Need another way to show off your Cisco UCS?

Cisco recently announced the 10,000th customer milestone for its UCS (Unified Computing System) offering, the fastest growing x86 blade server on the market. Cisco attributes this success to the increase in “data center happiness” caused by its blade server.  One major source of data center happiness, brought about by the Cisco UCS, is its low consumption.   Since reducing energy is  our passion at JouleX,  we thought we should show some other cool tricks you can implement by pairing the Cisco UCS with the JouleX Energy Manager (another fan favorite) to raise the mood level in your data center to pure ecstasy.

The JouleX Energy Manager brings unprecedented visibility into the energy savings realized by upgrading to Cisco UCS, solidifying your original business case, as well as the ongoing benefits of having this visibility, coupled with analysis of other energy, utilization, and temperature metrics.  Greater still, is the ability to granularly control the amount of energy it uses to lower costs even further, while maintaining your services levels and reliability metrics.

It’s easy to understand that collapsing 25 end-of-life machines into a single UCS blade server will save power. The challenge is determining just how much power is the UCS actually saving. Moreover, how do you calculate the actual impact on operations costs in years to come?

Consider the HP Compaq Proliant 1850R: If you retire 25 Proliant 1850Rs and replace those with 1 Cisco UCS B200 series Blade Server, your estimated energy savings will be about $10,100 per year*. This does not include cooling, heat, or maintenance costs. Assuming a PUE of 2.0, the total energy savings will be close to be $20,200 per year*.

*at $.12 per kwh

JouleX Energy Manager provides potential for additional energy savings for Cisco UCS, through Load Adaptive Computing.  While modern servers are MUCH more energy efficient than 5, 10 or even 2 years ago, there is still waste of energy in allowing a server to scale to maximum performance.   In order to quickly achieve this performance level, the power usage levels are geared toward maximum performance, not minimum needed to do the job efficiently and without impacting SLAs.  JouleX Energy Manager helps to address that.

With Load Adaptive Computing, you can:

• Lower power consumption levels during low peak/off hours
• Ensure power does not exceed a pre-set amount, to deal with challenges unique to the data center:
  • Address demand response by lowering energy power consumption, when you are out of power or need to free up energy to power something else on
  • You lose a chiller and the server room is heating up:
    • Shut down unnecessary servers
    • Power cap critical servers
• JouleX Energy Manager will provide the capability to turn off specified machines and send an alert if the temperature reaches designated levels or critical power loads
• Match data center energy use to server productivity ensuring THE most efficient data center not only from IT resources, but also from the amount of energy needed to run those IT resources.

Choosing Cisco UCS or any of our other server partners such as Dell and HP, is a step toward lowering energy costs and improving data center efficiency. Implementing JouleX Energy Manager as your energy management platform is the next logical step in making sure you can not only visualize the real savings numbers, but take control of the energy usage in your data center and put it to work in the most effective way possible.

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