IBM Offers Enhanced Measurement and Management for Energy Usage

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager measures, monitors, and manages the energy management components built into IBM systems while enabling across-platform management solution.

By Internet.com Staff

November 2, 2009

fact sheet

Vendor: IBM Corporation (www.ibm.com)

Vendor's Information:
About IBM Active Energy Manager
About IBM Corporation

Energy conservation remains a popular issue in every corner of the enterprise, but it's hard to conserve energy if you don't know where you're starting and how your energy demand fluctuates.

In the data center, energy efficiency depends on being able to clearly measure, monitor, and manage energy consumption. This includes having hardware and software work hand-in-hand to address power surges, "hot spots" in facilities, wasted energy, overheating, and overuse of power by applications, air conditioning, and other categories.

Monitoring solutions should collect energy data from across the enterprise and work closely with solutions that track facilities, business priorities, and policies. Data center space is saved if IT assets such as servers are used more efficiently, reducing the need to add more servers and making better use of those in place.

Equally important, the energy data that is collected must be integrated across the enterprise and at multiple levels, on both the IT and the business sides of the organization. This allows IT managers to reduce system power but not business performance. Organizations need an integrated system that enables users to set up policies that will automatically increase or decrease power consumption while still guaranteeing fulfillment of the business' service level agreements (SLAs).

An effective energy measurement and management solution should be able to:

Integrate information across the infrastructure, including IT and physical facilities

Flexibly manage power on servers or groups of servers either manually or automatically according to a defined policy

Enable administrators to view system utilization rates to make sure that IT assets are being used efficiently before new systems are added

Manage processor resources and power consumption to achieve application-response times and SLAs with minimum energy use and cost

Determine the proper power allocation for each server and help reallocate power to additional servers without additional power or cooling equipment

Provide operational management tools to incorporate a business and financial perspective

Capture, analyze, and display assets, locations, and work orders through geo-graphic information system (GIS) modeling and mapping software

Feed energy-use information into chargeback applications, enabling business units to accurately understand "who is using what" and hold users accountable

Although "going green" will remain an important challenge for IT, the good news is that green strategies and technologies exist to help data centers optimize space, power, cooling, and resiliency—all while improving operational management, reducing costs, and supporting business growth.

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager measures, monitors, and manages the energy management components built into IBM systems while enabling across-platform management solution. Active Energy Manager offers a single view of actual power use across multiple platforms, as opposed to system-energy-label specifications for power consumption.

Active Energy Manager also enables IT managers to cap power use at a system level. This is an important capability for organizations that have signed agreements with their utility companies to restrict their consumption or pay a premium. These organizations can choose to trade-off power consumption for performance in a controlled way, according to service level policies, to stabilize power use. In an outage, Active Energy Manager can "throttle back" systems to reduce consumption and better maintain costs.

Active Energy Manager runs as an extension to IBM Systems Director and employs agent-less technology to communicate directly with systems that are being managed and monitored by the application. IBM Systems Director is not required on every system that is managed by Active Energy Manager since agents do not need be installed on the end-point systems. Active Energy Manager does not require an additional management server because it can run on the server that it is managing and serve as a single control point for other systems being managed.

In addition, Active Energy Manager supports energy monitoring of devices that are connected to select Power Distribution Units (PDU), or "smart" power strips, used to provide power to multiple devices. By plugging systems into a PDU, Active Energy Manager can collect energy information from equipment in the rack that is plugged into the PDU, including I/O drawers, storage devices, and servers. Using PDUs, Active Energy Manager can monitor both IBM and non-IBM servers that do not have native support, thus providing a broader view of energy use within the IT data center. In the event that PDUs are not a viable alternative, Active Energy Manager can retrieve temperature and power information using the facility provider's wireless sensors, which can be located virtually anywhere in the data center.

If an SLA requires a response time of two seconds or less an IT manager can set a policy indicating that if the response time is less than one second, power consumption is reduced for the server. When the response time reaches 1.5 seconds, power consumption is increased for the server.

Monitoring capabilities from IBM Tivoli software can also be used to set thresholds and drive automated actions based on events such as overheating of a system. This data can be shared through power and thermal information reports.

Tivoli solutions for facilities management allow asset managers to visualize the spatial relationships among managed assets and other mapped features across IT, data center infrastructure, and building automation systems such as fire alarms, lighting, HVAC, and more. This brings energy data together from multiple systems, helping to improve work planning and analysis, eliminate the need for data duplication, create efficiencies in business processes, and enhance communication.

Tivoli usage and accounting solutions can be used to feed energy-use information into reporting and chargeback (financial accounting) applications, encouraging additional energy efficiencies. IT managers can track, allocate, and invoice by a number of criteria such as department, business unit, or even by customer in situations where an application has been outsourced.

By monitoring server utilization rates and energy consumption, IT can use less energy while still supporting business priorities and achieving application response-time targets and SLAs. A more accurate picture that measures power draw by actual use, not published system-energy-label specifications, is the first step toward developing a serious energy-conservation strategy.