In the words of many debut technology programs: Hello world.

This is the first of many blog posts that I will be writing here on IT galaxy in the coming months. My name is Darren Waters, and I run a communications firm called Monument PR.

My colleague Marc Ambasna-Jones and I have been invited by Intel to write blog posts, generate discussion, and generally help you, the community, get the best out of IT Galaxy.

We will be writing about what we hope is of interest to you – everything from the very latest in processor developments, to servers, data centres, green developments, and the sometimes nebulous world of cloud computing.

This is your site, so if at anytime you feel we are off-topic, or not relevant, let us know and we’ll do better. You can e-mail us at intel@monumentpr.com.

My background in technology is long – most recently I was the technology editor at the BBC News website, but I have been tinkering with tech since 1980 when I got my first computer, a Sinclair ZX80. I’ve been blogging for many years, set up the BBC Technology blog, dot.life, and have been writing and broadcasting about technology for about a decade.

Our goal is to generate debate, provoke discussion and keep people informed.

We’ll be writing blog posts based on breaking news, key industry trends and pointing you to some of the most relevant technology journalism from around the web. I spotted this today: a great piece about how Last.FM is using Intel SSDs to deliver streaming music to demanding Xbox Live users.

Marc and I will also be recording podcasts and video interviews with a host of tech luminaries. We’ll publish a list of planned interviews in the coming weeks; if there’s anyone you want to see on that list, let us know.

We’re also going to be pushing IT Galaxy beyond these walls – to Twitter. We’ll be using Twitter to be a little more real-time, a bit more responsive and hopefully direct people to the best new content on IT Galaxy.

We'll be starting in earnest in the New Year, with the first posts and podcasts, plus kickstarting the Twitter feed.

That’s it for introductions. We’re looking forward to developing conversations with you on IT Galaxy from January 2010.

With the imminent arrival of the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment ( CRC ) Energy Efficiency Scheme legislation its time to start giving serious thought as to how the energy consumption ( and hence CO2 emissions ) of your business can be reduced.

Although the CRC looks at the total business carbon emissions  and requires taking a holistic view of the business to assess areas where improvements/reductions can be made there are some immediate areas that companies with a large IT infrastructure can look at to get energy savings - and corresponding reductions in OPEX costs.

The CRC affects companies that have greater than 6GWh/year energy consumption, this may sound like a lot of power but a few quick calculations reveals that a data centre with 1000 4 year-old dual processor servers may be consuming over 6GWh/year

Average server power of  350W x 1000 servers x 24 hours x 365 days  = ~3GWh/year

Many older data centres have a PUE value greater than 2 which means that less than 50% of the inbound power is actually used by the IT equipment, the rest is  used by air handling and cooling equipment, so our 3GWh server power consumption now becomes over 6GWh per year.

If you want to explore further  the Xeon ROI calculator on www.intel.com can help you assess your own particular data centre environment and determine options for lower power consumption and the costs involved.

So, just owning and operating a medium sized data centre can put a business over the CRC limits without taking into account any other areas of power consumption. It becomes clear therefore that IT need to look at their installed base of data centres and assess how they can reduce their overall power consumption,

One way to do this is to look at what is currently installed and determine what the impact is of replacing the legacy installed base of servers with latest generation hardware. This can have many benefits -

• New servers can handle significantly more work load than legacy systems - typically current generation Xeon 5500 based DP server has the same performance as nine 4 year old DP servers, so just replacing the legacy installed base could result in ~90% reduction in server count and power consumption.
• Another benefit of upgrading the installed server base is that its possible to support more workload within the existing data centre infrastructure, this combined with the fact that the latest generations of servers have hardware support optimised for use with the latest virtualisation software can enable a reduction in installed server count whilst still delivering more compute capacity to the business.
• Other factors to consider here are that new servers have many more power management features and optimisations than were implemented in older generations of servers , this can also help in lower the it equipment power consumption within a data centre.

As part of any assessment of data centre energy consumption its also important to look at the facilities side if the data centre as well and to evaluate the latest recommendations on DC design in terms of air handling and cooling so as to maximise the reductions in DC power consumption.

Even if you aren't impacted by the CRC legislation at this time its still worth looking at the saving that can be made by refreshing your data centre installed base as lowering OPEX costs is always a good thing to do.

The conclusion here should be that upgrading servers is a key element in enabling IT to meeting CRC targets and should not be considered mutually exclusive. In fact it can deliver many positive benefits beyond just lowering energy consumption - including a reduction in OpEx costs, increasing capacity of existing data centre facilities ( enabling deferring of new Data Centre builds ), creating a more responsive IT infrastructure to name just a few benefits.