News

posted on 04 August 2008 08:33

Money back offer: get paid cash by PG&E if you buy Conserve IT-qualified storage operated with PG&E power.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), a California energy-supply company, will give customers rebates if they buy more energy-efficient IT kit, including storage gear.

Storage kit has to be rated and blessed by PG&E to qualify customers who buy it for rebates,

Conserve IT is a new Wikibon service designed to obtain the qualification of IT products from utility companies such as PG&E. It will enable IT vendors to secure rebate incentives for end customers.

Wikibon  is a web 2.0-style project, a 'community of practitioners, consultants, and researchers dedicated to improving the adoption of technology and business systems through an open source sharing of free advisory knowledge.' It has a storage portal and Conserve IT is a Wikibon storage project.

The Wikibon storage community felt that it could help to dramatically increase the participation of storage technologies which are major consumers of power and cooling in data centers. PG&E responded to Wikibon by allocating resources to help qualify additional storage technologies and providing guidance to the storage industry at large.

Conserve IT should:

- Significantly speed the time-to-qualification,

- Provide independent validation of energy savings,

- Result in cash incentives for customers, and

- Enable the sharing of techniques for reducing energy consumption in data centers through best practices awareness-raising.

Seven storage suppliers have signed on for Wikibon’s Conserve IT and have achieved or are actively seeking qualification of their technologies with PG&E and other utilities. They are:

- 3PAR,
- Compellent,
- DataDirect Networks,
- EMC,
- Hitachi Data Systems,
- Nexsan,
- Xiotech.

David Vellante, Co-founder and Principal Contributor at Wikibon, said: “These seven leading companies recognize that creating energy saving technology is a starting point and helping customers realize the benefits of applying green technologies is the next step. This partnership between the utilities and IT industries will accelerate the adoption of green technologies and this program will help customers and vendors directly connect green products to business value.”

Craig Nunes, 3PAR's Marketing VP, said: “Wikibon was able to secure qualification from PG&E for our InServ line of utility storage arrays within sixty days. Wikibon’s knowledge of the PG&E process combined with a terrific understanding of storage virtualization dramatically accelerated our qualification and reduced the workload on our internal team. We’re enthusiastic about the partnership with Wikibon in the future to secure incentives for customers both inside and outside of California.”

Dick Sullivan, Enterprise Marketing Director at EMC, said: "EMC is delighted to collaborate with Wikibon to effectively enable its customers to receive incentives from utilities for implementing energy efficient products and processes.”

PG&E incentives are based on the amount of energy savings achieved by datacenters through the installation of energy-efficient storage technologies such as MAID, virtualization and thin provisioning. In addition, Wikibon and its technology clients are seeking qualification of tiered storage management, high density storage arrays, flash drives, intelligent spindown, data de-duplication and other innovations.

To qualify for these financial incentives, Northern and Central California PG&E customers must apply for and be accepted into the incentive program prior to deploying new storage technologies.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}