After spending 15 years managing data centres for online retailers, Aaron Rallo’s attention slowly began fixating on large monthly power bills that hit the office as computers and servers chugged day and night.
But the former president of PNI Digital Media admits he didn’t know much about power expenses. Those bills were invoiced and he didn’t really question them until he noticed energy costs rising three years ago.
“It was getting really close to being 33% of my total data centre expenses,” he recalled.
“And what I realized [was that] if I could find a way to save a little bit of that money, we could put it into the bottom line.”
When he left PNI Digital in 2012 to found TSO Logic just a few floors up in the same building near Vancouver’s Chinatown, he was intent on developing software to help other managers cut costs as energy rates went up.
“I realized that if I could start to see my power usage based on all the different things that I do, applications that I host and run inside of my data centres, then I can make smarter decisions and try to drive down [costs],” Rallo said, adding he essentially sought to create a tool that did not exist previously.
So TSO Logic’s 18-person team got to work developing a dashboard that spells out exactly how much power is being used for different business applications. Just as importantly, the software features an automation engine that reduces power usage when data centres slow down during non-peak times.
“Data centres tend to be built to support your busiest periods of time,” Rallo said.
“And in our case it was a really busy two-hour window just before Christmas, yet I kept that equipment spinning 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”
He was forced to ask himself: “Why am I paying the same power bill at Christmas, when I’m really, really busy generating a lot of revenue, as I am in March, when I’m less busy?”
While major data centres use various techniques to cut down on power usage, those approaches generally start at the bottom by looking for efficiencies in the electrical and chiller infrastructure.
The dashboard sidesteps the traditional method by giving C-level executives and operations personnel access to data that can be interpreted easily. From there, they’re able to work their way down to the actual power draw.
TSO has been able to demonstrate 50 to 60% reductions in power costs using this software.
Arc Productions, an animation and effects house based out of Toronto, has saved $120,000 annually on its 500-server farm.
Rallo said momentum is building in the market for TSO’s products and the company is in the process of installing software for its first local client, the University of British Columbia (UBC), where a 5,000-square-foot data centre hosts 4,000 servers.
“While the enterprise services we provide to the UBC community must be reliable, scalable and secure, we are willing to look at leading-edge solutions,” Mario Angers, UBC’s information technology systems manager, said in an email.
He added the software has been intuitive and easy to use and he doesn’t expect any major barriers as it’s implemented.
“TSO has a solution that will give us abilities that we haven’t found elsewhere in the market in terms of sustainable IT.”
