Power Systems Energy Management

Concerns about server energy consumption are growing because of rising electric rates, higher oil prices, technology trends that result in higher power densities, and hefty increases in new server deployments over the past few years. Clients and manufacturers are now talking about systems that achieve greater performance and "eco efficiency" by reducing resource consumption.

Momentum is shifting towards consolidated and virtualized infrastructures to reduce the consumption of datacenter resources. IBM offers not only the products and services to help you make that shift, but also support for innovative technologies to help conserve energy and reduce costs.

POWER6 Processors
IBM's goal is to provide you with a highly efficient computing environment, and to sustain leadership in energy conservation and management by continuing to deliver power-management technologies. With these technologies, systems use less power, generate less heat and use less energy to cool the system. IBM's POWER6™ architecture with EnergyScale™ technology provides features such as power trending, power-saving, and capping of maximum power and thermal measurement. These features, enabled via IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager, allow you to measure the energy of the system and direct policies toward the energy-efficient operation of the server, while the underlying hardware automatically adjusts to deliver the desired operating solution.

IBM POWER6™ processor-based servers deliver outstanding performance per watt and innovative virtualization technologies. A feature called Live Partition Mobility allows you to move running partitions from one POWER6 processor-based server to another providing the capability to conserve power by moving workloads off underutilized servers to achieve optimal system utilization and energy efficiency. POWER6 processor-based systems can work together in this way to help optimize system utilization, improve application availability, balance critical workloads across multiple systems and respond to ever-changing business demands.

IBM Rear Door Heat exchanger
The IBM Rear Door Heat exchanger is designed to remove heat generated from the back of your computer systems before it enters the room. The efficient IBM Rear Door Heat exchanger, which takes heat from the rack with water, can substantially reduce the heat load coming from any IBM enterprise rack. Advantages include:

• No fans or electricity needed, alleviating the chance for mechanical fan failure.
• Passive design, allowing systems to air-cool without opening or removing the door.
• Condensation prevention.
• Attaches to the back of the rack and does not change the footprint of the racking.

BladeCenter and Power Architecture blades
Designed to address thermal concerns without sacrificing performance, IBM BladeCenter® technology leads the industry in innovation to address these current and future trends. Because the IBM BladeCenter infrastructure utilizes energy-efficient components and a shared infrastructure architecture, clients can realize lower power consumption when compared to many alternative designs. Calibrated Vectored Cooling capabilities enable dual paths of air to each component to improve uptime and longevity while also reducing wasteful air movement. The balance of optimized airflow, innovative blade form-factor design and power-efficient processors provide thermal management without the need for additional fans. Low power consumption and low heat output allow the packing of more servers into tight power and cooling envelopes.

The IBM Power Configurator tool can help provide better sizing information for your solutions. The Power Configurator allows you to estimate building and data-center electrical costs before you make a purchase. By allowing total customer control of all server power options, the Power Configurator gives an accurate display of required data-center electrical requirements for servers. Take the power challenge using the IBM Power Calculator, and discover the energy savings POWER Architecture blades and BladeCenter chassis can bring to your business.

Server consolidation and virtualization
Server consolidation is the process of centralizing business computing workloads to reduce cost, complexity, network traffic, management overhead and to optimize and simplify the existing IT infrastructure and provide a foundation for new solution investment and implementation. Server consolidation has many advantages including improving availability, reducing costs and complexity, and simplifying operations. Server consolidation can maximize an organization's return on investment in the IT operations facility. Consolidation also allows high levels of security and data integrity that are difficult to achieve in a distributed environment.

In the past, one of the greatest advantages that server consolidation provided was savings on floor space. By applying server consolidation, IT managers now talk about the electrical power they have saved. The white paper ”Virtualization Trends On IBM’s System p: Unraveling The Benefits In IBM’s PowerVM” (PDF, 106KB) by Forrester Research Group, discusses the many benefit of virtualization on Power servers including how server consolidation with PowerVM can help reduce the use and cost of energy.

• Learn more about server consolidation
• Learn more about PowerVM
• Server virtualization and Consolidation - A case study (362KB)
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Project Big Green
IBM provides additional technologies and services that can help make your IT operational facility more energy efficient.

• Learn about to how to become more energy efficient