Through extensive research and customer use cases, we’ve determined that there are four key functions of an effective Enterprise Energy Management platform: Discovery and Measurement, Assessment and Simulation, Policy and Control, and Reporting. A comprehensive solution should be able to assess and manage your energy needs from the moment the power enters your facility until the bill arrives in accounting.
These four functions should be dedicated to the monitor—analyze—control processes for every smart device in your enterprise. This approach is what the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) platform is built on. Let’s take a look at how these JEM functions work within a typical enterprise:
Discovery and Measurement—JEM leverages a unique automated discovery method to locate all the network-connected devices, systems, and facilities assets in the enterprise. It then begins to continually monitor and measure energy usage and utilization of those devices.
Assessment and Simulation—JEM then analyzes the energy usage, carbon emissions, utilization and costs associated with each machine. This data analysis allows Energy Managers to simulate policy scenarios, enabling them to identify their highest cost savings opportunities and device productivity levels. The JEM allows for simulation of energy policies by device, location, division, business unit, department, cost center, or any other segmentation designated by the enterprise.
Policy and Control—Once the simulations have been completed and the appropriate policies are implemented, JEM executes those automated energy management policies, or generates alerts, by device, time, location, or event. This results in a reduction of wasted energy costs and an increase in efficiency, ensuring that the energy use follows the productive user.
Reporting—The JEM Reporting engine consolidates all of the data collected, then delivers comprehensive and fully customizable reports on energy usage and the cost/carbon savings realized through the active energy management policies. From an enterprise-wide view, all the way down to individual devices, JEM delivers custom reports based on the unique reporting needs of the enterprise.
Based on the energy metrics and intelligence we have collected over time, most enterprises use JEM to develop policies and rules to optimize energy usage and reduce costs on a massive scale. Our typical customers achieve energy savings of 30-60 percent annually. These results have been proven time and again through the robust reporting, supporting the business case for corporate sustainability initiatives, sustainable procurement, and demonstrate incremental improvements over time.
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Our article Agentless or Agent Based - What's the difference? prompted a comment from Guy Kawasaki with some great questions. The responses to those questions are pretty in-depth, so we wanted to answer them in full here.
1. Would you mind to elaborate on how "agent based software uses additional energy on every single device it’s installed on"?
Let me just say that in reality it depends upon the agent itself. For the sake of discussion let’s break them down into several categories:
Shared Agent Resources: Many energy management agents are not true “energy management” agents. There are agents that do many things, of which energy management is just one aspect. For example, some software distribution and patch management systems do some energy management in addition to their “day” job. Patchlink will do energy management, but there is overhead in the agent to do patch and software analysis, so that overhead does have an impact to the overall energy use of the device. We recently did testing at an insurance customer that was using an antivirus agent, which also had some power management capabilities. What we found was that the AV scans for this agent actually were burning over $55K worth of energy per year at just over $.03 per kwh…JUST for the virus scans. That is a LOT of energy for just 5000 desktops computers. Even the energy management capability of that agent couldn’t help them due to the overhead of the scans.
Heavy Agent Resources: There are also energy management agents that are “heavy” in the way the gather energy analytics. They can add overhead to the operating system through additional drivers and interfaces needed to gather energy analytics. There is overhead to do these calculations on the endpoint, queue data, and communicate that data back to the analysis server. An example of this type of technology is used in 1E and Verdiem.
Embedded Agents: Another way to retrieve energy information is to utilize existing hardware and OS resources. You call out several examples in your next statement. SNMP, WMI, vPRO, NodeManager, iLO, DRAC, DCMI and IPMI are all different ways to retrieve energy analytics. Some of these interfaces are out of band to the host platform itself and require absolutely no overhead to the system. Some do have a small amount of system overhead to retrieve and communicate, but there is no additional agent overhead other than the OS or hardware itself. JouleX fits in this category.
2. When you don't have agent, you actually use an "embedded agent" (call it SNMP, Windows WMI, or whatever). Enabling and using that function is the same as installing an agent.
You’re absolutely correct. These interfaces are in fact embedded agents. However, there are several distinctive advantages to not having YAA! (Yet Another Agent!) for our corporate customers to manage. The basic problem with agent technology is really less the overhead of the agents to the systems themselves, but it is the overhead of the management of agents in a large corporate environment. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons:
Reducing Management Costs – For our customers, most of whom have 10’s of thousands of desktop computers or servers to manage, the cost of deploying, testing, and managing another agent with a vertical value is extremely high. One of the driving costs of virtualization in today’s companies is the need to reduce complexity of the client machines configurations and testing. Our agentless solution means that we can connect to a company’s existing environment with minimal regression testing, unlike a standard agent which requires testing to see if the energy management agent is working with other desktop configuration changes. Since we are only using standard system interfaces to query that energy data, there is minimal need for testing.
Another major problem with agent technology is tracking OS releases and patches, along with the agent updates themselves. Most customers are forced to do regression testing before they can release patches and updates, to ensure that there are no issues with the various applications and management agents running on these desktops. Using the standard OS interfaces to query energy data minimizes the time needed for testing and deployment. This enables us to get mission critical security patches out faster, reducing overall security posture, and at the same time lowering the cost of management of those devices.
Quick Time to Value – By using a standard system interface such as vPRO, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Windows Remote Management (WinRM), SNMP, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), Data Center Manageability Interface (DCMI) or even Server Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) and Desktop Architecture for System Hardware (DASH), you do not have to create software distribution packages to distribute your energy management agents to the thousands of machines in your corporation. In some corporate environments, just getting through change management processes and procedures can take weeks or months for approving agents to run on production assets. In most cases, the JEM platform can be installed and retrieving energy information from thousands of devices in less than an hour with no impact to the change management process. Try doing that with an agent based technology.
