Citrix Systems has announced a unique PowerSmart capability designed for organizations seeking to reduce datacenter power consumption as part of their application delivery infrastructure strategy. The new PowerSmart feature, which will be available as part of the Citrix Presentation Server product line, will enable organizations to set policies that automatically adjust server power consumption in response to application traffic levels to more effectively manage power during non-peak hours.

HP is the first server vendor to demonstrate support for PowerSmart in conjunction with its power management tools for the HP ProLiant server family. The combination of Citrix's application delivery infrastructure with HP's focus on assisting customers to achieve better datacenter efficiency should help customers support green initiatives and best practices by increasing utilization of existing infrastructure while lowering consumption of power and cooling resources. Citrix stated that the new PowerSmart feature could help organizations reduce energy consumption in the datacenter by up to 50%. PowerSmart is compatible with all current versions and editions of Citrix Presentation Server and iLO-enabled HP servers. PowerSmart will be available in December to all Citrix Presentation Server customers as a free download.

We find this announcement interesting as it is in tune with the marketing mantra du jour, power efficiency, but more importantly as it illustrates a strategic solution that seeks to deliver enhanced efficiency not for a specific application or server, but rather for a collection of applications. For most organizations, there is not just one mission-critical application, but instead a set of applications that collectively comprise the mission-critical workflow for an enterprise. The value proposition of server-based delivery of applications as typified by Presentation Server is well understood; however, the PowerSmart feature adds considerable value to the solution as it can reduce the power consumption footprint based upon the dynamics of several independent applications. Enabling more intelligent server provisioning and load management that is driven by specific knowledge of each application's workload and usage patterns to our way of thinking is a good thing. When taken in the context of a virtualized IT environment, this latest capability should further enhance the value proposition of consolidating application workloads and optimizing application traffic over the network.

HP's support for PowerSmart is important for Citrix, its customers, and the market overall. HP is no newcomer to the energy efficiency discussion and as a leading vendor of servers, its direct support for PowerSmart on its servers and in its management software should give Citrix and its customers increased validation in this approach. Further, organizations that deploy Presentation Server and choose HP as their hardware vendor will have few reasons not to take advantage of PowerSmart especially if the channel partners or direct sales forces are doing their jobs. Ideally, customers would not have to be aware of PowerSmart as the feature would be simply considered a default part of any solution and would be enabled as a matter of course. Given the power savings that Citrix states are possible, we doubt that many organizations would decline the usage of PowerSmart, if they knew it existed.

Overall, we believe this announcement reflects the considerable value afforded by server-based application delivery technologies, not only from an application management perspective, but from an energy efficiency and cost perspective as well. The task at hand for Citrix is to get the same degree of support from the other major server vendors so that all of its customers can benefit from the PowerSmart technology while Citrix can be achieve the enviable position of having a valuable technology become another checklist item for application servers installations in most any datacenter.