Why is energy important? What’s really driving this market?
If you look backwards into time, we clearly have built and delivered an IT infrastructure that’s always on; we have built building management systems that are disconnected from the rest of the corporation; data centers have been traditionally standalone energy hogs; and we haven’t been managing energy across the enterprise.
What’s driving this market today is the fact that energy is becoming an incredibly expensive operating component of the overall operating model for businesses. In many cases, businesses are energy constrained. Even if they can buy more, they can’t in certain data centers and locations. Our infrastructure and our processes, quite frankly, haven’t been optimized for energy. We’ve optimized for speed, for throughput, for cost, for all kinds of things.
The regulatory environment is changing dramatically. From country to country, carbon taxes, carbon regulations, and all kinds of environmental regulations are driving corporations to pay attention to this.
Lastly, it’s pure economics. If a business can save 10, 20, 40, as much as 50% of their wasted energy consumption and not impact productivity, then it makes sense. Making energy an important part of your sales cycle, and it’s what the market demands because the world has changed.
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Enterprises have become experts at cutting waste from their processes. Endless focus is put on maximizing product or service delivery to the customer, while also minimizing the associated costs and waste. In every industry, analysis is done to ensure appropriate product, staffing, and service availability to ensure that customers receive optimal service levels. Until now, however, it’s been difficult to apply those same principles to the Data Center.
Ask yourself: What if your data center was able to always use only the minimum amount of energy required to efficiently and automatically match service levels needed at that moment, no matter when that moment comes? That capability is here. It’s called Load Adaptive Computing™, and JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers provides it.
What is Load Adaptive Computing? It is the ability to automatically balance data center energy use, by balancing the processing power needed to deliver applications via dynamic power capping and virtual load balancing, in order to better identify and remove energy waste in the data center.
Types of Load Adapting Computing Functions:
1) Power Capping: On servers that support it (latest generation of Dell, IBM, HP, etc.), Power Capping is the ability to match energy use by the amount of resources needed to complete a task. It’s no longer necessary to waste energy resources while your servers are not in use. Power capping allows you to automatically increase energy when it is needed to process data and lower energy when it isn’t.
2) Virtual Load Balancing: The ability to shift workloads in a virtual environment so that you can balance energy usage by the amount of work to be done. Virtual Load Balancing can allow you to utilize only the number of physical servers that are necessary to do the real time work load, maximizing power and computing resources and minimizing energy needed to complete current tasks at all times.
3) Power/Temp Guarding: The ability to, through automation, throttle back energy and computing resources during peak power loads (brown outs, etc) and preventing thermal issues from overheating your data center.
Load Adaptive Computing is poised to change the way Data Centers consistently and efficiently manage power usage needs, while still delivering optimal service to your customers. If you’re ready to see real reduction in your energy use in the data center, increasing your PUE effectiveness, without a large investment of money in your infrastructure, JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers is ready to get you there.
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This article was written by Dan Safarik and originally posted on the CITO Research Website. We would like to thank Intel for allowing us to share this article here with our customers.
CIOs and facilities managers are suffering from a crisis of wasted energy across the enterprise. Most enterprises are almost completely unaware of how much power their data centers consume, and have no way to segment the data they do have. Even on sophisticated devices such as enterprise-class servers, there’s no information on energy consumption or its relationship to computing power utilization.
Introduction
CIOs and facilities managers are suffering from a crisis of wasted energy across the enterprise. Most enterprises are almost completely unaware of how much power their data centers consume, and have no way to segment the data they do have. Even on sophisticated devices such as enterprise-class servers, there’s no information on energy consumption or its relationship to computing power utilization.
Atlanta-based JouleX has risen to the challenge of providing energy intelligence on the full range of instrumented IT, covering everything from data center servers and HVAC equipment to office PCs, edge routers, and other networking devices. The company’s roots in network security set it apart from other energy management solutions because of its capability to listen to a much wider range of devices. The software, called JouleX Energy Management (JEM), uses network security protocols, interfaces with device management systems, and power management software such as Intel Data Center Manager (DCM), providing an unprecedented level of visibility into the relationship between energy consumption and device utilization and significantly reducing the overall energy costs of its customers.
