ColdWatt Pushes Power Savings

Energy conversion startup ColdWatt unveiled its first products today, which it claims will ease IT's power problems. (See ColdWatt Reduces Consumption.)

The vendor took the wraps off two digitally controlled AC/DC power conversion appliances, which it is touting as a way for firms to control their spiraling energy costs. Electricity prices have shot up over recent years and data centers are increasingly packed with high-density, power-hungry storage kit. (See Power Problems Plague Users and 365 Main.)

Such is the financial impact of this that Google reportedly located its main data center on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon to tap into abundant (and presumably cheaper) hydro-electric power. (See Google, Google Groans Under Data Strain, and Tracking Google's IT Booty.)

Cue ColdWatt. The Austin, Texas-based firm today launched its power conversion offerings as part of an effort to cut server and storage energy costs. These include a 650W and a 1200W product which use digital technology to control the flow of power to a data center device. The devices, which fit onto the motherboard of a 1U-high server are priced, respectively, at $143 and $265.

ColdWatt's director of marketing, Lakshmi Mandyam, told Byte & Switch that other products for converting power from AC to DC typically rely on analog technology. The exec explains that ColdWatt, which competes with the likes of Emerson Network Power and Delta Electronics, instead uses digital technology to control power conversion.Tighter control of power conversion brings costs savings, according to the exec. "Because the control is so precise and finely tuned we use less power," she adds. The startup has also tweaked the magnetic elements within the transformers at the core of its products, although Mandyam refused to reveal exactly what this involves.

Overall, ColdWatt claims that its offerings generate 45 percent less heat than other conversion products, which means 30 percent less energy spent on cooling.

At least one analyst thinks that it is about time someone focused their attention on power converters. "It's a very significant issue, and one that has been really ignored to date," says Jerald Murphy, research director at the Robert Frances Group. "People have been mainly focused on the CPUs and the power that they eat up," he says, adding that they've been optimizing for cost, not energy consumption.

ColdWatt's Mandyam told Byte & Switch that the startup has already clinched 15 OEM deals for its offerings with storage, server, and networking vendors, although only two of these, Intel and Open Source Systems, have been made public.

The vendor has also racked up some OEM deals with clustered storage vendors, although Mandyam refused to name names. Although the firm has only just emerged from stealth, the exec says that ColdWatt has been shipping products to customers since summer 2006.The 75-person firm was spun out of Rockwell Scientific back in 2004, and has since clinched $31.5 million in two rounds of funding. The most recent was a $16 million Series B completed just over a year ago.

ColdWatt is already planning to grow its product family. Lakshmi told Byte & Switch that the vendor will be unveiling more products in the second half of 2007, which will be in the "multi-kilowatt" range.

The Texan startup is not the only firm making a noise about environmental issues at the moment. Over recent months more and more technology vendors have been playing the "green" card in an attempt to cash in on the move towards environmentally friendly data centers. (See The Green Monster, Pillar's Power Pitch, and Blades Still Too Hot.)

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch