– Julie Brown, Marketing Manager, Server Technology (www.servertechnology.com), says:
Data center managers today know that they need to measure and monitor their power usage. It’s the first step to knowing what they need to do to improve efficiency – to save money and to act on their green initiatives. As the old saying goes – you can’t manage or control what you’re not measuring. We know that monitoring and reporting on energy consumption will be expected by 2012, so data center managers today need to implement tools to prepare for that. Our Sentry Power Manager (SPM) solution is one of the ways to do this. It’s a simple, affordable solution to measure, monitor and trend power usage with built in reports and the ability to store three years of data. It gives the data center manager the data he or she needs to make informed decisions on how to improve power efficiency, reduce costs and go green. Through solutions like Server Technology’s, data centers can determine PUE or DCiE goals and track, trend and manage them.
A cabinet power distribution unit (CDU) distributes power, but it does much more than that, depending on the intelligence in the CDU. Intelligent CDUs are meant to be networked through IP addresses. They can remotely reboot servers, they can report on a wide variety of power metrics and environmental (temperature and humidity) information and they can monitor down to the per outlet level or the per infeed level, depending on the unit.
Power is more expensive and data centers need to find ways to be more efficient. Where data center managers may have monitored power in the past, there’s a need now to measure to the most accurate level for power management – at the cabinet power distribution unit (CDU)level and down to the per outlet level. This is what organizations like the Green Grid have recommended. Server Technology’s SPM product combined with our Per Outlet Power Sensing (POPS) CDUs give the data center manager what he/she needs to monitor their entire server network at a glance.
The CDUs that you choose for your data center should not only provide mission-critical performance and quality and reliability, but the CDUs should help you achieve your overall power monitoring and management goals. There are a tremendous number of CDUs in the marketplace today, with varying degrees of intelligence, designed to provide the information that the data center manager needs to help him solve power management problems and/or goals. Talk to a “power expert” for advice on how to chose the right products and solutions to meet your data center goals.
Data Center managers need to implement a power monitoring and measurement solutions. Through the information from a monitoring solution, data center managers can deal with problems in their data center–whether it’s “zombie” servers (comatose servers that are using power), or potential overloaded server issues that could cause downtime, or temperature issues that could be addressed. It makes the data center manager’s life easier – as well as being able to make decisions to significantly reduce carbon footprint and reduce data center operations costs. While implementing a monitoring/measuring solution does require new equipment, the information that the data center will have because of it will allow him or her to make changes/improvements that will significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency – all the while reducing carbon footprint and other green goals.
