Issue 3, April 2009
FOCUS ENERGY EFFICIENCY
“The explosion of corporate data means you’ve often got data centers with cabinet after cabinet of stored information, and breaking point is being reached. We can reduce the space given over to storage by between 30% and 90%, which is a lot of electricity.
“Everyone’s talking about building new eco this, and new eco that, but basic laws still govern what you’ve got on the fl oor of the data center,” says Perkins.
INFORMED CHOICES Approaching the issue from yet another viewpoint is power management specialist APC. Eddie Dsouza, management solution business development manager at APC, maps out its energy offer.
“APC provides a range of solutions, from its Data Center Physical Infrastructure (DCPI) Management Suite, to its online TradeOff Tools,” he explains. “In doing so, we are able to help data center owners and operators make more informed decisions at every stage as they design, build and operate facilities.
“APC solutions help data center managers to size and place infrastructure equipment correctly, and to manage the population of rack space methodically. In this way, the physical infrastructure is kept matched to the IT load requirement, increasing the overall energy effi ciency of the system.
“At the same time, capacity of physical constraints is managed proactively so that
utilisation of power, cooling and space resources is optimised,” says Dsouza.
Dsouza says that APC’s management software solutions enable facility owners and operators to effi ciently operate and monitor a diverse range of devices. “Using InfraStruXure Central 5.1, which is an open, scalable monitoring system which collects, organises, and distributes critical alerts, surveillance video and key information, they can develop a unifi ed view of the physical environment from anywhere on a network,” explains Dsouza.
He points also to APC’s Capacity Manager, which he says allows users to plan and optimise actual power, cooling and rack capacities to enable effi cient equipment provisioning, and right-sizing of data center power and cooling equipment.
“This is an essential step towards the overall facility PUE,” claims Dsouza. “And Change Manager allows users to gain control over the physical environment by implementing systematic move, add and change processes to maintain the effi ciency of the system.”
The point at which the data center professional interfaces with these energy management IT options is more than likely to be with a partner of the vendor rather than the vendor direct, often bringing a welcome element of neutrality to the proceedings.
“There are so many different approaches – IBM, HP, Cisco, NetApps,” says Chris
Gabriel, head of solutions at IT consultancy Logicalis. “As a partner of many of these, it’s our job to try to understand and assimilate all those strategies.
“Pretty much everyone’s agreed on what the problem is, but where it gets interesting is the road to recovery. There are a lot of different routes you can take, which depend on the architecture of the data center.”
MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS And, naturally, different types of data center will benefi t from energy management solutions in different ways, points out Sodzawiczny. “If we look at those in the colocation and integration space, then power monitoring and management is mandatory for the business model,” he says.
“The ability to read actual power consumption at the rack level is paramount because that underpins the billing model.
“This sector of the data center market is certainly driving the uptake of power management tools as the segment undergoes considerable expansion, but they are not alone in recognising the advantages,” says Sodzawiczny.
With as many IT-led energy management solutions available as vendors supplying the sector, the data center engineer has his work cut out to make sense of it all. But with control over energy costs now a ‘must-have’ and no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s not a task that can be ignored any longer.
www.datacenterdynamics.com
49
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