TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Data Center Energy: The Newest IT Asset

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 03-12-10 | Comments

Energy provides performance, but smart energy management maximizes performance in the data center while minimizing waste, and in the process turns energy into the newest IT asset.

Demand-side energy management starts with an energy monitoring capability that requires no extra hardware to be installed. For instance, Sentilla Energy Manager tracks energy consumption at a data center to within 2 percent of actual, as well as provides savings of up to 40 percent by identifying where energy is being wasted.

A Web-based dashboard allows IT managers to view the real-time power consumption of the data center and pinpoint waste.

"We are treating energy as an IT asset, reducing power consumption at data centers while simultaneously increasing capacity and performance, but without the cost and disruption of installing metering hardware," says Sentilla Chief Executive Officer Bob Davis.

Previous demand-side energy management software required data centers to install utility meter-monitoring hardware on any unmetered devices. But the new Sentilla Energy Manager (Version 3.0) instead uses an artificially intelligent (AI) inference engine to deduce the power consumption of unmetered devices Sherlock Holmes-style.

First, the open-source and proprietary agents in the data center are queried by Sentilla Energy Manager to catalog each piece of equipment in the data center, its configuration and CPU utilization. The AI then looks up the typical energy consumption specifications for that type of equipment from a database of equipment profiles and estimates its energy consumption.

"The basic parameters for most data centers is how many CPUs each server has, how many disks, how many power supplies, plus how much utilization there is, all of which is fed into the inference engine," Davis states.

The second thing the AI does is build a hierarchy of the data center. The inference engine refines its estimates for the energy consumption of the unmetered equipment by the same method used by Sherlock Holmes�namely, deduction. For instance, if one branch of the hierarchical tree is using 100 watts, and it has two leafs, one of which is metered at 40 watts and the other estimated at 75 watts, then by deduction (here subtraction) the AI can infer a 15 watt over-estimate on the unmetered equipment, since the unmetered device's consumption must be 60 watts (100 minus 40).

"If all we know is how many CPUs, disks and power supplies a server has, then we can estimate how much power it is consuming to within about 10 percent," explains Davis. "But when we add in the adjustments to our estimates made by the inference engine using the hierarchical model, then we can get down to about 2 percent accuracy, which is just as good as adding a utility meter to every device."

In 2009, the Sentilla Energy Manager received an American Business Award for Best New Product of the Year, the TechWorld Award for Green Product of the Year, and the Best Technology Supplier of the Year for the British Computer Society's IT Industry Awards.