Lack of available power along with the energy expenses associated with IT equipment and cooling infrastructure has heightened the requirement for data center energy efficiency initiatives. Until now, it’s been difficult to successfully improve energy usage and gain visibility in the data center because of the cost and complexity involved in gathering actionable information about power consumption and utilization without adding more hardware to the data center. Until now, it has been nearly impossible to determine the “usefulness” of a given device in order to tie power consumption back to business priorities. Watch as Viridity Software takes you through the top 10 reasons to use energy resource management software.
Hello, my name is Mike Rowan. I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Viridity Software and I’ll be taking you through today’s webinar “Top Ten Reasons to Use Energy Resource Management Software.”Data centers are huge consumers of power. According to Nemertes Research, “half of organizations with mid-sized data centers (5,000 – 50,000 square feet) will have insufficient power in 2011. Yet, only 45% of organizations actually measure their power usage.” They do not know how muchpower they are using and where it is being used. Ask a manager how much power is being consumed in the data center, you’ll quickly find out that most of them have no visibility into the problem. They do not have the basic information about equipment utilization or power consumption to deal with this challenge. Viridity EnergyCenter softwareconnects equipment utilization and power consumption data so that managers have information they need to make the data center run more efficiently. Here are the top ten reasons customers are using Viridity Energy Resource Management Software.
It’s hard to manage a data center when you don’t know where everything is located. View data center inventory of assets including servers, power distribution units (PDU's), branch circuit monitors (BCM), and more. Then filter system types by data center, rack row, or IP address range. This provides intelligent on-going asset and facility management.
Viridity EnergyCenter is quickly deployed, and noninvasive. The software uses a combination of discovery (via standard protocols), test data, and evolving real time modeling to deliver accurate, reliable information on how each networked device consuming energy and is being utilized. There is no need to add additional hardware like wiring sensors which are complex and expensive. What’s more, they require additional power so they are adding to the power problem.
Identify underused, orphaned, or inefficient servers and highlights the server candidates for removal, consolidation, or virtualization to drive out underutilized capacity throughout the data center. With Viridity EnergyCenter, you can filter down to the component level of an individual server to see how effectively each one is performing and how efficiently it is being used.
Viridity EnergyCenter dynamically monitors data center power status on the power draw of your assets and the utilization and power consumption for the networked equipment in the data center. Snapshots look at data at a specific point in time so you wouldn’t be able to see when servers have spikes in workload unless you capture data at a particular moment.
Track equipment in the data center and identify what is consuming the most energy. Now, you can identify the best performing servers and placed where they’ll run most efficiently in the data center. You many also do a tech refresh to newer, more efficient servers to replace the least efficient ones.
Many data centers are being managed by spreadsheets and Visio drawings. These manually updated systems have a hard time keeping up with rack server equipment changes. With Viridity EnergyCenter, you have an easy-to-use, graphical view of your data center complete with utilization and automatic updates to server rack inventories. This helps optimize server capacity and avoid over-provisioning and underutilization of installed server rack systems. It also provides placement assistance for consolidations and new equipment.
The barriers to getting information can be organizational: silos of ownership between facilities and data center management.IT managers are responsible for supporting the business with technology. They are responsible for servers, storage, and virtualization in the data center. They need to keep the aisles cool and the data backed up. Facilities managers are responsible for overall site. They manage lighting, heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems, and most often, the electric bill. It’s their goal to drive down power consumption, reduce overall floor space, and keep the building operational.Energy efficiency initiatives require close alignment and participation of both departments. With Viridity EnergyCenter, everyone gets actionable information to do their jobs better together.
Viridity EnergyCenter deploys in minutes, not weeks. Within hours, you can discover data center power draw, events triggering jobs, average server utilization, and the number of underutilized servers across the data center. You get actionable information that improves energy efficiency and space utilization right away.When you consider that each watt of IT energy requires at least as much energy in infrastructure support, it’s easy to see a huge potential for savings and energy reduction without risking operations.
[NOTE: After the demo, switch to this slide . Leave this slide up during the Q&A portion.]We look forward to speaking with you about any challenges you may be having with energy in your data center and how we might help. I would also urge you to go to viridity.com and use our free underutilized server ROI calculator to gauge how much you could save annually in energy costs by shutting down servers which are not contributing to your business.Now, let’s take some of your questions.