Getting the most out of your power infrastructure

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Power Management

What do you do when your facilities team tells you you’re out of power in the data center?  Used to be the only worry we had about power was how long it would take the electrician to run a new power whip.  Now I see more and more shops that are running into power limitations in the datacenter.

As servers get smaller and more powerful, they drive up the power density of the data center.  Many datacenters will run out of power before floor space.  HP’s unique power management tools will allow you to maximize the number of server you can run in your existing power infrastructure.

There are many opportunities for IT organizations to work with facilities to save cost, increase reliability and get maximum utilization out of existing assets.  I’m going to focus on three tools offered by HP that can help IT work with facilities; dynamic power capping, HP Power Advisor and Intelligent Power Distribution Units (iPDU)

iPDU provides monitoring of power consumption at the core, load segment, stick, and outlet level.  iPDU communicates with the optional Platinum high efficiency power supplies in the attached servers to collect asset information for the automatic mapping of the power topology inside a rack.  In addition to monitoring power utilization, iPDU will reduce the risk of configuration errors that can cause power outages.    Have you ever plugged both power supplies into the same PDU by mistake?  iPDU will alert you to this and other common configuration errors.

Intelligent power discovery starts when the server is plugged into the intelligent PDU.  ILO sends server information via the high efficiency power supply, the power supply sends information through the power cable to the PDU core, and finally the RJ45 connector on the PDU sends power and server information to Systems Insight Manager. 

HP Power Advisor lets you plan for exactly how much power a server really needs.  A Gartner study showed that many facilities size circuits based on nameplate ratings rather than how much power a system actually needs.  By checking the configuration against Power Advisor you can calculate exactly how much power a system will draw at peak utilization.  This will often be less than half of the faceplate rating.  This allows you to provision more servers on the same circuit than if it was configured based on the faceplate.

Then Dynamic Power Capping can be used to make sure the server never exceeds it’s power budget.  In fact, you can monitor the power utilization of a server over time using the Insight Control Environment, and see what it actually uses with you application.  This will be even lower than the 100% utilization number calculated in Power Advisor.  Setting the power cap based on actual utilization will allow you to free up even more trapped power capacity, and support more servers.

These are just a few of the tools available from HP to manage power and free up trapped capacity in the datacenter.  Visit the links below for more information.

www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2010/techforum2010/pdf/TF_IPD_DataSheet.pdf

h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/dynamic-power-capping/index.html

www.hp.com/go/hppoweradvisor