The Insight Control Software guys get to strut their stuff at the HP Blades Tech Day (#hpbladesday)
By Chuck Klein
Now it was time for the bloggers to head to the Insight Software lab to see what HP does for managing data centers for power & cooling. John Schmitz, Ute Albert, and Tom Turicchi went over the System Insight Manager software (SIM) all the way up the management stack to Insight Dynamics. This is the software stack that allows system administrators to install, configure, monitor, and plan for BladeSystem chassis in the Datacenter.
Tom then gave a demonstration of how the Data Center Power Control part of Insight Control allows for data center managers to plan, monitor, cap and control the amount of energy and cooling is used by their infrastructure. Tom set up policies and rules to manage events that may happen in a Data Center from utility brown-outs to loss of cooling units. He also went over how you can monitor energy usage for the Data Center all the way down to each blade. This would allow you to better plan for capacity and where to install new blades.
The attendees wanted to know what couldn't be managed as they thought the list would be much shorter than reviewing what the software could do. So Tom went over that it managed only HP servers presently, that scripts could be used to manage or shutdown multi-tiered applications, network devices, and storage. These devices did not have the iLO2 ASIC chip in them and that was a foundational element that needed to be there.
Tom also went over a demo of what could be done to setup the event manager to respond to utility policies and help save companies money. He used an example from PG&E in California. That's all for now.
