Having all physical hosts utilized at only at 30% – 50% is a very common scenario in the data center. The vast majority of hosts are hence operating with low efficiency, because energy consumption of a fully utilized host is quite similar to that of the same host in idle condition, and the data center is likely to have too many physical servers for the applied workload, wastefully consuming capital and data center capacity.
Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation is able to consolidate any number of virtual machines onto the minimum number of physical server hosts, hence delivering autonomic Host Thin Provisioning™, provisioning only the number of physical servers and cores that applications need. Host Thin Provisioning™ works by switching on and off physical cores as workload varies in real-time.

Based on its sophisticated, totally scalable and carrier­class core engine providing real­time monitoring and analytics on multi­dimensional utilization of critical data center resources, Eco4Cloud automates the trigger of intelligent actions which result in best utilization of available capacity as well as right sizing of the compute farm avoiding over-provisioning of hardware, power and data centre capacity at a stroke.

IT is a major cost item for any Company, and data center within IT takes the lion’s share. By maximizing the utilization of active servers and RAM in the data center CapEx gets immediately reduced, and OpEx –in terms of direct energy saving– as well. Furthermore, by having less energy consumed power, cooling and sizing gets reduced as well, contributing to indirect additional reductions of OpEx and CapEx respectively.

Under the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air Act, any source emitting more than 250 tons of a pollutant would be forced to follow certain regulations and potentially be exposed to significant financial penalties and Carbon dioxide production is one aspect of data center operations impacted by recent and pending legislation. EPA2007, E-Server2007, ISO14000, EMAS, EnergyStar, CEEDA, EU CoC are a few examples of green certifications which help Companies go in the right direction.
E4C helps dramatically reduce the power consumed in a virtualized data center environment and stay compliant.

Thanks to the insights and monitoring analytics provided by Eco4Cloud, CxO’s (primarily CFO’s and CIO’s) can improve the accuracy of their budget planning, for both CapEx and OpEx as Capacity Management gets dramatically refined and takes advantage of intelligent scenario analysis provided by Eco4Cloud.

The data center is nowadays the crucial place in a Company where all business applications rus. Eco4Cloud provides comprehensive, intelligent and automated alerts to potentially dangerous conditions in the virtualized servers helping preventing undesired risks. Not only Eco4Cloud automates the inventory of potentially harmful configurations, but a severity ranking is also provided so that valuable DC Ops resources can focus on what’s most relevant for actual risk mitigation.

Nowadays IT is responsible for approx 3% of the whole energy consumption of the planet. Furthermore, the increasing use of powerful IT services in all public and private service sectors is leading to a growing energy demand for centralized IT equipment in data centers. Business-as-usual would lead to a doubling of energy consumption within a few years thereby also significantly increasing not only the energy costs in data centers but also the environmental impact and CO2 emissions. E4C helps dramatically reduce the power consumed in a virtualized data center environment and position your Company with a strong Green/Environmental-savvy reputation.

A three years analysis of a standard eco4cloud deployment shows an impressing ROI of 111%, and a payback time of 7.1 months in typical scenarios. The analysis is based on a mid-size data center, as per Gartner categorization (Forecast Analysis: Data Centers, Worldwide, 2010-2016). The example data center hosts 300 physical hosts, with a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.6.

E4C is a spin-off from the University of Calabria and ICAR-CNR, the internationally renowned excellence center on high-performance computing and networking, and Italy’s most relevant research center on Cloud and Grid Computing. Leading edge scientific research is at the basis of Eco4Cloud’s solutions, as several international innovation awards demonstrate.