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Raritan IT team recently decided to change our naming and association schemes in Power IQ. This change reflects the new level of power usage details IT wants to track, and how we plan to utilize such information to measure energy savings from the investment in replacing old servers with new, more energy efficient IT equipments.
In prior Power IQ naming scheme, we name the PX outlets by “phase-circuit-rack-L/R”. From this naming scheme, one can easily tell that it was a PX-centric thinking. Using Power IQ, IT was able to easily know the total data center power consumption, as well as power usage by circuit and by rack. The power consumption by individual IT devices was interesting but not as important for power capacity planning, especially when the servers were largely 1U/3U rack-mount servers.
When IT deployed Cisco UCS blade system, this focus has changed. The blade chassis is a device with high power density, IT has to track and monitor that carefully to ensure power capacity. And, the introduction of UCS blades was to start our transformation into Unified Computing, with the additional benefit of energy efficiency over the existing servers it will replace. IT would like to quantify the actual energy savings from this entire change as well as incremental savings per server decommission. As IT starts to migrate each old physical server as virtual servers onto the UCS blades, we would like to measure the delta between increased power consumption on the blade chassis and the reduced power consumption from decommissioning the old physical server.
Power IQ can help us do that easily if we change from PX-centric view to IT-device-centric view. With this change, IT can still obtain power usage per rack and per circuit from Power IQ; but it now becomes much easier to track power usage per device.
Between now and the end of this year, we will migrate all the old servers onto UCS and decommission them. Once we complete the entire migration, IT will know exactly the energy saving from this investment. For sure, IT wouldn’t introduce UCS just for energy efficiency if we didn’t have needs to increase computing capacity. But it will be very interesting to compare the actual energy saving from this investment with our original estimate based on server specs and vendor advices.
IT administrators in the government space are concerned about three things when they arrive at their place of work: security, security and security.
With the recent, and not so recent, cyber attacks on military and civilian agency networks, the government is constantly looking to the OEM and system integrator communities for new solutions to insure the lock-down of federal information system networks and servers that carry and hold information critical to the security of our nation.
Couple this daily challenge with compliance directives issued in large part by executive orders and shrinking budgets, data center managers hands are full. Not to mention that these folks have some of the busiest days out of anyone in the federal IT space.
Recent advances in KVM over IP switch makes the day more manageable for federal IT administrators by allowing secure, remote access to federal IT equipment and servers. Continue reading →
Come visit the Raritan booth at DatacenterDynamics in Washington, DC on August 31st to learn about our intelligent energy management solutions. For more information and to register, visit http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/washington.
If colder is not better and we agree you can save energy by increasing the temperature – why are data center managers still over-cooling? The reason is that many data center managers don’t have the information to safely increase the temperature. The following Gartner quote adds an important new element – the need to monitor for hot spots.
Gradually raise the temperature at the server inlet point to run up to 24 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit), but use sensors to monitor for hot spots – Gartner – 29 July 2009 Continue reading →
Ok, it’s July 20th, 1969 and America had finally realized JFK’s dream and commitment that we would land a man on the moon and return him safely within the decade of the 60s. Everybody remembers Neil Armstrong’s first few steps, and his famous first few words. (Although there is still some controversy as to the actual words he used, even when listening to the audio tape). Neil was pioneering the manned lunar exploration era. He became synonymous with the space program and his role became one of leadership and understanding.
Eighteen minutes later, Buzz Aldrin walked down the same ladder, and walked on the same landscape, ultimately uttering the words, ”Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.” Buzz was walking the exact same steps, but was doing so in the context of Neil’s 18-minute old path. Who remembers this detail about Buzz (not just his fun name, but the fact that he was the second person to walk on the moon)? Continue reading →
In my last post, I explained that “it is widely accepted that you can save energy by avoiding over cooling a data center”. That seems like a fair statement to accept, but have had one person question this statement – explaining that the fans on the servers might have to run more often.
Let us look at what ASHRAE and Gartner have to say on this.
ASHRAE’s takes the following position in their book titled “Best Practices for a Datacom Facility Energy Efficiency”
“Environmental conditions have a substantial impact on energy efficiency and total cost of ownership in a datacom facility.”
“Moving away from a “colder is better” philosophy can result in significant energy savings due to greater refrigeration cycle thermodynamics efficiency and increased economizer hours.”
“Allowing for increased temperature and humidity dead bands will eliminate “fighting” between adjacent supply air units, which is a significant source of inefficiency in some existing facilities.”
David J. Cappuccio, Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams has made the following position – “Data center managers can save up to 4 percent in energy costs for every degree of upward change in the baseline temperature, known as a set point. The higher set point means less frequent use of air conditioning, which saves the energy used to run cooling systems”
Tell me about your experiences.
James Cerwinski
According to one of the largest IT analyst firms, the deployment by enterprises of any form of comprehensive PHYSICAL IT MANAGEMENT solution is less than ONE PERCENT (1%) today. This same source forsees the rapid adoption of these solutions across the enterprise and projects an expected figure of SIXTY PERCENT (60%) by the year 2014. Wow! Sixty times??? Amazing. If we estimate the number of enterprises that have adopted ANY form of purpose-built PHYSICAL IT MANAGMENT solution at say, 1000 companies, then this would mean 60,000 companies are searching for new physical IT management solutions now or very soon. Even if the estimates are off by a factor of 2, 5 or even 10, then the number of companies that are CURRENTLY searching for a new PHYSICAL IT MANAGEMENT solution is in the TENS of THOUSANDS! Your company is not alone! Continue reading →
Who is ASHRAE and how can they help data center mangers save energy?
The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning (“ASHRAE”), founded in 1894, is an international organization with 51,000 persons. ASHRAE fulfills its mission of advancing heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration to serve humanity and promote a sustainable world through research, standards writing, publications and continuing education. One such publication is the “Best Practices for Datacom Facility Energy Efficiency” in which they define the recommended temperature and humidity level as measured at the inlet of datacom equipment. A valuable point to note is that the 2009 recommended upper limit temperature is 80.6 degrees F which is an increase of 3.6 degrees F over the 2004 recommendation. It is also important to note that the specific recommended range is defined more precisely on a Psychrometric chart in which each point is defined by the dry-bulb temperature and the relative humidity.
It is widely accepted that you can save energy by avoiding over cooling a data center. More on this in my next post.
James Cerwinski
At Raritan’s data centers, we integrate network monitoring and management with console management and power management into a single global IT dashboard. From the IT dashboard, IT members can see the current hot issues and track their progresses, or click into the network monitoring system to see the details of topology map and network and servers health. What’s cool is that, with Dominion PX, the network monitor also displays environmental sensor information such as the temparature on the same screen, making it really convenient for IT members. The only glitch was that we initially forgot to make it clear that the temperature was reported in 1/10 Celcius units, I almost had a heart attack when I saw the temperature numbers for the first time, 
.
Continue reading →
