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Doing It Cheaper With Technology

By: John K. Waters

1/1/2009

Saving on Energy

With winter approaching, administrators are keeping a weather eye on the utility meter. Consequently, one technology solution that's gaining traction among that group, says Kaestner, is computerized building energy-management solutions.

School Dude's PMDirect, is a good example of this type of application. It's a web-based "preventive maintenance" scheduling system designed to generate recurring maintenance schedules on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual, or equipment-usage basis. It provides wizards to allow schools to create their own schedule templates and tracks equipment information and history. It automatically assigns a work-order code to a technician, project, budget code and/or craft. And it provides access to this information from a web-page dashboard-- all of which provides enormous cost efficiencies to districts.

But one technology is doing more to save energy costs than just about anything else out there, and K-12 districts are beginning to take notice. Unless you've been in a coma for the last few years, you've probably heard of virtualization. Since VMware reinvented this old-school, big-iron tech for modern computing environments about eight years ago, it has become the gotta-have-it tech for organizations that need to reduce the number of servers they have to run and maintain-- and that's just about everybody.

Virtualization is now being implemented in a number of areas, and its cost savings continue to drive its adoption. K-12 districts are just beginning to notice. Dell is among the few vendors targeting virtualization services to the K-12 market.

Server consolidation is definitely the sweet spot in this market. By reducing the numbers and types of servers that support their applications, districts can save a bundle on power consumption, both from the servers themselves and the facilities' cooling systems. Plus the fuller use of existing, underutilized computing resources translates into a longer life for the data center and a fatter bottom line.

"Virtualization is one of those technologies that come along and change everything," Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chairman Hector de J. Ruiz recently observed. "It addresses energy efficiency and affordable internet access, and it shifts control from IT vendors to IT customers."


John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Palo Alto, CA.