Running out of power in your data center?

In recent years, the demand for IT has increased dramatically. At the same time, the cost of industry-standard servers has decreased dramatically. Combine these two things with the introduction of disruptive technologies like virtualization and blade servers, and you can easily see why it is more difficult than ever to get a handle on power consumption in the data center.

Power bills continue to rise and the availability of power is often constrained. This leaves both IT and facilities managers wondering which equipment is consuming the most power in the data center. They wonder which equipment is contributing useful work to the business. And, they wonder how much power capacity they have before they add additional equipment to the data center. As the rapidly increasing cost of powering equipment often exceeds the initial purchase price of the equipment it self, it has become imperative that data centers understand power consumption at a granular level.

Viridity EnergyCenter measures power consumption at the device level using an unobtrusive software-only approach that is both quick to deploy and quick with results. With EnergyCenter, data centers are able to run a discovery and locate all networked equipment in hours instead of weeks.

The initial discovery provides information at the component level so you have a comprehensive understanding of how a device is configured and how much power the device is using in total.

With this “bottoms-up” approach to measuring power consumption, managers can understand how much power is being consumed at the device, rack, row and at the data center level. And, they get invaluable data on how equipment is being utilized.

Measuring power usage needs to be dynamic. Taking a one time snapshot of power consumption is misleading and can do more harm than good. As the utilization of devices ramps up or down to meet demand, so to does the power consumption. A single power snapshot may leave you thinking you have more power than you do -- a dangerous situation.

Viridity EnergyCenter monitors the power consumption over time and allows you to view changes in power draw and utilization. This provides a more realistic and actionable profile of how your devices are consuming energy which assists you in avoiding outages and right-sizing your data center.