FOCUS POWER MANAGEMENT UPDATE
Issue 7, Dec 09/Jan 10
CONVERGENCE TREND PICKS UP PACE
As organisations race to optimise utilisation of their existing infrastructure assets, the convergence of IT and facilities becomes more and more inevitable.
A comprehensive and highly granular view into all elements of the data center is necessary in order to implement smarter use of available resources.
The market for data center monitoring tools is responding to this need, as players old and new roll out solutions that aim to provide as comprehensive a view into the performance of data center IT and facilities infrastructure as possible. Besides comprehensiveness, other key rules of the game appear to include extreme granularity, real-time monitoring, a wide variety of analysis and visualisation options for the collected data and scalability.
HP ADDS FACILITIES VISIBILITY
HP continued the convergence trend by expanding its Environmental Edge monitoring and control system with Data Center Smart Grid – a system that collects power and cooling information from across the data center, including both IT equipment, and power and cooling infrastructure.
Data is collected by a multitude of sensors in real time and then aggregated to create its visual representation.
The idea is to communicate the same information to both the data center’s IT and facilities management for a more comprehensive approach to running the operation, leading to increased efficiency. Besides monitoring capabilities, Data Center Smart Grid can send alerts to its users. It also has capabilities for automated policy-based power allocation.
START-UP TO DELIVER FULL VISIBILITY AND ADVANCED ANALYSIS IN REAL TIME
In late October, a San Francisco-based start-up entered the market for data center management tools with a wireless IP-based monitoring system. Arch Rock’s Energy Optimizer is a comprehensive customisable solution that includes wireless sensors for electrical, thermal, flow and air-pressure conditions in the data center, and an interface
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free cooling they can use in their particular location. The number of sensors depends on the level of granularity a customer desires in monitoring the facility.
The Optimizer includes five types of sensor nodes, IP routers and an interface application. Arch Rock provides the interface either as a physical appliance that can be installed in a rack, or as a web-based solution subscribed to yearly. The physical unit costs about $10,000 and a yearly subscription is $3,000 for 30 sensors. The subscription rate decreases marginally as more sensors are deployed.
Before designing its data center-specific solution, Arch Rock – established in 2005 – started with rolling out a monitoring product for commercial buildings at large.
Several beta versions of the data center system were deployed in late spring and more than 12 clients have signed up since. The company received two rounds of
that compiles the data collected by the sensors and represents it visually.
The data can be represented in real time in terms of the facility’s power consumption, cost of power it consumes, or its carbon footprint. Energy Optimizer measures the facility’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) or the Data Center infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE), and can compare its temperature, humidity and air quality to ASHRAE standards.
Any number of sensors, each with a unique IP address, can be installed on power circuits, equipment racks, CRAC and CRAH units, on chillers and beneath raised floors. The variety of sensors includes outdoor devices that can help clients determine how much
financing: $5m in the first round and $10m in the second. Its investors are Intel Capital, NEA and Shasta Ventures.
RARITAN FILLS IN THE HOLES
Raritan rolled out a new family of meters that monitor power use, temperature and humidity. The vendor designed the four new Dominion PX-3000 meters for use with standalone IT equipment, as well as in-rack PDUs that do not have monitoring capabilities.
The meters feature built-in monitoring, security and networking capabilities. They are compatible with Raritan’s Power IQ ener- gy-management software.
The system gathers power information, including data on voltage, current, power factor, apparent power, active power and kilowatts per hour energy consumption. It also provides room temperature and humidity information through optional plug- in sensors and can display real- time data either on a local screen or through a web-based interface.
1E’S NIGHTWATCHMAN MOVES TO SERVER
Software firm 1E launched an application designed to power down idle servers in the data center. The company’s NightWatchman Server Edition identifies servers that are not doing useful work and puts them in the ‘drowsy server’ mode, running them at low power use without impacting their availability, according to the company.
For the server to convince the application that it is doing useful work, it has to be running business applications, with real users connected to it.
Running server management processes is not considered to be delivering business value and thus does not qualify as useful work.
At the NightWatchman’s core is an algorithm that enables monitoring of all servers’ power usage without additional hardware, in addition to reporting their efficiency, power cost and associated CO2 emissions organised by location, department and application.
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