Active energy management: Taking control of your data center

Gaining critical insight into your data center power consumption — from one end of your data center to the other-can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for your data center and IT systems.

Energy Consumption and Data Center TCO: Ouch
Data center power consumption is costly — for operational budgets, IT efficiencies and even the environment. To run IT loads and maintain the network-critical physical infrastructure equipment in your data center, your power and cooling requirements are undoubtedly sizeable. In fact, they may be steadily on the rise in relation to your ongoing IT equipment investment. In a 2006 study, IDC stated that the expense to power and cool the installed base of servers equates to 45.8% of new server spend. And if IDC forecasts hold, server power and cooling expense as a percent of new server spend will amount to 65.8% by 2011.

So data center costs are pounding IT budgets, while data center inefficiencies are interfering with plans for IT optimization and operational excellence. And if your data center can't accommodate new servers or storage because of power availability or infrastructure constraints, your data center inefficiencies can impede your ability to grow. It might be time to reassess your data center strategies, adding energy efficiency to a list of critical operating parameters that already includes serviceability, reliability, and performance. You might consider asking important questions like:

• Is powering and cooling your data center causing any efficiency problems?
• Do you have the ability to keep systems housing critical business processes up and running during a power drain or surge?
• Has the energy consumption in your data center and the ensuing cost put a strain on your IT budget?
• Does your data center's power utilization align with your organization's corporate energy-efficiency policy?

Creating Manageable, Efficient Data Centers
Your data center power, cooling, and space demands can seem unmanageable, and at the very least, a highly complex undertaking. And you must continue to meet your service-level commitments to your business while transforming your existing data center infrastructure — that is, optimizing your IT — into a more flexible, cost-effective environment that can readily adapt to your changing business priorities, and especially to your plans for growth. By redirecting your data center strategy, you can effectively plan and manage your energy usage to reduce power and cooling consumption costs while maintaining operational resiliency.

So where do you begin? Most importantly, you need to know exactly what's going on in your data center-precisely how much energy your data center is consuming, where the data center hotspots are located, and where the opportunities lie for improving your data center operations and energy consumption. For example, high-density rack-mounted servers can create hotspots and tax cooling systems, making it difficult for older data centers to keep up with current energy demands. Also, the excessive heat can threaten operating stability and staff productivity. On a larger scale, conventional data centers can draw two to three times the amount of power required for the IT equipment because these outdated data center designs are oversized for maximum capacity, and older infrastructure components can be highly inefficient.

Therefore, gaining critical insight into your data center power consumption — from one end of your data center to the other — can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for your data center and IT systems. Once you know what's up with your data center, you can leverage energy efficient technology, products, skills and services to meet your data center challenges. Then, you can reduce data center energy consumption, increase overall IT efficiencies and even improve your service-level commitments. You can take control of your data center now, through active energy management.

Active Energy Management: A Five-Point Approach to Energy Efficiency
IBM emphasizes using a range of services and technologies based on best practices for reducing data center energy usage. IBM recommends a comprehensive five-point approach to help you develop energy-efficient, cost-effective and environmentally responsible data centers:

• Diagnose — Where data centers and energy consumption are concerned, you can't manage what you can't measure. So it's critical that you obtain accurate and detailed information on the energy efficiency of your data center so you can identify any opportunities for improvement.
• Build — You need to seize opportunities for improved data center efficiencies through planning, building or preparing your facilities for upgrades. By implementing best practices and innovative technologies in power and cooling, you can improve operations while reducing costs.
• Virtualize — By consolidating your data center infrastructure, you can drive utilization up and annual power cost down. Reducing the number of servers and storage devices and their associated environments through virtualization strategies can lead to a leaner, cleaner data center, without sacrificing performance. Virtualization also enables more efficient power distribution, backup and regulation.
• Manage — To actively manage your data center energy consumption, you'll need power management software that provides important power alerts, trending, capping and heat measurements.
• Cool — Innovative cooling solutions for inside and outside your data center can minimize your hotspots and reduce your energy consumption.

IBM Solutions for Active Energy Management
IBM offers a broad array of software, hardware and services to help you actively manage your data center infrastructure — and drive down energy consumption and cooling costs. IBM provides services designed to address every aspect of your data center improvement strategies — from assessment and design to building, consolidating and relocating. IBM has helped companies around the globe increase energy efficiencies through services including: Data Center and Facilities Strategy Services; IT Facilities Consolidation and Relocation Services; IT Facilities Assessment, Design and Construction; and Specialized Facilities Services.

IBM's portfolio of systems design and energy management tools helps you re-architect your complex computing environment and reduce server sprawl — improving energy utilization through more efficient powering and cooling in your data center. For example, the IBM Systems Director portfolio, with Active Energy Manager technology, helps you reallocate energy on a server-by-server basis, so critical systems get the energy they need to maintain performance in the event of power constraints. And the software spans the breadth of the technology that IBM delivers, unlike other energy management solutions. IBM's Rear Door Heat Exchanger can help maximize performance, per watt per square foot. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Management software can actively monitor power consumption and allocate workloads. The IBM POWER 6 ^TM processor and IBM System Z platform can drive more performance for less power than comparable products, for big operational improvements and cost savings.

Devon Health Services, Inc. turned to IBM to remedy a critical data center power problem. The company, which provides innovative healthcare products and services, reached power capacity after adding servers to keep up with growing IT demands. Devon Health chose to consolidate on IBM BladeCenter®, targeting 28 servers for consolidation, including two HP servers hosting the company's core enterprise application. The implementation resolved the power issue and reduced the number of racks, consoles and network connections in the data center. According to Justin Hawley, director of IT for Devon Health, "We've already retired enough physical servers that power is no longer an issue." More importantly, the BladeCenter has empowered Devon Health to take advantage of new solutions, and easier management and higher reliability are improving IT efficiencies.

Energy-smart Data Centers
Through active energy management, you can create operational efficiencies in your data center that align with your energy consumption objectives. IBM energy-efficiency offerings provide all the tools you need to create new energy-smart data centers that lower complexity and deliver pinpoint control through diagnosing, building, virtualizing, managing, and cooling your data center. By optimizing data center power consumption, your IT infrastructure can better operate as a cohesive energy-efficient entity — while your business can operate with a replenished IT budget.