JouleX: Tackling the “Massive Amounts of Micro-Waste”
JouleX’s approach to energy management is predicated on the idea that what CEO Thomas Noonan calls “massive amounts of micro-waste” are accumulating on virtually every device that is part of the IT landscape, from servers all the way down to screen savers on PCs, HVAC equipment, and VoIP telephones.
“Today, we live in a world that is all about optimization,” Noonan says. “We don’t live in a world that is ‘on’ or ‘off’ anymore. If a device is operating at 20 or 30 percent utilization, there is no reason that it needs to be consuming full power. We can easily and automatically reduce a device’s energy consumption by 30 to 35 percent and not affect the performance, saving a lot of money and reducing a corporation’s carbon footprint. Our field customer data shows that we’re saving as much as 50 percent in some applications, with no impact to productivity.” One customer is saving more than €600,000 annually due to steps taken based on JouleX Energy Manager’s (JEM) intelligence.
JouleX, whose founders come from the information security world, takes the patterns of information capture and analysis from network security and applies them to the problem of energy management. Rather than try to replace existing management and control platforms, JEM complements and enhances management and control functions by adding a layer of information about the energy profile of all the equipment in the data center (and often beyond). Through an “agentless,” network-based implementation, JEM interfaces with devices in three primary ways:
• Through the device’s native interface
• Through the device’s management system. This is usually the ideal approach because the management system also provides critical device information about firmware updates, CPU utilization, and the allocation of resources against applications
• Natively through network protocols such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), SSH (Secure Shell), and others
“The ideology of ‘always on’ simply can’t exist in the future, because we are wasting an enormous amount of power,” says Noonan. “We’re out there helping people make the IT infrastructure be ‘always available, but energy-optimized.’” Micro-waste is rampant in energy-intensive data centers, where as much as 30 percent of the servers are “dead”—defined as using less than 15 percent of computing capacity but consuming 70 percent or more or their rated energy capacity, Noonan says.
But micro-waste also lurks in corners far below the threshold of perception for most facilities or IT managers, says Noonan, citing evidence such as one client’s $118,000 in annual power bills, attributed solely to screen savers running at night. Another client’s virus scan software was waking up machines to do system checks and neglecting to put them to sleep—$78,000 per year. Noonan says there is no way either client would have discovered this waste without JEM.
The Role and Benefits of Intel DCM
Intel DCM adds another level of granular information about and management control over the equipment JEM monitors in the data center. Using Intel DCM’s dynamic control capabilities, JEM customers observe the real-time power profiles of individual nodes, machines, or groups of servers and can vary the core voltage of processors anywhere along the power scale from 0 to 100 percent, dramatically improving energy efficiency. This can be done across tens of thousands of servers, in multiple locations worldwide, from a single “pane of glass” or management console. For servers with power capping technologies, JEM customers use Intel DCM to dynamically implement automated policies that are time-, location-, or event-based, allowing holistic monitoring, management, and control across a range of devices, optimizing energy and computing performance across time zones, device types, and application profiles.
Since 60 percent or more of the energy consumption of a server is in the processor, any solution made to monitor and control energy in the data center would require a high degree of visibility into the thermal, power consumption, and utilization conditions of processors. Well before the company launched in 2010, JouleX’s founding engineers started a dialogue with Intel, knowing that any solution that offered visibility into the performance of Intel hardware would be critical to the success of JouleX’s overall offering, Noonan says. Recognizing the demands that would be made for a high level of instrumentation on chips, Intel engaged with JouleX in development discussions around Intel DCM.
Participation in development discussions for Intel DCM, “gave us a granular control plane to both extract accurate energy consumption data, and at the same time deliver variable levels of control, Noonan says. In the data center, the last thing anyone wants to hear is that someone is going to “turn something off”…energy optimization in the data center requires acute visibility into power consumption and utilization at a very granular level and demands sophisticated control to reduce energy consumption without impacting performance.”
Intel DCM helps partners such as JouleX help their customers measure energy usage by device, plan for future power capacity needs, proactively identify failure situations and inefficient power consumption, and dynamically control the power draw of any number of devices, from one to tens of thousands, through a single console. With Intel DCM embedded in JEM, JouleX is able to offer one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated energy intelligence platforms available in a simple, easy to use network-based software application.
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!