By Mark Lackey,

Product Manager, Insight Control power management

HP is introducing Data Center Power Control, the newest power management feature of Insight Control.  I want to share a cool story about how this product was invented after a nearly catastrophic event at an HP site.  We used our experience to innovate and make sure your company doesn’t go through a similar experience. 

Last summer, a water chiller failed in the computer room at an HP site.  As a result, our engineers had to run around manually turning off the systems before they crashed.  We were fortunate because the right people were in place to do this as it happened, even though it was a manual process.  That got our engineers thinking… if only there were a way to set pre-defined policies to automatically shutdown servers or lower the power state during catastrophic events.  Today that’s a reality because of HP Data Center Power Control.  In a nutshell, you set the guidelines in advance so that you can extend the ride-through time for mission critical apps by reducing power usage by non-critical workloads when there’s a failure.

Another important perk is the ability to lower your energy bill by taking control of your power usage during peak times.  Imagine the utility company contacts you and says you need to shed 50 KWh of power today from 3 – 6 PM.  That’s no problem with HP Data Center Power Control.  You can also drop power usage during peak or coincident peak times.  This helps you drive your infrastructure into a more efficient operating range.  It’s also good for scheduled maintenance.  At the given maintenance time, you can shed power to make sure certain servers are powered down.  The best part is that it’s as easy as pressing a button.

What are your thoughts on Data Center Power Control?  Has your company had a catastrophic failure or needed to shed power quickly where this capability would have been useful?