Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Vigyanlabs Promises 30 Percent to 40 Percent Reduction in Datacenter Power Consumption 

Indian startup is dedicated to “clean and green IT solutions” for computer industry …

Vigyan means “science” in Sanskrit. The founders of Vigyanlabs see their mission as leveraging science and technology innovations “for the benefit of all living beings without compromising on mother nature.”

That's a lofty environmental goal for a company founded by a couple of patent-holding technologists who came from the HPC industry. This isn't a company that looks to become “green” by reducing datacenter energy consumption in order to save money—which is an admiral business goal. Not that Vigyanlabs ignores the cost issue, but the founders' values include “Respect for Nature and Life,” “Integrity and Honesty,” and “Social Responsibility.”

This is starting to sound like Google. 

The company offers consulting services and products such as IPMPlus, an intelligent power management suite with versions geared at everything from mobile and tablet computers to datacenter and cloud providers. The enterprise version of the software software includes a dashboard to show machine states and power consumption data, UPS and PDU energy management techniques, application sensors, and a program that schedules power policies based on the workload patterns. The company's “Application Sensor” technology, for example, can reduce the power state of servers or selectively shut down components, as well as identify utilization of server capacity.

CEO Srinivas Varadarajan spoke with InformationWeek in a Q&A to discuss his company,  its values ad its approach to saving energy. He said that from the beginning the co-founders wanted to build green IT solutions. “We felt that energy was being wasted unnecessarily,” he said. His laptop battery got hot and lost its charge quickly. A patent search found nothing that promised to save power across the IT infrastructure “in a holistic way.”  They decided the design for their first PC product was applicable across a wide range of equipment and filed a U.S. patent in January 2010.

Big problem areas for datacenters include: servers and network equipment that need better power management and capacity utilization; UPS systems, generators and batteries that are not managed efficiently and are over-provisioned; and AC power systems that are poorly designed.

He says that traditional power management techniques in datacenters fail to integrate the IT and electrical planning systems. “The IT and non-IT parts are separate silos,” he notes. He describes the usual approach as: “Procure energy efficient devices, use a BMS (building management system) for non-IT components, an EMS system for the IT components, focus on air conditioning and hot/cold aisle, etc.”

Vigyanlabs, he says, analyzes power usage all the way from the electrical source to the server and the applications that use them, and optimize all of them together.

While many customers are in India, he complains that “there are not enough regulatory pressures to go green” in that country  Other countries are more forward-looking. “We are finding German and French customers more willing to adopt our product without looking at direct power savings alone as they look at the ripple effects of power saving on the economy and environment as well.”

He did not mention attitudes from U.S. customers.

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