Can you afford to ignore the cost of power?

The challenging economy has made it increasingly difficult to get the staff, equipment, and resources needed to keep pace with the increasing business demands required of the data center. Under these circumstances, many see power management as a “Green IT” initiative; something which is nice to have but not a requirement to keep the data center going given other business priorities. This could not be further from the truth.

Three of the top challenges (and expenses) that data centers face are outages/brownouts, expansion, and the rising costs of powering underutilized servers.

The primary responsibility of the data center is to keep business critical applications running and to maintain the appropriate uptime levels. When power capacity and cooling is not understood, uptime can be compromised. Viridity EnergyCenter software provides the information you need to understand how much power is being delivered and consumed at the data center, row, rack, and individual device level. This information lets you know when and where a power outage may occur so that you can proactively avoid the potential of a cascading outage. This eliminates the quess work as to whether or not you can add additional applications and equipment before it’s too late.

Many data centers rely on derating equipment specifications as a way to provision power for the data center. This practice may seem like a way to play it safe but, derating results in costly, idle power capacity. In reality, server power consumption is driven by utilization and the national average for servers at just 6%, so most servers come nowhere near reaching the derated value. When you relying on derating, you may think you are out of power long before you really are.

With Viridity EnergyCenter software, you are able to identify “stranded capacity” and avoid prematurely building out a new, multimillion dollar data center. You can remove costly margins associated with the derating method and instead, use actual power consumption for your planning purposes. EnergyCenter’s underutilized server module provides analysis and reports that help you to recover additional power because you can instantly identify the servers with the lowest utilization that are still drawing power. By using the actionable information generated by Viridity EnergyCenter, you can retire, consolidate, or virtualize underutilized servers in order to free up power and defer the need for an expensive data center expansion.