Technological Shifts in Computing – There is a shift occurring in today’s campus computing environments. Virtualization and Tablet computing is taking root at companies across the globe, reducing costs and complexity for the average desktop user. One of the challenges faced by agent-based energy management technology is how to address THIS problem. Agents become totally useless when the machine has been virtualized on a tablet or thin client.
Until you are able to retrieve energy information from other sources such as the virtual infrastructure, the Power over Ethernet (PoE) switching infrastructure or the VDI/tablet appliances, your technology has become obsolete. JouleX developers have realized this from the beginning and have created a platform that can already handle these environments the same as any other environment.
Companies like Cisco are even beginning to deliver up to 80 Watts of power over standard Cat5 ethernet cables. These will be the “power plugs” of the future office. Unless you have already integrated energy metering and control into the switching fabric, you will not be able to retrieve, much less control, energy usage for those corporate users at all.
3. Lastly, I wonder how enabling Windows Management Interface (WMI) on Windows (and leaving that port open) is perceived as more secure that an agent based solution?
This is an interesting question and I am very glad you brought it up. One can argue that WMI has been the root of many interesting security exploits. However, as long as you are a Windows shop running Active Directory services, you are pretty much required to use WMI for management. While many long for a change in corporate computing, Microsoft still maintains a hefty dominance in the corporate world.
Domain controllers leverage WMI today for policy objects and other management structures. Microsoft has seen this issue and has re-engineered the management infrastructure moving away from RPC-based WMI to a web-services based WinRM. This reduces the threat landscape dramatically for those customers that use it. Here is the catch: Who is actually using WinRM instead of WMI? We have only seen ONE customer who has shifted to WinRM over WMI.
Since we have to support both the legacy environment AND the new environment, JouleX supports both infrastructures. Additionally, JouleX is also able to use standard non-privileged user credentials and lock down the access to just the WMI entries we need to calculate energy information reducing the threat landscape even more.
Thanks again for the GREAT comments. I appreciate the opportunity to delve deeper into this topic. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.
Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed! We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!
Enterprises trying to find the right energy management solution for their businesses need to know what the agent based/agentless difference actually means to their bottom line. We know that both solutions are equally accurate for gathering PC and physical server energy data. Beyond that, the benefits and capabilities of the agentless solution outshine agent based in every area.
Agent Based energy management solutions require that software be installed on every device to measure the energy from it. For example, to measure and report the energy from a PC, an agent based solution would have to be installed on that PC. Then you can query the software and it would return the energy usage of the device. Since the only devices you can realistically install monitoring software on are PCs and servers, NO agent based energy management solution is able to measure, monitor or manage the full scope of your enterprise’s devices.
In most companies, servers and PCs are only 50% - 70% of their IT infrastructure. You can’t load software on the peripheral equipment, such as switches, routers, wireless access points, and printers; therefore you have no ability to get energy data using a software agent. With the JEM agentless energy management approach, these barriers don’t exist.
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Agent Based Devices Managed:
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JouleX Energy Manager Devices Managed:
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- PCs
- Macs
- Thin clients
- Servers
- VoIP phones
- Monitors
- Printers
- Copiers
- Scanners
- Network switches and routers
- Wireless access points
- Heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and lighting systems
- And more
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Even if agent based solutions could be installed on every peripheral device in an enterprise, there are other significant challenges to that approach.
- COST- It costs time and money to install and manage agents on every desktop. If, for example, your company has 50,000 PCs in its environment, the costs grow exponentially. Consider the amount of time (X 50,000) to:
- Download and install
- Deploy and test
- Monitor and measure
- Patch and update
- Upgrade
- SECURITY– An agent requires software to run in a privileged mode. If there is a vulnerability or problem with the agent itself, the machine is exposed to additional security vulnerability, whereas the agentless approach uses the existing supported Operating System based metrics. This means, the system is not unnecessarily exposed to additional security vulnerabilities.
- DEVICE SUPPORT – By leveraging that core operating system functionality, with the agentless approach, tracking agent and operating system releases and hardware releases is not necessary.
- DISCOVERY – The JEM agentless system collects an inventory of all assets that are drawing energy on your network. Basically that means “it just works.” There is no guess work or double checking to ensure that none of the machines are overlooked or forgotten.
One last, but key, distinction between the agentless and agent based solutions is this: Agent based software uses additional energy on every single device it’s installed on, increasing the very costs your company is trying to measure, monitor, and control.
When you look beyond the surface it's plain that these solutions are only similar in name, but not in capabilities and effectiveness for the enerprise.
For more information, read: Questions Answered about Agentless vs Agent Based
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View the pictures individually on Flickr
Team JouleX held its official company launch party at Interop Las Vegas 2010. We were thrilled to have over 100 of our partners, current & prospective customers, and supporters join us for the unveiling of JouleX Energy Manager. We firmly believe JEM, an agentless solution that reduces energy costs by monitoring, analyzing and controlling energy usage of all network-connected devices and systems, is the future of Energy Sustainability.
The positive energy and support from everyone in attendance was truly inspiring to all of us at JouleX. The feedback on our services and product demos were invaluable. We can’t thank you enough.
Do you want to know more about JouleX Energy Manager? Tell us how to contact you, and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.
Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed! We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!