Issue 5, Aug/Sep 2009
FOCUS POWER MANAGEMENT
USING THE NETWORK TO CONTROL
POWER CONSUMPTION Cisco looks beyond Power-Over-Ethernet devices with Phase 2 of EnergyWise
and facilities as a whole when re-examining their energy consumption will be the ones to come up with most effective solutions.
M
With Phase 1 of Cisco’s EnergyWise technology – announced in January – the firm began to leverage the network to monitor and control energy consumption of Power-Over- Ethernet (POE) devices only. The company’s long-term vision, however, is for the network to also be used for non-POE devices, such as controllers for lighting; controllers for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC); and other environmental devices used in business.
“Through the EnergyWise architecture, we will be able to start communicating … information about power from those devices within the scope of the network,” said Luis Suau, consulting engineer at Cisco.
He and Kevin Kosko, senior product manager for Schneider Electric’s APC, spoke at the Cisco Live! conference in San Francisco in June. They outlined Cisco’s plans for EnergyWise and the technology’s potential to enable engineers to use the network to analyse and manage every aspect of a facility’s power consumption.
EnergyWise Phase 1 is an option that today comes free of charge with Cisco’s Catalyst switches. It enables engineers to monitor the energy use of all POE devices – from climate control controllers to IP phones, cameras and access points – and to switch on or off any device through an API. It also enables engineers to implement policy for automated switching of any POE device at a predetermined time of day, according to that device’s usage patterns.
Phase 1 is limited to management API only, but when Cisco rolls out Phase 2 of the software, developers will be able to implement both management- and client- side program interfacing, transforming the network into a “control plane for complete energy management”, said Suau.
any companies in the IT industry currently exploring smarter energy use are discovering that those enterprises that look at IT
HERE’S HOW IT WORKS An EnergyWise domain is a logical grouping of EnergyWise-enabled entities.
“We think of a domain as being ... a localised structure, so we don’t envision a domain will be a large span for the entire enterprise, but rather an enterprise consisting of a series of domains,” said Suau. “Those domains will probably be buildings.”
Energywise cost calculator
Besides collecting power information from network-attached devices, “we also start to normalise the kinds of information we collect on the devices, so we have the concept called ‘power levels’.” Power level 0 means a device is turned off. Power level 10 means it is at full consumption and power levels in between are its varying states throughout the day.
The final attribute is ‘Importance’, or “a way of establishing a device’s importance in the network so that when network-wide queries are run it is possible to distinguish between devices of a similar type”. A query is a mechanism for reporting and for sending actions through the network.
Cisco is developing EnergyWise Phase 2 through its Developer Network, using development partners such as APC which joined Cisco in developing Phase 1.
APC is integrating its data center management software InfraStruXure Central with EnergyWise to provide a comprehensive real- time view of a data center’s power usage to IT and facilities engineers, and to alert them of abnormal power or temperature events.
While APC’s vendor-neutral software monitors almost all aspects of a data center’s power usage, environmentals and even video from its security cameras, it is EnergyWise that enables it to monitor the power usage of IT equipment.
If over-provisioning of power and cooling provided a safety cushion against possible risks associated with adding servers or storage to a rack in the past, it is a luxury that can seldom be afforded today. That message was at the core of Kosko’s pitch for InfraStruXure Central, which aims to enable data center managers to know exactly where they are able to install an additional piece of equipment without “tripping a breaker”.
“We can go in and find the best place to put a server based on power, cooling, space and so on,” Kosko said. “Once we know what we have we can start predictive simulation and modelling. We can do those ‘what if?’ scenarios – those good, bad or best scenarios.”
Besides safely increasing IT capacity in an already high-density environment, the APC solution can help engineers shed or shift compute loads safely to reduce power consumption, either for conservation purposes or at times when a utility requests lower power consumption on a hot day in return for credits.
“The big thing here is a proactive approach. Looking…to see if I have enough redundancy; to see that if a unit failed, how much more would I have to lose before I have to bring the whole thing down. Where’s the next breaker that’s going to trip? Being able to know all this prior to it happening delivers excellent service at our end – from a data center standpoint – but also allows us to manage availability across the enterprise.”
www.datacenterdynamics.com 41
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56