With all the interest today about “green” data center initiatives, I’ve been curious if any of our large enterprise customers were actually taking any action in support of these initiatives or if all this “green” talk is just fodder for causes like “Save the Planet” which seldom make their way into real financial justifications for IT purchases. What I found when I starting asking questions to our customers at one of our recent user meetings, staggered me. I found this story so compelling I feel a need to share it since it may be that other customers are overlooking the impact of “green” and how it can turn to “gold” collateral in pursuit of modernization of email infrastructure.
The major enterprise customer I spoke to was able to upgrade their email backbone from software licenses on old Sun Solaris hardware to Sentrion appliances based entirely upon “green” savings. The analysis they shared with me is by moving to Sentrion MP appliances, the cost justification metrics were astounding in “green” savings alone. The customer quoted power consumption savings of 59%, lower heat dissipation by 56%, and rack space reduction by 60%! The customer did not share the exact resulting dollar savings with me, but it is clear the savings were significant enough to pay for multiple Sentrions and services over a three year period! And they confirmed that no other budget justification was needed once the analysis was done and shared with executive management.
In addition to the obvious post-consolidation “green” data center benefits, the messaging team was able to gain the desired performance efficiencies, ease of management, and added capacity to handle their increasing email volumes for the next three years! That’s what I call turning “Green” into “Gold.” As a result, we’ve been training our field sales teams how to help other customers calculate the same potential savings from modernization to a Sentrion MP infrastructure. I’m interested to learn about other success stories in this area.