June 10th, 2009
Want to get more efficient? Tideway helps you figure out where to start.
Last week, one of the senior Cisco Systems executives in charge of the company’s vast partner network made much out of how much Cisco equipment installed out at existing customer sites (up to $9 billion worth) would reach end of life during its next fiscal year.
Clearly, its intention was to highlight a great upgrade opportunity for companies selling Cisco gear. But from the customer’s point of view, end-of-life technology has whole different ramifications: from maintenance problems, to incompatibilities with new applications and hardware, and even security issues.
It can also be a drain on data center efficiency, which plays into Green IT projects. “What our clients are really talking about is getting as the maximum power they can out of their infrastructure, while understanding where they might need to add and support new applications,” says Adam Kerrison, CTO of Tideway.
The big question is: Can we avoid spending this money?
Tideway sells a product called Foundation that helps companies answer that question, by peeking into data centers and presenting IT managers with an aggregate list of critical hardware reference information and software end-of-life data. The latest version of the application, Tideway Foundation 7.2, also lets businesses collect power consumption statistics for specific business applications and calculate the carbon footprint associated with certain servers. In essence, you could figure out the specific environmental impact of each life-of-business application. You can take that information and use it to recalibrate how cooling and power management are applied to that specific section of your data center options.
The Tideway Foundation application pulls the reference data from what it calls the Tideway Knowledge Update Service. Incidentally, just in case you’re wondering which products will reach their end of life in the June/July time period, Tideway keeps a pretty neat running blog of this information on its Web site. Here’s the latest entry.
You can download a “community edition” of the Tideway software to try it out at this URL.
Tideway (the company) has some pretty good credentials to its credit. It boasts clients including Avis and TransUnion, and it was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2009. The company was one of only 15 IT companies in the world selected for the recognition.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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