State of California Green IT Policy To Deliver $40M in Savings

If there is one common trend over the last couple of years it’s automation.

For example “Give me intelligence from my asset data without hundreds of hours of crunching” and “Give me more out of the box functionality” are common requests in the 2010 tools census.

The ability to build pretty drag and drop pivots on data streams on their own do not cut it. Users want automation, rapid time to value and real insights based on discovery. BDNA appear to have delivered this in spades with their State of California win.

“Executive Order S-20-04, signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, established the State of California’s priority for energy and resource-efficient, high-performance buildings. The goal of the order was to support California’s power conservation initiatives and reduce overall energy usage. One obvious candidate for conservation was the State’s vast, power-hungry IT infrastructure, which included some 225,000 PCs, 9,500 servers, and more than 100 email systems. The State of California expect to save over $40 million and reduce carbon emissions by 200,000 tons per year based on analyzing data provided by BDNA.” Amit Golan, BDNA

Amit Golan, BDNA

One way in which the State of California is able to forecast such savings is via hardware refresh. Agent-less discovery data is normalised and then combined with market data such as device age, expiry dates and power to facilitate informed choices regarding power consumption. With a quarter of a million PC’s to manage small tweaks make big dollar savings.

This form of IT Asset Analysis is central to BDNA’s “IT Genome Strategy” which in essence says that by understanding more about IT environments organisations can eliminate waste. Software license compliance, virtualisation, data centre consolidation and Green IT projects are said to be enhanced by this encyclopaedia of IT Asset data which they have named their ‘Technopedia’.

One chink in this otherwise impressive armour is the absence of long term software usage (Where it is argued the most software savings can be made over the longer term). However BDNA also offer a ‘Normalise’ offering which takes feeds from other data sources such as SCCM or other Enterprise tools which might be able to provide usage. See also Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager SAM Add-Ons.

Visit TheITGenome.com to find out more.