By Brandon Fears

Product Manager, HP Data Center Environmental Edge

Part of the focus of the HP Data Center Smart Grid is not only monitoring / managing power at the IT level, but also visualizing and optimizing the power and cooling infrastructure. This is where the newest version of the HP Data Center Environmental Edge solution is key to achieving the insight needed to measure and understand current energy usage and historical trends.  The solution helps both IT and facility managers understand how their cooling infrastructure is operating and visually show where they have issues to be addressed.

As the team began the development on the Environmental Edge Program, we conducted customer visits and formal market research to better understand how customers monitor and optimize their data centers.  The one item that kept coming to the top was the lack of knowledge on how much power in KWh was consumed in a day, week or a month.  The most common answers were, “Maybe if I look at our electrical bill”, or “I don’t know because the data center is part of the office and facility managers pay the bill”.  Therefore we began working on the second half of the Environmental Edge solution: power visualization. 

In the view below, as the customer scrolls over their data center layout, they can see real time results from the energy base stations to understand power, and environmental base stations to get information on cooling at the rack level.

Customers can also provide drill down on an energy meter and get more robust information, amps per phase, voltage per phase, KWh, and power factor. 

Additionally, the solution can show power usage for the past 18 months, and provide several different reports.  This is just part of the new power visualization capabilities.  Customers can also opt to have real-time PUE, see power consumption at the rack level with our branch circuit monitoring solution (BCMS).  The goal of our solution is to help customers use their infrastructure more efficiently and help match the output to the needs of IT.