Tame the hungry beast (and make it work for you)
With the Avocent® Power Management Solution
Power Management
Powerful tools to help
you simply control and
manage power usage
Green I.T. “Blah. Blah. Blah.”
No offense… But how will we ever attain green anything when over
a third of IT managers are in the dark about what their power
consumption is and nearly half only know the aggregate usage?*
Necessary. Beneficial. Good. There’s no
arguing the moral value of a greener IT
infrastructure, especially considering just
how much these beasts in our basements
consume. A 2007 US Environmental
Protection Agency study found that data
center energy utilization had doubled
between 2000 and 2006, representing
about 1.5% of all US energy consumption
(almost twice as much power used by all
the color televisions in the country). That
trend is expected to continue with power
consumption doubling again by 2011.
It’s no wonder that power is becoming
such an important facet of data center
planning and management.
We’ve taken more than 20 years of
success developing data center
optimization and endpoint control
products and created a unique, multitouch solution specifically for IT power
management. This powerful (forgive the
pun) offering gives you the tools you need
to monitor energy consumption, costs
and trends across various levels within the
data center and remote locations.
*2007 Study by Research Concepts
The Challenge
Knowing your power consumption starts with
admitting what you don’t know.
You may be aware that a typical server consumes 190 watts. But
did you know that this only represents 41% of power usage for that
server? Add in uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and HVAC for
each unit, and the number jumps to 418 watts. That equates to
$439 a year and a staggering 3.66 tons of greenhouse gasses
emitted annually! Now multiply that by hundreds of servers, all
running an average of 88% of the time, and…you get the idea. It’s
what you don’t know that makes the difference.
Of course, most data center managers typically “don’t pay the
bill,” so there’s little motivation to expend resources to improve
energy efficiency. But, with growing pressure from management
to operate more leanly or lose head count, there’s plenty of
incentive to better understand energy usage. Lucky for IT, there’s
most likely an equipment already on site to help them do this.
There’s more information out there than you think.
But how do you tap them all?
A recent Aperture Research Institute study states that half the
data centers do not have the ability to track power from individual
assets (more than 5 million servers in the US alone!). But that
statistic may be misleading. Most data centers actually have at
least some of the equipment needed to track power usage; they
just don’t know how to “mine” that data to give a single master
view of energy consumption trends.
The Answer
A smart power management solution (without all
the blah, blah, blah).
Yes, the obstacles are many, from a multitude of machine
and operating system types to legacy connectivity systems, diverse
data formats and manual processes. But they are not
insurmountable. The Avocent® proven solution is ready to integrate
all of that data flowing in from various devices to facilitate a deeper
understanding of your IT environment. With it in place, you can:
Monitor Usage – Individual assets to company-wide power
consumption can be monitored and reported at various levels of
granularity, from individual PDUs and racks to rows of racks, the
data center, even the entire company.
Control Power Remotely – Manage from anywhere, anytime.
Out-of-band, remote management for all Avocent powercontrolled devices, select third-party PDUs and power
management of IPMI-enabled servers.
Control Capacity – Use power more efficiently. Real-time and
historical data give you insight into how to best set thresholds and
alerts, plus plan for growth.
Pinpoint Problem Areas – Get tighter command over the power
guzzlers. By identifying the highest users of power, from the rack
to the data center to the company, you can calculate and
compare expenses by area and trend.
Chargeback Power Costs – Make power a tangible part of
budget considerations. With detailed monitoring down to the
individual outlet and device, you can understand how many data
center resources a particular department is using and what
percentage of the total power it should be responsible for funding.
Optimize Uptime – Ensure service levels are maintained. It could
be as simple as disabling unused outlets on a power strip to
control usage on a rack. Or, as detailed as setting power
thresholds on racks and data centers that produce online
notifications or management reaction.
The Conclusion
Green represents more than just the environment. It’s the color of
money saved as well.
Enterprises that have implemented efficiency initiatives have
seen, on average, a 19% reduction in total IT power consumption,
with some even enjoying upwards of 60% (Enterprise
Management Associates Survey 2009).
The Avocent suite of systems management tools and products
can help you effectively achieve your green goals
(environmentally- and cash-driven) through proper power
management tools. Our industry-leading solutions enable
complete monitoring, management automation and detailed
reporting on energy usage from the data center down to the rack,
not only creating savings in actual energy consumption, but in
staff time and effort.
Components
Avocent® Power Management Solution
Avocent DSView™ Management Software
Control and Access Centrally - The first step to management is to
centralize. The Avocent DSView software provides secure, remote,
consolidated, out-of-band management through a single, centralized
interface. The software provides control of the KVM and serial
appliances (server and network access), control of the PDUs (power cycle
access) and service processors (IPMI and vendor solution access).
Avocent Rack Power Manager
The Avocent Rack Power Manager can handle enterprise-size PDU
deployments with ease, providing access and control capabilities to
maintain and configure your PDUs.
Avocent ACS 6000 Advanced Console Servers
The ACS 6000 console servers provide remote access for console port
management. They provide secure, remote access to IT devices and
UNIX/LINUX-based servers.
Avocent MergePoint™ Service Processor Manager
The Avocent MergePoint Service Processor Manager merges both
proprietary (DRAC, iLO, RSA for example) and open service
management protocols (such as IPMI) onto a unified management
platform. Alerts and notifications can be sent via SNMP, IM or email
when a situation arises.
Avocent MergePoint Unity™ KVM over IP and Serial Console Switch
The Avocent MergePoint Unity solutions provide remote KVM access
to servers. Combined with the Avocent DSView management software,
system administrators have a centralized management system for
power control of their servers.
Avocent Rack PDUs
The Avocent DSView management software and the Avocent Rack
Power Manager support a wide range of rack PDU models that support
strip-level metering, outlet-level metering or outlet-level metering and
switching. Integrate the information gathered from these supported
rack PDUs with the Avocent Rack Power Manager to generate historical
graphs and reports to get a clear power picture of the data center.
Supported Rack PDUs*:
- Avocent PM 10/10i, PM20/20i, PM1000, PM2000, and PM3000
- Liebert® MPH and Liebert MPX rack PDUs
- Select third-party PDUs from APC and Server Technology*
*Note- supported models may change; contact Avocent solutions for current information.
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P.O. Box 29186
Columbus, OH 43229
Tel: +1 614 888 0246
Emerson Network Power
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