Data Center Power Monitoring

Smart and efficient energy management has been one of the major challenges not just in the IT industry but also in data centers. Energy use is a persistent issue for data centers. Power drawn by data centers vary from a few kW for a rack of servers in a closet to several tens of MW for huge facilities. Some facilities have energy densities more than 100 times that of a distinctive office building. For higher power mass facilities, electricity costs are a central operating cost and account for over 10% of the total cost of ownership of a data center.

There are a numerous things that data center managers can do over time for power monitoring. Some of it being:

 Understanding Application Usage Drives of the Data Center

Grasping that application service levels drive the entire vehicle—including data center power, capacity and performance-level decisions. Data centre could do without knowing about them.
Using Centralized Management

New-generation data centers are divided into two; one being environmental/ facilities and the other system/IT management. An all-inclusive management system for the complete data center environment permits organizations to take a holistic view of control and of energy use and management.

 Use Consulting Services to improve

By carefully managing refreshers, energy can be conserved. The consulting services provide intelligent technology refresh decisions.  As companies get into new markets and seek new ways to tie with customers, the demand for new IT services shoot up. Professionals merge design engineering and architecture with IT expertise while they design and build data centers to meet altering business needs with lower amenities capital and operating costs. To cope with, IT implements lithe infrastructure like blade systems, storage-area networks and virtualization, all matched carefully to business needs.
Balancing Act in Data Center

In data center management, managers need to emphasise on the balancing act across facilities (power and cooling) and IT (CPU, Memory, Network and Storage). Power is distinctively measured and managed. The data center consumes it, facilities provide it and the finance department pays for all of this. There are very few institutes that drift away from this operational model and, not ironically, the key objective is to comprise power as an IT service delivery cost element paid by the business.
Creating a Logical Network

By creating a common and virtual I/O, network data center network design energy can be utilized efficiently. Virtualization is a significant factor here. Fusing servers and storage assortment to use far less power and increase capacity utilization can have an optimistic power impact right away–not only over the long heave. IT can connect thousands of servers; servers which are virtualized, high performance, low latency, and multiprotocol network to trim down network latency. It is in contrast with conservative switches and it enhances agility by allowing administrators to change connectivity and bandwidth allocation without troublesome servers.
 

Use Power Charge Backs in Demand for Payment

Implementing charge-backs to split power costs amount the different corporate sector receiving IT services make the concern more visible to the managers who can make a difference. Including power practice into a chargeback instrument is also a better method to assign virtual machine charges to reduce over-provisioning and under-consumption. Or else, many users will simply take benefit of the resources for as long as they can get away with it.

 

Adopting Cooling Practices

Data centers also need cooling, as all that power going to and through IT gear ultimately turns into heat. Typically, this cooling needs more electrical power. Nearly about 65% of power cost is attributed to cooling equipments at the data center. By using high efficiency cooling system, energy consumption could be managed efficiently. This can also save the cost up to almost 20% which is still a good amount.
Check Out Other Data Centers

For example, Hewlett-Packard opened a state-of-the-art research facility at Fort Collins, Colo., where the company is working to progressive sustainable data center technologies. It will house about 2,000 server racks used by the research and business groups for product development. The facility has a 200-watt-per-square-foot cooling competence. It features overhead power bus bars that offer maximum flexibility for a variety of power types required to run the server racks. Overhead cable trays deliver 10 GB capable network to the equipment. The 30-inch raised floor is used exclusively for cold air plenum. Hence by getting to know strategies of other data canters, ideas which are suitable can be implemented.
Using Renewable, Carbon-Neutral Power

Along with looking for affordability, many data center planners look at power sources that don’t eat up fuel and leave a small carbon footprint. Carbon offsets are a small portion of the sustainability process. Hence this is a new trend in power monitoring at the data centers.

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