Datacenter power and cooling - low-hanging fruit - Reality Check: Server Insights -
Reality Check: Server Insights » Datacenter power and cooling - low-hanging fruit
Datacenter power and cooling - low-hanging fruit
Hi!  I’m Steve Cumings, and to make a long story short I’m responsible for delivery of some of HP’s datacenter infrastructure products, such as the HP POD (Performance-Optimized Datacenter) container, and Dynamic Smart Cooling.  And the goal for this part of the blog is to discuss customer challenges in the datacenter, and how they can be addressed. Let’s start with datacenters in general.  It will surprise few of you that there’s typically a communications gap between a company’s IT and facilities staff.  This isn’t an absolute, and some companies have combined the organizations with very positive results – but it’s pretty common to find that the IT department is among other things judged on IT performance and cost, while the facilities group is monitored on supporting IT and IT growth, uptime, etc.   And power and cooling can become a large stumbling block, because the IT department isn’t typically focused on how much power is used, while the facilities teams care about that very much – and they usually have to write the monthly energy check.  How to resolve this?  There may always be a certain amount of disconnect, but we’ve found considerable success in a) working with BOTH teams to generate understanding of mutual goals, and b) providing tools that help both sides.   There are many examples of these, and a couple that immediately come to mind are power capping, and active facility management.  By capping the amount of power a rack of servers or blades can consume, the HW can be used more efficiently – and the facilities teams can plan for a set amount of power and cooling capacity (Insight Power Manager).  And active management of the facilities infrastructure, such as cooling capacity, can extend available capacity by using only as much capacity as is needed (DSC).  Simple, right?  Of course not – but it’s also not too complex, and the steps to get there are available. Thanks for your time, I’ll be back with answers to questions and more comments in the near future.

 

Posted 08-14-2008 9:37 PM by SCLivestrong

Add a Comment

(required)  
(optional)
(required)  
Remember Me?

Type the numbers and letters above:
Powered by Community Server (Non-Commercial Edition), by Telligent Systems