TSO Logic™ has announced the official launch of its award-winning energy efficiency software designed exclusively to help data centers control their energy costs.

Already managing more than 2,200 enterprise servers, the software has helped pre-release customers save more than 50% on server power costs, leading to a significant reduction of their environmental footprints.

The closely integrated, non-invasive product suite-TSO Metrics™ and TSO Power Control™ has no negative impact on server performance and requires no significant changes to data center infrastructure, according to the company.

"Most data centers leave all of their servers on all the time, regardless of the actual demand. That's like leaving your car running all day just in case you have to drive somewhere," said Aaron Rallo, CEO and founder of TSO Logic.

"I started TSO Logic after first-hand experience running businesses that relied on large-scale server farms. Server demand would go up and down, but our huge power bill was always the same. The lack of data, insights and viable solutions was frustrating and I realized there had to be a better way to manage energy costs," said Rallo.

TSO Logic's software uses application-level inspection to determine exactly how much of a data center's power draw is going toward revenue-generating activities versus idle servers. This insight allows customers to save electricity without sacrificing performance-automatically controlling the power state of servers based on application demand. TSO Logic's unique approach is called "Application-Aware Power Management™".

"Many data centers have highly variable workloads. To prepare for spikes in demand, operators tend to run their servers at full power, even when the machine is not doing anything useful," said Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst of Datacenter Technologies, 451 Research. "Controlling server power states is an obvious way to curb the substantial energy demands of modern data centers. TSO Logic takes a nuanced approach to server power management; it can enable operators to tightly monitor and then control server power consumption according to business demand."

The company's two software toolsets are deployed together in one install, typically on a single dedicated server. TSO Metrics delivers visibility into application workload, performance, wasted energy and untapped cost savings. TSO Power Control then uses the data generated by TSO Metrics to control power to the servers while also ensuring the application workload is comfortably supported.

Using an easy-to-read dashboard, all relevant data is displayed on a single screen. This provides customers with a finely tuned interface for controlling which servers are monitored, what days and times those servers are managed and how aggressively they want to save energy.

TSO Logic has already been awarded the respected Green Enterprise IT Award from Uptime Institute for a pre-release deployment of their solution with the prominent Toronto-based digital media studio Arc Productions Ltd. The TSO Logic product suite identified potential server energy savings of 56 percent at the studio's data center, which houses more than 600 servers. Now Arc Productions is using TSO Power Control to realize those savings.

"TSO Logic has made the whole process very straightforward, with no disruption, no physical infrastructure changes and no impact on the way we conduct our business," said Terry Dale, VP of Infrastructure with Arc Productions Ltd. "We continue to find new ways to leverage the insights that the TSO Logic software is providing and that were previously unknown to us."

More about energy waste at data centers:

• The majority of data centers experience what is known as variable load, which simply means that the demand on servers varies from hour to hour. However, to stay prepared for periodic surges-called "peak demand" or "peak load"-most data centers keep running at full capacity all of the time. This means that much of the energy consumed is wasted on idle servers.
• A two-part New York Times series ("The Cloud Factories," September 22, 2012) investigated energy waste at data centers. At the request of The New York Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that, on average, data centers were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations.
• Worldwide, digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The New York Times.
• An August 1, 2011, report by Analytics Press, "Growth in Data Center Electricity Use 2005 to 2010," said data centers in 2010 used about 1.3 percent of all electricity used in the world.
• According to a 2012 report from Pike Research, "Green Data Centers," the worldwide market for green data centers will grow from $17.1 billion in 2012 to $45.4 billion by 2016.