Although Cacti has been available to do data center energy monitoring for at least 3 years, the number of data centers using it to monitor their energy use is limited indeed. It should come as no surprise that the one company who track the energy cost of releasing software downloads, using cacti, is Mozilla.

The issue is clearly not in the capabilities. If you look at content management, Drupal has over 7 million web sites, and Apache delivers 49% of all Web sites.

So what is the issue?

Well! One large Bay Area corporation said “the energy cost of our data center, relative to our other costs, is simply too low to justify the human effort of a solution.” Ouch!

But they were right, energy, when compared to other business costs, is simply too low on the cost totem pole for the average CFO to pay much attention.

So yes, we are paying lip service to the need to be energy efficient, but until the issue is legislated, or the costs go up to the point it is a factor along with health care and other employee issues, it seems that open source will be an honest reflection of the REAL (rather than market hyped) interest in energy solutions.

Yes, Niagara can glue anybodies anything together, but you had to pay for the license, and you must use the framework to develop the machine & human interfaces.