Reduce Server Power Usage and Save Money with Power Manager
Download PDFMon, 16 Jan 2023 18:41:07 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Summary
Between the substantial rise in energy costs and organizations’ sustainable initiatives to reduce global warming, lowering data center power usage is a key strategy for many IT teams. This Direct from Development Tech Note describes the capabilities of Dell OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager version 3.0, which is a fully integrated extension to Dell OpenManage Enterprise. Power Manager provides increased visibility of server power data, including consumption, anomalies, and utilization. Customers can use this tool to discover and then proactively manage server power consumption plus server thermals while also assessing their carbon footprint.
Introduction
The phrase “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is often attributed to W. Edwards Deming, the statistician. In terms of server power usage, this adage means that organizations need data plus tools to manage and lower server power usage, resulting in a reduced carbon footprint. With Dell OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager, PowerEdge customers can both monitor and actively manage server power usage. In addition to reporting power and thermal data, Power Manager can also cap server power consumption and manage thermal events. Version 3.0 also introduces a new carbon usage calculation feature for customers who want to understand their server estate emissions.
Figure 1. Server power usage data and threshold
Power reduction strategy
OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager supports creating a power reduction strategy easily and efficiently through several key elements.
Current usage
Discovering the current usage across an entire server estate is simple. Each managed server’s iDRAC gathers various metrics, such as power consumption, thermal utilization, and server utilization. OpenManage Enterprise collects and displays the data in dashlet graphs (mini dashboards), such as Power History (Watt) (shown in Figure 2). Within the tool, administrators can place servers into racks, aisles, and then data center collections to reflect the real-world environment to assist with reporting and actions. These dashlets offer powerful visualization of the data, from one server to an entire server fleet, for the last few hours or up to an entire year. If required, customers can add power values for unmonitored devices for a more complete view of data center power usage. An OpenManage Enterprise Advanced or Advanced+ license is required on each server to enable Power Manager.
Figure 2. Power history for one group of servers
Review and analyze
Through its dashlets, Power Manager accelerates customers’ understanding by providing relevant data that highlights servers that should be reviewed. These include top energy consumers (kWh), as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Top energy-consuming servers (kWh)
This data is also consolidated into reports and is available in the custom report builder as well. The prebuilt library contains numerous useful reports, including Power Manager: Server Utilization Report and Power Manager: Power and Thermal Report (shown in Figure 4). These reports highlight underutilized and idle servers that could be candidates for consolidation or decommissioning.
Figure 4. Power and thermal report
Administrators can assess power draw by virtual machines (VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V hosts) as well as power draw by key components such as CPU, RAM, server fans, and local storage.
Customers who want carbon footprint data can use the integrated greenhouse gas emissions reports that detail energy consumed (kWh) and greenhouse gas emissions per server and per group. All report data can be exported as HTML, PDF, CSV, or XLS, and any report can be run ad hoc or automatically delivered by email on a regular basis through the OpenManage Enterprise report schedule.
Figure 5. List of power-related reports
Take action
Administrators can consider using power capping during hours that are outside of normal operations or in test and development environments. Modern servers are relatively efficient when idling; however, the introduction of power capping can guarantee low power usage. Administrators can use Power Manager’s static policies to set budget power for a device or group, or even the entire server estate, as shown in Figure 6. Power caps can be set in watts or percentage.
Figure 6. Creating a power-capping policy for multiple servers
For example, an administrator might have no power capping policies during the day when full server performance is required and configure a lower power cap for evenings and weekends when server workload is less.
Additional suggestions to decrease power consumption and carbon footprint include:
- Review and change the server BIOS system profile. For example, change Maximum Performance to Performance Per Watt. Expect Power Manager to manage this profile setting in future releases.
- Replace or consolidate older servers that use outdated CPU technology. Those older servers are not as power- efficient as the latest generation of PowerEdge. Tools such as Dell Live Optics, through which you can review current server operating system performance data such as RAM capacity and storage performance, and Dell Enterprise Infrastructure Planning Tool (EIPT) can help with further investigation and “what-if” migration modeling.
- Improve the overall efficiency of data center cooling, thereby improving power usage effectiveness (PUE). For example, review air flow for more effective cooling, resolving data center hot spots/cold spots, or implement highly efficient liquid-cooled Dell servers.
- Move to renewable energy sources/suppliers to aid in decreasing carbon emissions.
References
- Dell OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager Support site
- Usage of Reports in Data Center through Dell OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager
- iDRAC, CMC, OpenManage Enterprise, OpenManage Integration with Microsoft Windows Admin Center, OpenManage Integration with ServiceNow, and DPAT trial licenses