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VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/14/13 -- A Canadian digital media studio has become one of the first companies to uncover massive energy waste in their data center using a new software-based approach to energy efficiency.

Arc Productions works in animation and visual effects for projects like Gnomeo & Juliet and Halo 4 from their headquarters in Toronto, Ontario.

In a project launched in September, Vancouver-based TSO Logic took a closer look at power consumption by the studio's in-house server farm, made up of over 600 servers.

Even with server utilization rates that are better than the industry average, Arc learned that more than two-thirds of the time, half of their servers are powered on but completely idle.

In two months, they identified potential energy savings of 56 percent. With electricity costing the studio hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, these savings represent a major business opportunity.

"The whole process of working with TSO Logic and their product has been surprisingly easy," says John Hickson, Head of Systems and Rendering at Arc.

"With no infrastructure changes, we are getting data we never had before. This allows us to capture savings and lower costs in our studio," says Hickson.

TSO Logic's proprietary technology looks at server activity on an application level, monitoring consumption patterns and finding opportunities to automatically conserve.

"We call it application-aware power management, and believe that it's a totally new approach to intelligently saving energy," says Aaron Rallo, the founder and CEO of TSO Logic.

"Basically, our technology allows data centers to power down servers automatically when demand is low. This happens seamlessly, does not impact performance and provides deep insight into the environment," says Rallo.

The company's twin suite of energy efficiency solutions, called TSO Metrics and TSO Power Control, shows that most data centers with variable load have an untapped savings potential.

About energy waste at data centers:

--  Most data centers experience variable load, which means that the demand
    on servers varies from hour to hour. However, to stay prepared for
    periodic surges-called peak demand or peak load-most data centers keep
    running at full capacity all of the time. This means that much of the
    energy consumed is wasted on idle servers.

--  At the request of The New York Times, the consulting firm McKinsey &
    Company found that, on average, data centers were using only 6 percent
    to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers.

--  Worldwide, digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity,
    equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to
    estimates compiled for The Times.

About TSO Logic:

TSO Logic provides software for monitoring and reducing energy consumption at in-house server farms and large data centers. Their application-aware power management software allows data centers to automatically power down servers when demand is low, without impacting availability or performance and without changes to infrastructure. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.