy usage, reduced costs and frees up much needed physical space.
• Eaton's Powerware BladeUPS is a three-phase uninterruptible power system (UPS) designed and optimized for today’s high-density data centers. The Powerware BladeUPS delivers energy efficiency, scalability and flexibility and by using the UPS over a five-year period, more than $30,000 may be realized in utility bill savings for a typical 60 kilowatt data center that pays 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.

“Blade.org members are helping to drive innovation in the blade market by working aggressively to integrate their latest technologies and products within various blade vendor’s chassis,” said Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics. “Blade makers use their enclosures to innovate in areas including power consumption and cooling, and third-party hardware makers leverage blades to reduce entire system design costs. These activities ultimately lead to innovative, collaborative designs coming to market more quickly.”

Blade.org will be exhibiting at the Next Generation Data Center show, August 6–9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.

To register for the upcoming energy webinar series, please visit www.blade.org for more information.