Winning the power struggle
A sign of the times is that power management has become a real issue for large and small companies. When money was rolling in and the Celtic tiger was still growling, little attention was paid to utility bills. But as businesses look to reduce their cost base, energy consumption in particular is identified as away of saving money, while conveniently ticking the box for the green agenda.
Avocent is a global company that specialises in infrastructure management solutions and makes power management tools that have been attracting more attention as organisations seek to reduce their consumption levels.
“We make intelligent power distribution units to remotely control power and a single console to control everything,” said Wolfgang Goretzki, marketing manager. “Our customers are able to collect the real-time power metering information and aggregate it at various levels within the company, right down to an individual device.”
Not only does the software monitor usage by individual assets, it delivers granular reports that enable the business to identify power-guzzling kit and areas of the data centre that are leaking money.
“They can identify which non-critical applications they can move to off-peak times, or they can reduce the cooling power requirement because they are able to better balance heat dissipation,” said Goretzki.
Research has showed that most data centres are over-cooled precisely because of this problem. Some racks have higher heat dissipation than others, forcing up the cooling requirement and consuming excessive amounts of energy.
The trick is to balance the heat dissipation, eradicate the hot spots and reduce power usage. “If you can eliminate the hot spots, there is the potential to achieve 25 to 30 per cent energy reduction without any hardware investment,” said Goretzki.
Avocent targets medium and large sized organisations, but the response to the power-saving tools is very different. Large corporates are up to speed with energy savings, driven by investor interests and corporate social responsibility programmes. Medium sized firms still need to be educated, according to Goretzki.
Another challenge is the structure Of organisations. In the past, energy costs were typically allocated to facility managers, but they are now too important to be buried in utility bills.
“Energy costs are becoming a key performance indicator for the data centre, so companies want to be able to see the complete picture,” said Goretzki.
Speaking of its other management tools, Goretzki quoted IDC research that said the running costs of a server over three years are seven times greater than the cost of the hardware.
It is a compelling statistic that reminds IT departments everywhere that savings and efficiencies can be found in the day-to-day management of systems as well as the initial purchase.
