Reducing energy consumption, or at least stopping its growth, requires to implement a high-level project plan that includes an essential step, that is the capacity to measure, report and analyze the actual electricity consumption.
| Plan | Benchmark | Measure | Log & Report | Implement |
| Perform data center survey |
Determine methodology |
Data collection |
Facilities data |
Develop action plan |
| Research best practices & ROI |
Install instrumentation |
Environmental monitoring | Infrastructure data |
Set goal for benchmark |
| Research potential rebates |
Perform energy utilization audit |
Analysis | IT equipment data |
Implement improvements |
| Get executive managerial buy-in |
Calculate current benchmark |
Environmental conditions | Update benchmark |
|
| Establish efficiency team & goals |
Design and any limitations |
Communicate |
= Today’s practices
= Tomorrow’s solution required to reduce the energy footprint of your data center.
Data centers administrators need a technology that accurately and constantly monitor the equipment to report the electricity consumption of each server in kWh, even for servers that are not equipped with a power meter. Thus, selecting the proper software technology can be at least as important as choosing optimal hardware.
BMC Performance Management is a monitoring framework that features several modules specialized in the monitoring of specific IT components, like operating systems, databases, email servers, etc.
At the core level of BMC Performance Management, there is a module that specializes in the monitoring of server hardware, storage devices, and switches. This solution, developed by Sentry Software and licensed by BMC Software, is available in two forms:
 Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL (agent-based module for BMC PATROL) |
 BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware(agent-less module for BMC Portal) |
The main purpose of this module is to discover and monitor all of the hardware components of servers, disk arrays, tape libraries, fiber switches, etc. In addition, the product also reports the power consumption of each monitored system as a simple graph in Watts in the PATROL Console or BMC Portal. This graph shows the current instantaneous power drawn by a server.
The product also enables you to create an Energy Usage report based on data that has been collected every 2 minutes for several days. The report exposes the amount of energy used by the server on a daily basis. The graph is in kWh and by knowing the price of the kWh in your region, you can easily calculate the energy cost of the system.
By using other BMC reporting products, you can build reports for the entire server room, server by server, department by department and tell whose servers are the most expensive.
Few systems are equipped with an embedded power meter. When monitoring such a server, BMC Performance Management will report the actual power consumption of the system based on the data collected through the instrumentation layer provided by the manufacturer.
Sentry Software uses an alternate method for systems that are not instrumented and do not have power meter sensors. Since the hardware monitoring module already discovers all the physical parts of the system (fans, memory modules, processors, NICs, etc.) by knowing the typical power consumption of all these internal components, BMC Performance Management is able to evaluate the power consumption of the system, based on its internal components and its activity. While it’s not an actual measure of the power consumption, it’s still a good estimation based on real data: what the server, disk array or switch is made of.
Get started now to reduce energy consumption of your IT : soon, the IT energy cost will be higher than the IT equipment cost.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.Lord Kelvin
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