How much power does your datacenter use?
Aug/096
Everyone (hopefully) wants to be green now-a-days and virtualization is helping with that goal by consolidating a lot of your servers. I have asked many IT administrators in the last year ‘do you know how much power your datacenter uses?‘ and pretty much never did I hear a ‘yes‘ as answer.
So why is that? Most IT managers never see the energy bill as facilities take care of that. But would you not as IT manager want to have this information to help proof that moving to virtualization was a good move.
I personally run a reasonable size datacenter at VMware, our demo briefing center, and want to know myself how much power we are using. So I did some investigation in this, but found out this is a very expensive wish. I was only able to find solutions based on physical hardware that can monitor your power consumption, costing around $1000 per PDU strip. Just for my small datacenter alone that would cost me $20.000+ just to figure out how much power I use.
But hold on! most hardware today, especially servers, have build in power monitors. All my HP servers and Blades and all my Dell servers and Blades can report individually how much power they are using. So why is there no software out there that consolidates all this??? I have searched, but came up empty. How hard can it be to have an application that reads out the power consumption every X minutes from all your supported devices and historically stores this and provides some nice graphs??
So here my idea, let me know if you care about this as well. If enough people think so, I will write the bloody app myself and make it available for free. If you already know of an app that does this, please let us know in the comments. I thought there was an iPhone App for everything?
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11:51 pm on August 4th, 2009
Just a quick plug here guys. If you want an enterprise ready solution that gives you the above information use “nworks”.. Not just on one datacenter but multiple datacenters at the same.
2:28 pm on August 6th, 2009
What kind of PDUs do you use? Take a look at APC’s ISX Central device. It is a surveillance system, and environmental monitor. It will integrate with many products to do what you are looking to do…
http://www.apc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=350
12:31 pm on August 15th, 2009
In my company the “production machines” use so much energy we have special prices with our engy supplier – and special, *really* low prices.
Some kilowatts plus or minus for IT-infrastructure simply doesn’t matter, when you talk about several Megawatts total
(ok, potentially it matters for cooling purposes – a little bit)
12:36 pm on August 15th, 2009
In addition: the move to run virtual servers was caused by a really simple, other, fact: two ESX servers use less rack space than 20-30 “real” servers…
Just tell management what a new rack costs (including cables, additional switch, …) plus that you can save some man-hours a week in managing (easier to check remotely, installation, look if running amok etc).
12:53 pm on August 21st, 2009
Here is a rule of thumb:
20 % of the watts per server tha times the cost of the price of power
divide these cost by half and add these up for cooling purposes.
2:11 am on November 27th, 2009
I use cacti to monitor server power consumption, apc rack pdu power levels, as well as the ups input/output power levels. All via snmp, user contributed templates and scripts I found in the cacti forums.