Energy-efficient tax scheme offers savings
By Leslie Faughnan
Irish companies have been encouraged to invest in energy-efficient equipment under the Accelerated Capital Allowances (ACA) scheme introduced in March 2009.This tax incentive scheme means that companies can write off the entire capital cost of qualifying equipment against taxable income in the first year, rather than over eight years.
In the ICT sector, products such as servers and other computers with reduced energy requirements are eligible. Strictly, software per se is not eligible for the ACA scheme, but VMware announced at the end of last year that its technology had been accepted.
“VMware technology has, for some years now, played a key role in helping organisations large and small to reduce their energy consumption in ICT,” said Justin Owens, managing director of VMware’s Irish partner, Commtech.
“Virtualisation is now the definitive computing architecture and enables organisations both to lower their ICT costs and to be socially responsible.”
The ACA initiative was welcomed by Owens as an example of an enlightened and proactive step in helping IT departments and the industry sector to adopt more energy-efficient and green approaches.
In order for a virtualisation solution to qualify for the ACA, it must be capable of converting a physical server to a virtual machine, automatically consolidating workloads and powering down unused equipment.
The VMware vSphere 4 platform includes management features to deliver the stipulated functionality. Distributed Power Management continuously optimises power consumption and Distributed Resource Scheduler provisions resources dynamically to ensure workloads are balanced across the available infrastructure.
